Donald Trump has disgraced tradition and that will be his lasting legacy

The President has failed both the tests set by George Washington: to relinquish office voluntarily and with grace.

Donald Trump prepares to speak to supporters from The Ellipse near the White House as they flocked to the capital. Picture: AFP

Nothing required George Washington to leave office in 1797 after two terms as president. The 22nd amendment limiting a president to two terms was not ratified until 1951. But he was determined he wouldn’t be the monarch his critics accused him of aspiring to be.

More than 200 years later this decision is still regarded as one of Washington’s greatest acts and one of the most important in the establishment of the republic as a constitutional democracy.

However, there is a contender for the greatest act of the Washington presidency and for its most important contribution to the American rule of law. It came little more than two years earlier when the federal government determined to put down an insurrection in Pennsylvania, where the imposition of taxes on distilled spirits was being resisted.

President Washington set forth to lead the forces suppressing the so-called Whiskey Rebellion and confrontation was avoided. In this way the US federal government insisted it would be governed by law and not by violent protest.

Donald Trump has failed both the tests set by Washington. He has failed to relinquish office voluntarily and with grace. And he has encouraged violent resistance rather than sought to put it down. His video was too little too late. Just as Washington is remembered for his acts of leadership and left a legacy of a strong republic, Mr Trump will be remembered for his dereliction of duty and for the way he has weakened the republic he was supposed to serve.

Politics in the time of the founders was not gentle, nor did it lack tribal conflict. When the Virginia House of Delegates responded to Washington’s farewell address by introducing a motion hailing the president’s “virtue, patriotism and wisdom”, Republicans lobbied to delete the word “wisdom” and only narrowly lost. The second president, John Adams, quietly left town to avoid attending the inauguration of his successor Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson was notoriously factious and attempted to subdue the Supreme Court. Aaron Burr, his vice-president, shot dead one of the founding fathers, Alexander Hamilton, in a duel caused by their political disputes.

So it is not as if Donald Trump was facing provocation unique in American history or can claim as an excuse that the political temperature is higher now.

Yet despite this, and through all this, presidents have seen their duty as Washington did: to hold power lightly and to surrender it gracefully when the time came, and to insist on adherence to law and the constitution. Donald Trump has disgraced that tradition and it will be his legacy. Before the armed insurrection overwhelmed the Capitol there had been what might ordinarily have been regarded as a remarkable speech by Mitch McConnell, the Republican Senate majority leader. He stated clearly that the presidential election had not been stolen and that it had not even been all that close.

The Trump part of the Republican movement sees that as treachery, as they do the refusal by Mike Pence, the vice-president, to overturn the election results unilaterally.

It is now an open question whether a workable coalition can still be made between mainstream Republicans and Mr Trump’s populist forces. Mr Trump may add breaking his party to his list of achievements.

The Times