By David Axelrod, CNN Senior Political Commentator
In the end, the President who put all his chips on blatant contempt for the rules, norms, laws and basic institutions of democracy, and the politics of division -- and practiced it with an unremitting ferocity -- discovered its limits, writes David Axelrod.
President Donald Trump is on his way out of the White House, but he's not done just yet. After nearly four years of relentless law-bending and norm-smashing, Trump now enters his final two-plus months in office entirely unrestrained. He won't have to face the voters again, so he can indulge his basest instincts for payback and self-preservation. Get ready for a Constitutional stress test like we've never seen before.
We've spent so much of our life energy just trying to hold it together over these past four years, writes Van Jones. It's easier to tell your kids that character, truth and being a good person matters...and now we get a chance to get some peace and reset, he says.
If Donald Trump refuses to give a concession speech, it will be one of the last norms that he breaks as President. Now that President-elect Joe Biden has won the 2020 election, Trump will need to decide what to do next.
No modern president has lost re-election without grieving privately. The morning after the 1980 election, when Ronald Reagan defeated Jimmy Carter in a landslide, Carter's communications director, Gerald Rafshoon, went to visit the president, who was sitting with bloodshot eyes in the Oval Office. "Forty-one million, six hundred thousand people don't like me," Carter lamented. That number was actually larger, Reagan won 44 million votes to Carter's 35.5 million votes.
Wes Ely knew that as a doctor, he couldn't kill another person just because they wanted him to. But he still had to find a way respond to Paul's request to die.