When Joe Biden ran for president in 2020, he spoke with a calm, deliberate conviction about the “battle for the soul of the nation.” It wasn’t a campaign slogan so much as a warning. He talked about restoring decency, dignity, and democracy, the sacred trifecta of our national character.
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During the 2022 midterm races, Biden renewed the call to “battle for the soul of our nation.”
His voice would often lower when he invoked that word, "soul," as if he knew he was speaking of something very fragile that, like a delicate flower, could fall apart easily if we weren’t vigilant.
In his farewell address, Biden returned to the same theme, reminding us that the soul of the nation is not a partisan idea but the very essence of who we are, our empathy, our decency, our respect for truth and each other.
I listened to that speech again and mourned that loss of unmitigated decency and eloquence from the Oval Office.
President Biden was eloquent in a way that reflected some of America’s greatest presidents, and most certainly not the current one. He was earnest, reflective, and deeply human. Biden believed in America’s better angels because he’d wrestled with his own hardships and, perhaps, because he saw that under a Trump presidency, the soul of the nation would fall into the abyss.
He was right.
If you had to choose two monuments that best embody the soul of the nation, they would be the U.S. Capitol and the White House. One represents the people’s voice, and the other, the people’s home. The Capitol has given birth to laws that expanded liberty, protected equality, and corrected injustice.
And the White House, welcoming schoolchildren, tour groups, and heads of state. It has been both a stage and a sanctuary for America’s proudest and most painful moments. Lincoln, Roosevelt, Kennedy, Reagan, and Obama delivered soaring words to the nation from the Oval Office. They also signed historic legislation.
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I was there in 1989 when President George H.W. Bush signed a bipartisian bill raising the minimum wage into law. The history of that room overwhelms you.
I know these places not only from history books but from life. When I worked on Capitol Hill, I passed the U.S. Capitol nearly every day. I would tell people that passing the Capitol every day on my morning runs never got old. It still doesn’t. It’s sacred ground to me.
As a young congressional aide, I often gave tours to visiting constituents. I could walk the rotunda with my eyes closed, through Statuary Hall, the old House and Senate chambers, and today’s chambers and galleries, down to the site of George Washington’s empty tomb (he chose Mount Vernon). I know I could return 30 years later and still give that same tour, still feel the same awe that never once dimmed.
And then there was the White House, my first visit, before the bill signing, forever etched in memory. Through family friends, we were lucky enough to have a private tour led by Louis Freeh, who would later become FBI director under President Clinton.
We went everywhere, under the stanchion into the Oval Office, through the Cabinet and Roosevelt Rooms, the East Room where Lincoln once lay in state, even into the Secret Service quarters below. I remember each room as if I’d just left it. The sense of history, again, was overwhelming.
So when the January 6 insurrectionists, led on by Donald Trump, stormed the Capitol, I shed a tear. I knew the layouts of every hallway they violated, every shattered window they defiled. Watching that sacred space, one I had cherished for decades, be desecrated was demoralizing.
This week, I felt that same heartbreak again. When images emerged of Trump demolishing the East Wing of the White House, I felt that same lump in my throat, that same disbelief that once again he had found a way to physically destroy what millions of Americans hold sacred.
He had indeed ripped apart the soul of our nation.
For anyone who has ever walked through those doors, the East Wing was where your journey into history began. You’d pass through Secret Service checkpoints, step through metal detectors, and suddenly, you were inside the people’s house.
Now, under Trump, that story is being torn apart brick by brick. He is smashing not only institutions but symbols, the very architecture of our collective soul. He’s making the Constitution worthless. The laws of our nation don’t matter to him..
Where to begin adding up the damage? He literally and figuratively punched democracy in the face on January 6. Now, with his destruction of the White House, he’s delivered a gut punch to the nation’s soul and spirit. And I fear he’s not done.
He’s already targeting the majestic Air Force One, aiming to replace its stately blue-and-white design, a global symbol of American strength and dignity for decades, with a gilded luxury liner, an aircraft that reflects the antithesis of a democratic republic.
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He’s eyeing the Kennedy Center, musing about renaming it after himself. That’s a grotesque insult to President Kennedy, who inspired a whole generation to public service. He’s rewriting the history of Smithsonian exhibits to better suit his autocratic ways.
And yes, there’s talk, unthinkable, yet frighteningly plausible, of adding his likeness to Mount Rushmore..
Once upon a time, such scenarios would’ve been dismissed as crazy talk. But did any of us ever imagine seeing the U.S. Capitol ransacked? The White House razed? The unimaginable, it seems, is now the inevitable.
Trump has turned our most venerated spaces into demolition sites. A Marie Antoinette ballroom in the White House is an insult to the modest and moral soul of America that house stands for.
Joe Biden was right all along. The battle for the soul of the nation is the moral fight of our time.
I fear what Trump will destroy next. But more than that, I fear what we may allow to be destroyed if we fall silent, grow fatigued at all the turmoil and madness, or sink into a despair that saps our souls.
The Capitol once stood as a beacon of our shared purpose, the White House as a symbol of our shared home. Both now they bear the scars of a monster who only cares about possessions, and wants nothing to do with stewardship.
The soul of the nation is bleeding, hemorrhaging. The question that remains, the one President Biden continually asked us, is if we have the courage to save it again.
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