On second thought: The new quiet time rule

What if the losing candidate went away after a presidential election? Suppose the nation had heard nothing from Donald Trump these last two years, except, perhaps report of the day he scored the greatest golf tournament triumph ever?

Many lament the ferocity of presidential campaigns, but the after-campaign season has become pretty nasty too. A few months after her 2016 loss to Trump, Hillary Clinton found plenty of people to blame in her book on the lost cause, from Barack Obama to James Comey to the media, but a recurrent thread in What Happened is that the Russians did it with Trump’s cooperation. As to Trump’s next act after his own loss, the defeated president never missed a beat between exhorting his fans to “Stop the Steal,” and calling on them to, “Take back our country” on Jan. 6, 2021.

Presidential campaigns end, eventually, but the post election mud season goes on, at least as long as the losing candidate keeps talking. Trump’s election fraud charges have been repeatedly debunked, but Republican candidates who wanted the former president’s blessing were still repeating his, “Stop the Steal” line last fall.

Researchers have been looking for evidence that Russian meddling made a difference in the Trump/Clinton contest ever since 2017, and coming up empty, but that didn’t stop Clinton from comparing Russian interference to 9/11 two years after the election. The newspapers generally dropped the Trump/Russia story after Special Counsel Robert Mueller spent most of a July day in 2019 telling Congress there weren’t going to be any conspiring with Russians charges for anybody, but Clinton was still calling Trump “Putin’s Puppet” late in the next presidential election cycle in Sept. 20.

It is not difficult to notice real political effects from the lingering afterlives of recent presidential candidates. For the last two years, Trump fans in state legislatures around the country have busied themselves coming up with new voting barriers to overcome non-existent election fraud.

Clinton’s repeated, unsubstantiated complaints about Americans conspiring with the Russian menace may be a factor in the unquestioning readiness now among congressional Democrats for every escalation in arms shipments to Ukraine. In 2014 it was enough for Democratic President Obama to say Ukraine is a core interest of Russia, not of the United States, to justify refusing weapons for Ukraine after Russia seized Crimea. Today, no Democrat is about to risk getting smeared as pro-Russian.

Our fellowship as Americans has definitely suffered from these too-long swan songs. By now, most Trump supporters must have been treated to at least one obscene Trump/Putin cartoon. Trump, and those who echo him, invite us to be suspicious of the local county clerk who supervises elections, even of our neighbors who volunteer to sit at the tables on election night.

Other civilizations have come up with an effective solution to the sore loser problem: the losing Roman general throws himself on his sword; the unsuccessful samurai does the hari-kari. While it may not be widely understood, the real reason for these customs is to make sure under-performing leaders don’t stick around to lead their followers into new disasters. The last thing the empire needs is some loser general whining, “Attila cheated,” when it’s time for the next battle.

Agreed, the specific remedies of ancient Rome and imperial Japan may be a poor fit for American political culture: self sacrifice is not the sort of thing we can expect from those who aspire to the presidency. But can we also agree that, now every presidential election has become a contest for the very soul of the nation, it is no longer safe for the losers to remain at the head of their armies post election?

The new post-Presidential election Quiet Time is the answer. From now on, once three or more news organizations have called it, the losing major party candidate will give a speech. That speech will not necessarily be gracious; it will be perfectly acceptable for the distraught candidate to say something along the lines of, “I hope you people are happy now, you picked that jerk over me.” The speech must, however include a declaration of responsibility, “Yeah, I blew it. Otherwise, would you be stuck with that jerk?” And the conclusion will be,“I’m going away now.”

And that’s all. No sentimental post election interviews No memoirs about noble ambitions and malign adversaries. Lose a presidential election, and it’s over. Maybe the former candidate takes up golf. The winner doesn’t have to be nasty about it either. All the new president has to do is forget about it: the one time adversary’s name becomes the name never to be spoken,

While some may bristle about First Amendment issues, Quiet Time depends, not on new law, but new custom. After all, in the days before Bill Clinton, American broadcasters stayed mum about presidential affairs until long after anybody who ever cared didn’t.

In Quiet Time, soon enough the former candidate’s adherents will find new causes. In time, perhaps the new custom could be extended to include leaders for other losing causes. Imagine a time, for example when everybody realizes, it wouldn’t be a bad thing if members of congress who helped get us into disastrous wars 20 years ago took up some other line of work now.

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Will Rawn is a retired Montana State University-Northern professor.