Words Worth Remembering: The Enduring Experiment
On Thursday morning, November 7, 2024, New Yorkers—and general readers everywhere—who grabbed a copy of The New York Times were greeted with a front page that many had believed could never happen and hoped would never occur. “Trump storms back,” read the headline. “He defeats Harris and caps his resurgence from outcast to felon to president-elect.”
The photograph that graced the front page showed the 45th president and 47th president-elect, Donald Trump, one hand grasping that of his wife, former First Lady Melania, and the other forming a fist in the air, his face stern, his demeanor that of a pariah who had just overcome the impossible—but who somehow knew that the impossible was very probable.
As of 6 p.m. Eastern time on Wednesday, November 6, the former president had secured the presidency with 295 electoral votes to Vice President Kamala Harris’s 226, winning the popular vote—the first Republican to do so since George W. Bush in 2004—and set to sweep, though narrowly, every battleground state in the Union.
The Times’s Peter Baker summarized that, for better or worse, the outcome of one of the nation’s most contentious and polarized elections “tells us who we are.” To those who saw, and continue to see, the president-elect as a swine who threatens to poison, if he has not already, the very soul of American democracy, the election was a confirmation of the worst. To others—the constitutional majority—his re-election was a recommitment to the ongoing, perennial struggle against political elitism, social erosion, economic uncertainty, and the failures of international liberalism
At precisely 11:24 a.m. in the nation’s capital, on the very day that readers, approvingly or not, glanced at Trump’s raised fist and saw a map painted red in the Times, the president, worn but oddly jubilant, exited the White House and made his way to the podium erected in the Rose Garden.
“For over 200 years, America has carried on the greatest experiment in self-government in the history of the world,” President Joe Biden said. “Yesterday, I spoke with President-elect Trump to congratulate him on his victory. I assured him that I would direct my entire administration to work with his team to ensure a peaceful and orderly transition,” adding, “that’s what the American people deserve.”
It was all rather poetic, for the very man whose constitutional election was, and still is, denied by leading Republican statespeople was doing what the 45th president had not done, at least not in totality, in the winter of 2020-21: accepting the results and ensuring the continuation of the tradition begun by George Washington.
Less than four years earlier, on Wednesday, January 6, 2021, President Trump told a raucous crowd in front of the White House, “We will never concede.” As he continued to speak, supporters overran the perimeter of the Capitol Building just blocks away, entering the building a little after 2 p.m., many hoisting Confederate battle and Trump campaign flags, their intention to prevent the certification of the electoral college votes by Congress, of which Trump had 38 fewer than the required 270.
The rioters’ efforts failed, and Biden was sworn in on an unprecedented Wednesday, January 20, a day that saw the outgoing president fail to attend his successor’s inauguration—the first time since Reconstruction. On that day, President Biden told a nation troubled by a pandemic and the threat of a constitutional crisis that “democracy has prevailed” and that “now, on this hallowed ground where just days ago violence sought to shake the Capitol’s very foundation, we come together as one nation, under God, indivisible, to carry out the peaceful transfer of power as we have for more than two centuries.”
Now, in November 2024, the embattled president was accepting the re-election of a man whom he openly condemned as a threat to democracy itself. “Campaigns are contests of competing visions,” Biden said. “We accept the choice the country made,” adding that “you can’t love your country only when you win. You can’t love your neighbor only when you agree.”
Concluding his six-minute address, the president said, “The American experiment endures, and we’re going to be okay.” Several weeks later, Biden pledged to attend the inauguration on Monday, January 20, 2025, which coincides with Martin Luther King, Jr., Day.
The public may have overlooked, or perhaps never even seen or heard, the brief remarks made from the Rose Garden on November 7, 2024. But history will remember a president who, although one side of the fiercest, most polarizing political rivalry in the American 21st century, chose to live the words uttered by Al Gore on the fateful day of December 13, 2000, when he submitted to the election of George W. Bush by saying, above all else, “This is America, and we put country before party.”
It is a testament to the character and strength of American democracy that those remarks were even given. And we should see them for what they are: an expression of the extraordinary in a world whose history is plagued, as ever, by the ordinariness of bullets instead of ballots, of violence instead of peace, and of despotism instead of self-rule. Perhaps America is, or continues to try to be, the shining city on a hill after all.