Step up, Mr. President

President Obama, we have never met, but I’m one of your most committed supporters. I’ve contributed thousands of dollars, thousands of hours to your campaigns and to the fight for health reform. I’m so proud of your intelligence, decency, and integrity. I’m gratified to have given every dollar, every hour I devoted to your campaigns and to these worthy causes. I weep for my country, that a man of your comprehensive excellence will be replaced by a figure of such comprehensive unworthiness as Donald Trump.

Despite–or rather because of my pride in you, I am troubled by your equivocal performance at perhaps your last press conference today. In its way, this was a low point of your presidency, rivaling your defeat at the hands of Republicans in the debt ceiling crisis and your defeat in the first 2012 presidential debate. We are in a national crisis, and we are looking to you.

The majority of Americans—we who voted for you, and many who did not—are frightened for our future. We are uncertain about the opaque finances, entanglements, and intentions of our incoming President. We are looking for you to lead us. We know that you have an awesome responsibility to ensure the peaceful transfer of power, and to maintain a minimum of decorum in a polarized time. You have other responsibilities, too.

Some have called upon you to take dramatic action before January 20, perhaps a special session of Congress to address the President-elect’s conflicts of interest and the Russian hack. I’m not sure what to think about that.

At minimum, I wish that you had said today some obvious things that need to be said. You didn’t have to harshly condemn the President-elect or to become a bitter antagonist in the political fray. You could have spoken in the precise, civil, and frank locution we have come to expect from you in moments of national difficulty and pain.

Here, for example, are some things that should be said:

Given the whisker-thin electoral college margin, Russian interference on behalf of Mr. Trump obviously casts some shadow over the outcome. That’s the reality. Of course, we can never know whether this made a decisive difference. It mattered, alongside other important things that also mattered. We can all recognize that reality, whether we voted for Mr. Trump, for Secretary Clinton, or for some other candidate.

Given the divisive campaign and Secretary Clinton’s securing the popular vote, President-elect Trump has a special responsibility to reach across the aisle. He has a special responsibility to be scrupulous and transparent about his complicated financial affairs, so that the American people can be absolutely  sure that he has no conflicts of interests, foreign entanglements, or vulnerabilities, given what we know just unfolded. I have spoken with him about these matters.

I’m not sure how Mr. Trump or his supporters would have reacted to such comments. I do know many are hungry for you to be more assertive—not as a Democrat but as President of a nation whose political system has just been badly damaged.

You missed an opportunity to do that today. Fortunately, you are still President of the United States. I hope that you use the next month effectively. At times, you must help our next president as he prepares to assume this awesome job. Other times, you must help the rest of us, as we prepare to resist his unworthy efforts to undo your own worthy legacy.