With only a few days left in Trump’s term of office, Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos resigned. She says she objected to his rhetoric in inciting the insurrection of his devoted loyalists. This is certainly an anti-climax. DeVos had to clear out anyway, but by resigning now she avoids the painful decision about forcing Trump to resign by the terms of the 25th Amendment. Whether she resigns or stays is irrelevant. Whether she uses her position to force the ouster of a malevolent, incompetent president does matter. She opted out.

The Washington Post reported:

Education Secretary Betsy DeVos submitted her resignation Thursday, citing the president’s role in the riot on Capitol Hill.
“There is no mistaking the impact your rhetoric had on the situation, and it is the inflection point for me,” she wrote in a letter to President Trump. The behavior of the “violent protestors overrunning theh U.S. Capitol” was “unconscionable,” she wrote.


“Impressionable children are watching all of this, and they are learning from us. I believe we each have a moral obligation to exercise good judgment and model the behavior we hope they would emulate,” she wrote. “They must know from us that America is greater than what transpired yesterday.”


She said her resignation is effective Friday. The resignation, she said was “in support of the oath I took to our Constitution, our people, and our freedoms.”


DeVos had been one of Trump’s most loyal and longest serving Cabinet secretaries, and also one of his most controversial, despised by many on the left. In recent days, though, even as Trump disputed the election results, DeVos acknowledged that Joe Biden had defeated him.


DeVos joined several other Trump administration officials who quit with less than two weeks left in Trump’s term, in protest of the violence that unfolded Wednesday.


Earlier in the day, Elaine Chao — who is married to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R.-Ky.)—also resigned as transportation secretary, saying she was “deeply troubled” by what had happened at the Capitol. In addition, Mick Mulvaney quit his job as the U.S. special envoy for Northern Ireland.

DeVos’s sensibilities were not offended by the separation of children from their families at the border. She was not offended by his effort to pressure the president of Ukraine to give him dirt on Joe Biden. She was not offended by his destruction of the independence of the Justice Department or his politicization of every other Department, including her own. She was not offended by his racism, sexism, xenophobia. She was not offended by his persistent lying about everything. She was not offended by his flagrant lies about losing the election, and his refusal to concede his loss more than two months after the election.

She happily served this morally and ethically bankrupt man.

But she bails out rather than stand up to her duty to vote to oust him by the terms of the 25th Amendment, which requires a vote of the Vice President and the Cabinet to remove him.