* * *
To understand Trump’s unfitness for office, step back for a moment and wipe from your mind the image Trump spent decades polishing through his faux reality television show, the books others wrote for him, and his manipulation of the conventions of journalism.
Imagine a man you never heard of sits down next to you at the start of a cross-country plane flight or a long bus ride. This older man, his yellowish hair long and combed over, wearing a nice suit with a long necktie, incessantly talks about himself.
You would get an earful of bluster about his wealth. Next would be his imagined smarts—“I have a very good brain”—a tale told in sixth-grade sentences, half-finished thoughts, and other verbal ingredients of what is politely called “word salad.”
Imagine he started talking, as he did to black leaders in February, about Frederick Douglass in the present tense, more than a century after his death. This man tells you that Douglass is “an example of somebody who’s done an amazing job and is getting recognized more and more, I notice.”
Listen as he describes climate change as a “Chinese hoax” and says America should mine and burn more coal instead of developing renewable energy sources like the rest of the world. Imagine him urging steam power rather than “digital” catapults to launch jet fighters from aircraft carriers because “no one understands digital.”
Imagine him telling you that he gets pleasure from destroying the lives of anyone who slights him. And imagine he tells you that the Mexican government is sending hordes of murderers and rapists across the border and that all blacks live in ghettos, uneducated and often unable to find work.
Now imagine you are a black businessman, the owner of profitable factories like my former next-door neighbor in Rochester. Or a federal judge born in America whose parents came from Mexico. Or one of the millions of Americans who owe their jobs to “the digital.”
You would, I imagine, fear you were, to use a Trumpian term, stuck next to a nut job until your trip ended.
How can it be that millions of people do not see Trump for what he is—a narcissistic, ill-informed, thieving old blowhard? As the adage goes, poor people are crazy; rich people are eccentric.
Before the election, I predicted that, as president, Trump’s behavior would become increasingly erratic, and it has. That is because of his own shortcomings, especially his desperate need for adoration, his self-centered thinking, and his ignorance of basic issues of diplomacy, economics, and geopolitics.
A month after the inauguration, thirty-five psychiatrists wrote a letter to the editor of The New York Times that made exactly this point:
Mr. Trump’s speech and actions demonstrate an inability to tolerate views different from his own, leading to rage reactions. His words and behavior suggest a profound inability to empathize. Individuals with these traits distort reality to suit their psychological state, attacking facts and those who convey them (journalists, scientists).
In a powerful leader, these attacks are likely to increase, as his personal myth of greatness appears to be confirmed. We believe that the grave emotional instability indicated by Mr. Trump’s speech and actions makes him incapable of serving safely as president.
A few months later, psychiatrist Prudence L. Gourguechon, a former president of the American Psychoanalytic Association, proposed judging Trump’s fitness for office using the United States Army Field Manual on developing leaders. She distilled from its 188 pages five crucial qualities needed to lead:
- Trust
- Discipline and self-control
- Judgment and critical thinking
- Self-awareness
- Empathy
Not one of these is part of Trump’s nature.
Trust. For years, he has said in talks and the books that bear his name that no one is to be trusted, especially those closest to you.
Discipline and Self-control. The Army manual says leaders maintain their composure under pressure and do not react “viscerally or angrily when receiving bad news or conflicting information,” and do not allow “personal emotions to drive decisions or guide responses to emotionally charged situations.” That’s the opposite of Trump.
Judgment. That Trump asserts that the best advisers reside in his head and thus he does not need experts does not suggest sound judgment.
Critical Thinking. The Army manual notes that a leader adapts to new facts and “seeks to obtain the most thorough and accurate understanding possible” while also anticipating “first, second and third consequences of multiple courses of action.” A trademark Trump characteristic runs counter to this. “We have no choice,” he says about everything from banning Muslims from entering America to building his wall on the Mexican border to repealing Obamacare.
Self-awareness. Trump lies compulsively, telling so many made-up stories, imagined events, and absurd fabrications that he often stumbles over his own statements. That Trump contradicts himself without embarrassment, remorse, or even acknowledgment goes to the heart of his lack of self-awareness. Showing video clips of Trump denying he said something followed by earlier clips of him saying that which he denied have become staples of political comedy shows like Saturday Night Live and late night television.
On his first full day in office, the public got a full dose of how Trump just makes stuff up and insists it is reality. The first official statement read by Sean Spicer, the White House press secretary, insisted that Trump’s was “the largest audience to witness an inauguration, period. Both in person and around the globe.”
Never mind that photographs and transit ridership data show that Obama’s second inaugural drew a bigger crowd than Trump’s. Never mind that transit ridership at the 2009 inauguration was more than double that in 2017. Never mind that George W. Bush in 2001 and Bill Clinton in 1993 drew crowds that by such indicators as transit ridership and photographs were larger or at least equal. Never mind that as Spicer spoke, the largest mass demonstrations in American history, by far, were under way as about six million women and some men marched in Washington and more than 100 other cities to protest Trump’s presidency.
Spicer’s statement, obviously ordered by Trump as a test of his press secretary’s loyalty—and which Spicer said after resigning that he regretted—used a litany of what could be called alternative facts to justify the crowd size claim. Labeling anything that does not comport with Trump’s version of reality “fake news” is part of a strategy to muddy clear waters, sow confusion, and pose as the only honest person in a craven world of dissemblers.
Similarly, after denigrating American intelligence agencies, Trump insisted his dismissive remarks were made up by journalists, whom he calls “dishonest” and “among the most dishonest human beings on earth” and “totally dishonest.” With those words he is really speaking of himself.
Empathy. As for empathy, Trump flew twice to Texas after Hurricane Harvey. The first time he boasted about the size of the crowd he drew in Corpus Christi, his wife’s white athletic shoes not smudged by a speck of mud. On his second visit, he advised people at a feeding station to “have a good time.” During the presidential campaign he denigrated John McCain’s five years as a prisoner of war and later mocked Khizr and Ghazala Khan, whose Army officer son was killed in Afghanistan.
Later Trump denounced the people of Puerto Rico after hurricane Maria flattened the island, mocking how the island name is pronounced by locals, saying pwear-toe-rico. And on his brief visit he tossed rolls of paper towels to those in the small audience, a Trumpian twist on Marie Antoinette. He criticized the mayor of San Juan for pointing out that, contrary to Trump’s claims of a great job of relief, people were dying for lack of water, food, medicine, and electricity and federal officials were slow to respond. Trump blamed the Puerto Ricans for refusing to help themselves. Lin-Manuel Miranda, creator of the musical Hamilton, noted the contrast between Trump’s remarks on the American island hurricane and those that ravaged Florida and Texas. “I’ve never seen a sitting president attack the vic
tims of a natural disaster before,” Miranda said.
By every measure in the manual, had Trump become an Army officer instead of dodging the draft with his doctor’s note about a bone spur in his foot, he would not have risen through the ranks.
* * *
Throughout his campaign, Trump predicted his presidency would be one win after another. “We’re going to win so much you may even get tired of winning. And you’ll say please, please, it’s too much winning, we can’t take it anymore.”
That’s not what happened. Still, many of his supporters refuse to accept that they got conned. It must be the fault of Democrats or news reporters, or anyone except Trump. Such is the power of adoration of the celebrity, not that much different from when the ancient Greeks invented tales of intimacy with the gods, producing demigods. Right after they invented demigods, hubris appeared. And we know how that turned out . . .
Trump arrived with no idea of how Washington works. The self-proclaimed great negotiator then started off on the wrong foot and kept on going.
The smart first move would have been to introduce an infrastructure bill to undo decades of malign neglect. Rebuilding failing highways and bridges, replacing unsafe dams, building modern airport terminals, and improving water and sewer systems would have created jobs for construction crews, engineers, and factory workers nationwide. It would have made life more pleasant and signaled a better future. And Democrats would have had to go along with such a bill.
Instead Trump put that on the back burner and demanded an immediate replacement of Obama’s signature achievement, the Affordable Care Act.
A month after taking office, Trump met with governors to discuss the problems of repealing Obamacare. He came out of the closed-door session confessing his ignorance of what was common knowledge. “I have to tell you, it’s an unbelievably complex subject. Nobody knew that health care could be so complicated.”
That should have opened more eyes to Trump’s con artistry since everyone else in America knew health care was extremely complicated.
His most extreme supporters, the neo-Nazis, call him “savior” in their online publications. Trump claims that mantle, tweeting as a candidate “I alone can solve” the problem of “radical Islamic terrorism.” In accepting the Republican nomination for president, Trump declared “I alone can fix it.” Instead of disgust at such an authoritarian claim, or mocking laughter, his words were greeted with enthusiastic applause by leaders of the party that says it stands for personal responsibility and maximum individual liberty (including openly carrying loaded military-grade weapons).
Trump’s success in reaching the White House and his continued die-hard support among a third of the adult population reveals a much more serious problem than a crazy man being president.
Donald Trump is not the political disease afflicting America, he is a symptom.
That millions of people voted for a narcissistic, know-nothing con artist who has spent his entire life swindling others while repeatedly urging followers to commit criminal acts of violence against his critics reveals more about America than about Trump.
During the Constitutional Convention, Benjamin Franklin was supposedly asked, “What have we got, a republic or a monarchy?” to which he replied, “A republic—if you can keep it.”
Franklin’s point was that self-governance requires people to accept the burdens as well as the benefits of freedom. It means they are responsible for their fate and cannot just blame a crazy king or an uncaring despot or anyone else. They must, to be free, take personal responsibility and be actively engaged in shaping the policies that will affect not only their lives, but those of generations to come.
If the United States of America is to endure, it must be with a recognition that compromise, cooperation, and caring about the interests of those you dislike are the basic ingredients of success.
What we have seen since Watergate, unfortunately, is a widening chasm between the incentives of office seekers and the interests of the American people, a political divide that Trump recognized and brilliantly exploited. And now he uses his office to profiteer and to denigrate those who disagree with him, just as dictators and would-be dictators have always done.
Under our Constitution we determine our political fate. If we wish to turn in our citizenship responsibilities and outsource the work to power mongers, we can do so.
Democracies do not die dramatically. They slowly fade away.
In a democracy, we deal with many contending interests through cooperation and compromise. But ever since the anti-tax zealot Grover Norquist popularized the quip by Dick Armey, the former Texas congressman, that “bipartisanship is political date rape,” we have seen a growing sense of my way or the highway.
We live in a time when many people denigrate those who have worked to make the most of the opportunities of living in this country, not in terms of monetary rewards but of developing their character, intellect, and judgment. We should oppose these crass tendencies. Our Constitution was born of the Enlightenment, of the idea that reason and intellect and vigorous public debate could produce better societies than those ruled by dogma and monarchs who claimed authority as their divine right.
“Our Constitution is not written to handle someone like Trump,” the political scientist Jason Johnson told me. “That is the greatest danger and greatest harm he is to our country.”
Johnson notes that the Federalist Papers, the structured debate over whether America should adopt the Constitution, shows that the Framers “envisioned presidents who might be dishonest, who might not have consistent ethical values, but they never envisioned a self-involved dictatorial capitalist, so we don’t have a government designed to restrain someone who doesn’t care about any of the norms. The British would just get rid of such a person” by calling elections.
In America, though, “everything is dependent on the moral will of existing political parties and Congress, and we are all suffering for that whether we recognize it or not.” Johnson believes the failure of Congress to rein in Trump’s profiteering, his dealings with the Kremlin, and his bellicosity will afflict America long after he leaves office. “For the next thirty-five years or so, the standard for what you can get away with as long as you are in power and stay in power has been lowered to a level I don’t think any of us can fully appreciate today,” he said.
* * *
America has yet to become the society that Martin Luther King dreamed of in 1963, in which we judge one another not by the color of our skin but the content of our character. Trump represents a diversion on the road to that much better society. He is emblematic of the tendency, magnified since the 1980s, to judge people by the content of their wallet, as if money had anything to do with character.
Our Constitution is meant to free the human spirit so we and our posterity may become something better than we were, better than we are today. Freedom is about choosing, but it is also about having to live with the consequences of the choices we make. If we choose to empower the dishonest, the ill prepared, the mean-spirited, and the emotionally immature, we will pay dearly.
Trump often speaks of a unified nation, revealing yet another aspect of his appalling ignorance about our nation. We were not founded to be united. We are not the Taliban, nor the Saudis, nor any other society built on the premise that every member will behave as those in power demand. No president should ever express his admiration for dictators and those who rule not because of popular support but with the iron fist and the gulag. Yet Trump has done exactly that with regard to power seekers in Russia, the Philippines, and Turkey, and even the fratricidal dictator in North Korea, whose power depends on maintaining his entire country as a prison.
* * *
Trump’s presidency poses a challenge for America. What future will we choose? Do we want to slide toward autocracy in this and future administrations? Or do we want a future that frees the human spirit even more?
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
One person wrote this book, but th
e facts came from many people, far more than I will properly express my gratitude to below. To those I neglect to mention, be assured you have my appreciation and so do the readers.
This book is dedicated to Wayne Barrett, who in the late 1970s was the first journalist to start seriously covering Donald Trump instead of printing as fact whatever Trump said. Wayne worked at The Village Voice and yet had the deep trust of many law enforcement officials because of his doggedness and absolute integrity, as shown at his funeral, where politicians whose foibles and misconduct he laid bare in print, including New York governor Andrew Cuomo and Senator Chuck Schumer, came to honor his memory and express gratitude for reporting that persuaded them to become better public servants. Before he died, one day before Trump assumed office, Wayne entrusted me with his extensive Trump files. I have shared those files and my own with reporters from major news organizations, many of whom also helped with tying down key facts in this book.
Many academics took time to tutor me and point me to scholarly articles, often by those with whom they disagree, and to refine my understanding of complex issues. Especially helpful were Professors Douglas Brinkley of Rice University, a presidential historian; David Carlton of Vanderbilt, who studies Southern industrialization and deindustrialization; and Roger Conner of Vanderbilt Law, who for more than four decades has been a source for my reporting.
George Lakoff, the University of California cognitive scientist who wrote Don’t Think of an Elephant! and other provocative books on how the ways politicians, journalists, and others frame issues affect popular perceptions and civic debate, patiently refreshed his past lessons for me on issue framing.
My Syracuse University College of Law colleagues Robert Ashford and Aviva Abramovsky, now dean at the University at Buffalo School of Law, promptly gave advice on legal issues. At the University of Minnesota Law School, I relied on the insights of professors Richard W. Painter, who served as chief ethics officer in the George W. Bush administration, and June Carbone and her husband, William K. (Bill) Black, who as a banking regulator was responsible for the more than three thousand criminal cases brought during the savings and loan scandals of the late 1980s and early 1990s.
It's Even Worse Than You Think Page 27
