The Washington Post Editorial Board has a discussion of Trump’s presidential style. [This is part 3 of a series — see Update below.] There are so many aspects of Trump’s presidency worthy of critical examination, but this will do for the moment. The gist of the piece is that Trump is a divider, a flame thrower, an inciter, totally partisan — and the partisanship is all about him. He has neither the ability or the inclination to bring the country together.
Here’s a few of the juicy bits; let’s hope it doesn’t disappear into the weekend news void.
...Where past occupants of the office have at least paid lip service to its inspirational aspects, and where both of his immediate predecessors, George W. Bush and Barack Obama, actively campaigned on themes of unity, Mr. Trump lives by a different credo: “When someone attacks me, I always attack back . . . except 100x more.” This is a formula for upwardly spiraling conflict. Consistent with it, Mr. Trump has used the bully pulpit — magnified by social media — to debase public discourse.
emphasis added
Ya think? I suppose we should be glad he hasn't gotten around to using those nuclear launch codes yet...
...This is a president who does not so much govern the country as harass it. In fact, the flow of invective is so constant that it can become overwhelming, almost numbing — but must not be normalized just the same. This is especially true with respect to his repeated use of xenophobic, racist and misogynistic themes and tropes. Amid times of tension and disorder, where other presidents would call for calm, he traffics in violent words (“when the looting starts, the shooting starts”). On one notorious occasion in 2017 — doubly shocking to recall in light of subsequent events, including the death of George Floyd under a policeman’s knee — Mr. Trump told an audience of law enforcement officers on Long Island: “When you see these thugs being thrown into the back of a paddy wagon, you just see them thrown in, rough, and I said, ‘Please don’t be too nice.’ ”
emphasis added.
Yeah, about that normalization thing...
And now something from the Department of “Well, DUH!”
...There was a time, during the election year of 2016, when it was still possible — barely — to suppose that actual possession of the presidency, and its awesome responsibility, might temper Mr. Trump. That is obviously false now. Patriotic Cabinet members and staff who agreed to serve in his administration early on with similar hopes have long since quit or been dismissed. What surround the president now are apologists, reduced to explaining away his offensive words and deeds, when they don’t ignore them...
emphasis added
Dudes, it’s late 2020; you are just bringing this up now? You are really exceeding the design limits of the “better late than never” convention. [To be fair, several commenters have pointed out the WAPO has been better on Trump than the NY Times. This opinion series certainly shows it. See Update below.]
Enjoy the pieces if you can get to it past the WAPO pay wall. They are not all that long but very much to the point. Here’s a few more points they might pick up on if they want to make this into a series. [Oops — my bad; they already did. See the Update below.]
- Trump’s constant lying — not just exaggeration, honest mistakes, partial truths. Lying, with malice aforethought.
- Trump’s campaign messaging that echoes that coming from Russia. There’s no active coordination, right? (Wink, wink, nudge, nudge, know what I mean, know what I mean?)
- Trump’s defense of the indefensible — like Kyle Rittenhouse, and all the other “very fine people”.
- His total lack of any coherent policy ideas, other than overturning anything done by Obama, and cashing in for his own benefit. (Ditto for his party.)
- Using the government to go after his ‘enemies’.
- His alternating bragging about his non-accomplishments and whining about his grievances.
- The open nepotism around Trump — his reliance on family members for critical tasks for which they are not qualified.
- The open corruption around Trump — the way he uses the government like his own personal property. Hatch Act? What’s that?
- His “only the best people” whose chief selection criteria seems to be their unquestioning loyalty to Trump and their willingness to destroy the government they’ve been entrusted with.
- The ongoing questions about his finances, his health, his mental state.
- The ongoing questions about his ties to Russia.
- The total complicity of the party formerly known as Republican, but now a Trump subsidiary.
And do we even need to bring up the revelations about his contempt for the military?
59 days….
MAJOR UPDATE: As it happens, I overlooked the two previous installments in this three part series “Our Democracy in Peril.” It’s a must-read trilogy.
Part One: A second Trump term might injure the democratic experiment beyond recovery
...If you reelect me, I will make things great again.
Seeking reelection in the midst of the worst public health crisis and sharpest economic downturn of our lifetimes, this may, realistically, be the only argument left to him. But, fittingly for a president who has spoken more than 20,000 lies during his presidency, it rests on two huge falsehoods.
One is that the nation, his presidency and, above all, Mr. Trump himself are innocent victims of covid-19. In fact, his own negligence, ignorance and malpractice turned what would have been a daunting challenge for any president into a national disaster.
The other is that there was anything to admire in his record before the virus struck...
Part Two: Trump has advanced authoritarianism and undermined the free world
...America must prevail in the race to develop new technologies, rally fellow democracies to counter authoritarian aggression, and reform capitalism and democracy itself to serve a new age. But President Trump cannot deliver that leadership. On the contrary, over the past three years he has done as much as any global actor to advance the cause of authoritarianism and undermine the free world.
Mr. Trump’s most conspicuous aid to tyranny has been his relentless support for Russian President Vladimir Putin, who aided Mr. Trump’s 2016 election and whose foreign policy is laser-focused on weakening the United States and dividing it from other democracies in the NATO alliance. Mr. Trump has provided invaluable support for this cause, most recently by ordering a withdrawal of U.S. troops from Germany. While he has not hesitated to publicly trash NATO and the leaders of Germany, Canada and Britain, Mr. Trump has never uttered a word of criticism of Mr. Putin, even after receiving U.S. intelligence reports indicating that Moscow paid bounties to the Afghan Taliban to kill U.S. soldiers...
...For all this, the greatest damage Mr. Trump has done to the cause of democracy has come at home. His assaults on the U.S. media and courts, attempts to politicize Justice Department investigations, and bald efforts to manipulate voting in November’s election threaten to degrade what has been the world’s strongest democracy while offering a model for budding authoritarians around the world. His disregard for science and restrictions on immigration have weakened the chances that the United States will win the race to develop new technologies. His incessant lying has helped to create a political culture in which wild conspiracy theories flourish and there is no consensus on basic facts, making informed legislative debate and compromise all but impossible….
Together, these three pieces are a damning indictment of Trump. If they want to do a part 4, I suggest they examine what made all this possible: the Republican Party, Right Wing Media, and the Big Money behind it all. This section from Part One was unfortunately prophetic.
Four years ago, after Mr. Trump was nominated in Cleveland, we did something in this space we had never done before: Even before the Democrats had nominated their candidate, we told you that we could never, under any circumstances, endorse Donald Trump for president. He was, we said, “uniquely unqualified” to be president.
“Mr. Trump’s politics of denigration and division could strain the bonds that have held a diverse nation together,” we warned. “His contempt for constitutional norms might reveal the nation’s two-century-old experiment in checks and balances to be more fragile than we knew.”
And here we are.