A Warning

by Anonymous

“A good moral character is the first essential in a man…It is therefore highly important that you should endeavor not only to be learned but virtuous.” —George Washington

George W. Bush calmed a grieving nation after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, telling Americans from the same room that “a great people has been moved to defend a great nation…the brightest beacon for freedom and opportunity in the world, and no one will keep that light from shining.”

(1) “understanding and acknowledging truth”; (2) “maintaining good fellowship with men, giving to every one his due, and keeping faith in contracts and promises”; (3) “greatness and strength of a lofty and unconquered mind”; and (4) “the order and measure that constitute moderation and temperance.”

Great deeds can be done by imperfect men. We just need to decide whether it’s worth it.

He gets up halfway through meetings with world leaders because he is bored.”

Intelligence is one of those qualities that, if you insist you have it, you probably don’t.

“I know more about courts than any human being on Earth.”

“If Hillary Clinton can’t satisfy her husband,” he tweeted in 2015, “what makes her think she can satisfy America?”

“Power is like being a lady,” she remarked. “If you have to tell people you are, you aren’t.”)

“We must present to the world not just an America that’s militarily strong, but an America that is morally powerful, an America that has a creed, a cause, a vision of a future time when all peoples have the right to self-government and personal freedom. I think American conservatives are uniquely equipped to present to the world this vision of the future—a vision worthy of the American past.” —Ronald Reagan

“the fact-problem test.” It was a simple way to determine whether a candidate’s “views” were resonating with voters, creating a strong and trusted brand. Ronald Reagan was a high scorer. For instance, you could give a 1980s voter a fake political scenario about any major topic and then ask, “What would Reagan’s position be on this matter? X, Y, or Z?” The voter would respond without hesitating. “Z.” Reagan communicated his views clearly and acted decisively, so people knew where he stood. Imagine voters receiving the same fact-problem test for Donald Trump. “What would Trump’s position be on this matter? X, Y, or Z?” Fill in whatever scenario you want. Let’s say the issue was health care, abortion, trade with China, or guns. I pity the voter who would give a confident answer. Because Trump has flip-flopped on all of them.

He encourages the comparison. “Wow, highest Poll Numbers in the history of the Republican Party,” he tweeted in July 2018. “That includes Honest Abe Lincoln and Ronald Reagan. There must be something wrong, please recheck that poll!” This is the same man who proudly declared on the White House lawn, “I am the Chosen One,” gesturing knowingly toward the heavens in front of a gaggle of reporters. He said he was teasing, but he wasn’t. Such is the self-perception of Donald J. Trump.

a wolf in elephant’s clothing—dawned

The US federal budget deficit was actually declining under the Obama administration, from $1.4 trillion in 2009 when Obama took office to $587 billion in 2016, just before he left.

the budget deficit has increased every single year since Donald Trump took office,

During the presidential campaign, he said he would eliminate America’s debt during his time in office.

In one such meeting, Trump reportedly said, “Yeah, but I won’t be here.”

He refers to leaders of the military not as nonpartisan defenders of the republic, but as “his generals,” whom he can move around as he pleases, like knights on a chess board. It’s tough to listen to him talk like this. Some of these leaders have lost children in the defense of the nation. They have answered the knock at the door from men and women standing there to tell them the most heart-wrenching news a parent can hear, that their child is gone forever. Yet they are on the receiving end of orders barked by a man who cowered at the thought of military service.

Analysts pointed out that such statements are used by terrorists for propaganda, helping them recruit supporters by touting America’s supposed cruelty.

President Trump took office eager to meet face-to-face with Iran’s leaders, who run one of the most anti-American governments in the world. “Anytime they want,” he said. No preconditions. This is something a US president has never done, for good reason. Iran’s government has the blood of American soldiers on its hands. They are responsible for the deaths of hundreds of US troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. Giving them an audience with the leader of the free world would put them on equal footing and be priceless media fodder for their use back home.

As one economist explained, it should be in the public interest “in every country” to let the people “buy whatever they want from those who sell it cheapest…The proposition is so very manifest that it seems ridiculous to take any pains to prove it.” This wasn’t a recent observation. It was the father of capitalism, Adam Smith, writing in the 1700s. His point is more relevant than ever.

They’ve written variations of the same book—from Jason Chaffetz’s The Deep State: How an Army of Elected Bureaucrats Protected Barack Obama and Is Working to Destroy the Trump Agenda, to Jerome Corsi’s Killing the Deep State: The Fight to Save President Trump, to George Papadopoulos’s Deep State Target: How I Got Caught in the Crosshairs of the Plot to Bring Down President Trump, to Corey Lewandowski and David Bossie’s Trump’s Enemies: How the Deep State is Undermining His Presidency, and a collection of alliterative titles by Judge Jeanine Pirro, also making the exact same points: Deep inside the government are a group of people out to destroy democracy, Donald Trump, and America.

“The Mueller Crime Family,” including supposedly nefarious individuals who were part of the Deep-State plot to investigate Donald Trump. One of them was his own deputy attorney general, Rod Rosenstein. Rosenstein has since won praise from President Trump for his public service, even though the president once retweeted a meme showing Rod behind bars for treason. Which means that members of the “Deep State” really are just people whom Trump doesn’t like. Once he likes them, they aren’t in it anymore.

His paranoia is the best evidence of a guilty conscience. After a particularly bad series of leaks from the White House, President Trump inquired about the possibility of surreptitiously monitoring the phones of White House staff. To avoid veering into “illegal” territory, staff interpreted this as the president asking for better “insider-threat detection” systems, a common practice in businesses or agencies working to prevent unauthorized disclosures. Here was a man who was apoplectic at the (completely false) theory that Barack Obama had his “wires tapped” at Trump Tower, but who was more than happy to tap those of the people around him.

Trump’s animus toward the law extends to judges and courts, too. He has less control over their actions, so he uses his bully pulpit to demean them and to question their legitimacy. Recall during the 2016 campaign when candidate Trump disparaged a judge for a ruling related to a lawsuit against Trump University by claiming the judge’s Mexican heritage made him biased. At the time, CNN’s Jake Tapper confronted Trump. “I don’t care if you criticize him. That’s fine. You can criticize every decision. What I’m saying is, if you invoke his race as a reason why he can’t do his job—” “I think that’s why he’s doing it,” Trump interrupted, doubling down and insisting the judge should recuse himself. The judge, by the way, was not from Mexico, but Indiana. Paul Ryan called it “the textbook definition of a racist comment.”

Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts repudiated the president’s attack, writing that the United States does not have “Obama judges or Trump judges, Bush judges or Clinton judges…The independent judiciary is something we should all be thankful for.”

In an interview with NBC News, he cited the Russia probe as one of the reasons he had gotten rid of Comey. “I said to myself, I said, ‘You know, this Russia thing with Trump and Russia is a made-up story,’ ” he told the outlet.

The same month in a meeting with Russian officials at the White House, the president confessed to them that dismissing Jim had relieved “great pressure.”

Trump privately told White House counsel Don McGahn that he needed to have Rod Rosenstein get rid of the special counsel. No way, McGahn warned. “Knocking out Mueller,” he said, would be “another fact used to claim” that Trump had committed obstruction of justice, according to the investigation’s final report. The president tried again on June 17, 2017, phoning McGahn from Camp David. “You gotta do this,” he insisted. “You gotta call Rod.” Trump reiterated the order the next day. McGahn ignored both requests and threatened to resign. When the story broke, the president told Don to dispute it and to “create a record stating he had not been ordered to have the special counsel removed.” McGahn refused to lie, and the president called him into the Oval Office to pressure him, an entreaty his chief lawyer again rebuffed.

One minute, he might try to jettison a longstanding free trade agreement after a bad phone call with the Canadian president, and the next he might propose cutting off a US lifeline to a stalwart ally because he thought it was costing too much.

Fellow Republicans called candidate Trump a “race-baiting xenophobic bigot” in the presidential campaign.