A Warning

by Anonymous

When everything is a crisis and a scandal, the end result is that nothing is. Americans are fed up with the cacophony, becoming numb to it. We are looking the other way, which has caused us to lose sight of what is important in the national debate.

Removing my identity from the equation deprives him of an opportunity to create a distraction. What will he do when there is no person to attack, only an idea?

Unlike the president-elect’s friends and the leftovers he brought with him, who were used to currying Trump’s favor and surviving his fickle turns of affection, these experienced leaders were not worn down by life inside Trump’s inner circle of flattery and deception. The administration’s recruits came together because many had one trait in common: They didn’t know the chief executive.

Two traits are illustrative of what brought the Steady State together: the president’s inattentiveness and his impulsiveness.

Then officials were told that PowerPoint decks needed to be slimmed down. The president couldn’t digest too many slides. He needed more images to keep his interest—and fewer words. Then they were told to cut back the overall message (on complicated issues such as military readiness or the federal budget) to just three main points. Eh, that was still too much. Soon, West Wing aides were exchanging “best practices” for success in the Oval Office. The most salient advice? Forget the three points. Come in with one main point and repeat it—over and over again, even if the president inevitably goes off on tangents—until he gets it.

“What the fuck is this?” the president would shout, looking at a document one of them handed him. “These are just words. A bunch of words. It doesn’t mean anything.” Sometimes he would throw the papers back on the table. He definitely wouldn’t read them.

It took a lot of trial and error for West Wing staff to realize there needed to be a change in the White House briefing process. Until that happened, officials would walk out of briefings frustrated. “He is the most distracted person I’ve ever met,” one of the president’s security lieutenants confessed. “He has no fucking clue what we are talking about!” More changes were ordered to cater to Trump’s peculiarities. Documents were dramatically downsized, and position papers became sound bites. As a result, complex proposals were reduced to a single page (or ideally a paragraph) and translated into Trump’s “winners and losers” tone.

It was a visceral lesson that we weren’t just appointees of the president. We were glorified government babysitters.

Some aides grew so worn down by the roller coaster of presidential whims that they started encouraging him to hold more campaign rallies, putting aside the fact that it wasn’t campaign season. The events had the dual benefit of giving Trump something “fun” to do and also getting him out of town, where he would hypothetically do less damage.

The day-to-day management of the executive branch was falling apart before our eyes. Trump was all over the place. He was like a twelve-year-old in an air traffic control tower, pushing the buttons of government indiscriminately, indifferent to the planes skidding across the runway and the flights frantically diverting away from the airport.

Fundamentally, the president never learned to manage the government’s day-to-day functions, or showed any real interest in doing so. This remains a problem. He doesn’t know how the executive branch works.

“About a third of the things the president wants us to do are flat-out stupid. Another third would be impossible to implement and wouldn’t even solve the problem. And a third of them would be flat-out illegal.”

when Trump suggests doing something unlawful, it’s not necessarily nefarious. More often than not, it’s because he doesn’t understand the limits of federal law. He might order an agency to stop spending money on something he dislikes, not knowing he generally can’t cut off funds Congress has already approved. For instance, Trump has repeatedly tried to stop the flow of aid to countries overseas, complaining we are wasting money that should be spent at home.

In other cases he thought of the funds as bargaining chips, as in the case of money earmarked by Congress to go to Ukraine, and tried to pause the funds for whatever purpose suited him at the moment, perhaps until he got something he wanted in return.

Despite the president’s recurring desire to do so, the law cannot be shaped like Play-Doh and made to say whatever he wants it to say.

“God grant that men of principle be our principal men,” Thomas Jefferson once wrote.

In the history of American democracy, we have had undisciplined presidents. We have had incurious presidents. We have had inexperienced presidents. We have had amoral presidents. Rarely if ever before have we had them all at once. Donald Trump is not like his predecessors, everyone knows that. But his vices are more alarming than amusing.

Cicero gave us a useful guide for measuring a leader’s character. His four-part rubric will sound familiar: (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.”

What is troubling about the president is not that he came into office with so little information about how it runs. It’s that he’s done so little to try to learn more in order to do his job.

Both of President Trump’s predecessors, Bush and Obama, were voracious readers. Trump himself frequently stays up late in the residence, and he often doesn’t start the day in the Oval Office until 10 or 11 a.m. Rather than consume books, he spends his time bingeing on cable news, tweeting, and making phone calls.

The sheer level of intellectual laziness is astounding. I found myself bewildered how anyone could have run a private company on the empty mental tank President Trump relies upon every day to run the government.

All I can tell you is that normal people who spend any time with Donald Trump are uncomfortable by what they witness. He stumbles, slurs, gets confused, is easily irritated, and has trouble synthesizing information, not occasionally but with regularity. Those who would claim otherwise are lying to themselves or to the country.

It should be evident by now that Trump is one of the more offensive public figures in recent times. The president has difficulty showing restraint and lashes out without warning. His behavior is quintessentially unseemly, from crude rhetoric and vulgar jokes to immodest public reactions.

It’s no exaggeration to say we have a commander in chief who is channel-surfing his way through the presidency.

the Republican Party, which once helped propel the civil rights movement, now had as its mouthpiece a man whose words fed racial intolerance.

In the process of bungling border security, Donald Trump has obliterated America’s reputation as a nation of immigrants. This is a deeply Republican, conservative, classical liberal conception—that the United States is a refuge for those seeking a better life.

The bottom line for Republicans is this: The United States can have an open door without having “open borders,” but we cannot preserve the country we love by slamming that door in the faces of those who most aspire to join our nation.

Trade should not be used as a weapon of war in times of peace. It’s a war that everyone loses.

Conservatives dreaming that Donald Trump is our savior need to wake up. Not only is he not a conservative, he represents a long-term threat to the Republican Party and what it purports to stand for.

Our response at such a pivotal moment must be to fortify our position. We should be deepening relationships with allies. We should be fighting forward with our principles. For every step we take backward, adversaries will step forward on the world stage to accomplish their priorities instead of ours.

Historically, our nation’s chief executives have chosen their words carefully when talking about dictatorial foreign leaders to avoid giving them more credibility than they deserve. Trump, by contrast, lavishes them with praise.

We need a comprehensive strategy to counter the Russians, not court them. But Trump is living on another planet, one where he and Putin are companions and where Russia wants to help America be successful.

According to a former top FBI official, Trump at one point rejected information he received regarding a rogue country’s missile capability. He said the Russian president had given him different information, so it didn’t matter what US spy agencies said. “I don’t care. I believe Putin,” the official quoted him as saying.

Willful ignorance is the fairest way to describe the president’s attitude toward our enemies. He sees what he wants to see. If Trump likes a foreign leader, he refuses to accept the danger they might pose or ulterior motives they bring to the table. That’s what makes it so easy for him to offhandedly dismiss detailed US threat assessments about nation-states or urgent alerts from our closest allies.

Why is the president so attracted to autocrats? After a contentious meeting about the president’s engagement with a foreign dictator, a top national security aide offered me his take. “The president sees in these guys what he wishes he had: total power, no term limits, enforced popularity, and the ability to silence critics for good.” He was spot on. It was the simplest explanation.

Trump’s affinity for autocrats means we are flying blind through world affairs. The moral compass in the cockpit, the one that has charted America’s course for decades, is broken. The president lacks a cogent agenda for dealing with these rivals

The president’s attraction to dictators would be less worrisome if it were matched by an equal affinity for our friends. The opposite is true. President Trump frequently alienates America’s most important partners and personally disparages their leaders.

When you bump into former officials in the course of Washington business, they ask what it’s like to operate in this type of environment. I’ll tell you. It’s like showing up at the nursing home at daybreak to find your elderly uncle running pantsless across the courtyard and cursing loudly about the cafeteria food, as worried attendants try to catch him.

President Trump is fundamentally undermining our perceptions of “truth.” He has taken us down a dark, subjectivist rabbit hole. To him, there is no real truth. If people believe something is true, that makes it true.

It’s not accurate to say Donald Trump is a dictator. Commentators who make such claims shouldn’t be taken seriously. However, it’s fair to say the president possesses clear authoritarian tendencies like very few presidents before him.

Although Donald Trump is undoubtedly prone to contemptible behavior, we should not wish upon our nation the crisis of premature presidential expulsion. It might be how the story ends, but we must be reluctant to fire a president in non-electoral ways and should only consider doing so as an absolute last resort.

Trump’s critics would be smart to drop the idea, too. They should keep such fantasies to themselves, lest they further poison our already toxic discourse. In a democracy we don’t overthrow our leaders when they’re underperforming. That’s for third-rate banana republics and police states. The Twenty-fifth Amendment should be reserved for scenarios when the commander in chief is truly unable to discharge his duties, not when we are dissatisfied with his performance.

The Trump administration is an unmitigated catastrophe, and the responsibility rests entirely at his feet, the predictable outcome of assigning organizational leadership to a man of weak morals.

We can drain the swamp if we want by firing Donald Trump and electing a new Congress. I strongly believe the first action will make a difference. But lasting change will require deeper, nationwide self-reflection. It will require us to alter ourselves—to consider who we were, who we are, and who we want to be.

There are two choices. We can either bury our heads in the sand, hoping it gets better by itself. Or we can recognize the situation for what it is and, rather than allow political turmoil to hasten our demise, begin a restoration.