A Warning

by Anonymous

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?

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.

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.

Intelligence is one of those qualities that, if you insist you have it, you probably don’t. Nonetheless, Trump is known to interrupt briefings with assertions along the lines of, “Yeah, I get it. I’m pretty smart, okay?”

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

On taxes: “Nobody knows more about taxes than I do.”

On the US government: “Nobody knows the system better than I do.”

On the contrary, I’ve seen the president fall flat on his face when trying to speak intelligently about most of these topics. You can see why behind closed doors his own top officials deride him as an “idiot” and a “moron” with the understanding of a “fifth or sixth grader.” Folks have been forced to publicly deny those specific quotes, usually with non-denial denials. These are the tamest descriptions used internally to express exasperation with the commander in chief. People normally tack a string of expletives onto the front and back ends of their assessments.

Trump defenders will be tempted to write these off as the musings of Never-Trumpers, but that is not the case. We are talking about people who came into office committed to serving the commander and carrying out the mission. I am not qualified to diagnose the president’s mental acuity. 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.

One of his favorite sources for news analysis is Lou Dobbs, a once-respected Fox host whose late-night show is now riddled with conspiracy theories and wild speculation about current events. The president goes to bed with Lou’s ideas floating in his mind, whether it’s conjecture about liberal billionaire George Soros or ideas for new Justice Department investigations. We know this because he regularly brings Lou’s ideas into the Oval Office the next morning, demanding they be implemented the way Lou said they should be. I can’t think of another elected leader in this country who is so easily lured in by obvious carnival barkers.

We can tell when Trump is preparing to ask his lawyers to do something unethical or foolish because that’s when he starts scanning the room for note takers.

“Are you fucking taking notes?” Trump continued, glaring.

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.

Our enemies and adversaries recognize the president is a simplistic pushover. They are unmoved by his bellicose Twitter threats because they know he can be played. President Trump is easily swayed by their rhetoric. We can all see it. He is visibly moved by flattery. He folds in negotiations, and he is willing to give up the farm for something that merely looks like a good deal, whether it is or not. They believe he is weak, and they take advantage of him. When they cannot, they simply ignore him.

Summaries of presidential phone calls with foreign leaders are typically written up afterward and distributed within the White House and to other officials with the appropriate clearances. This is standard practice. The transcripts help a president’s lieutenants to stay in sync with their boss when engaging the same countries. After details leaked from Trump’s early calls, the summaries were put on lockdown. The distribution was limited mostly for security reasons, but also because the content was so routinely and so remarkably embarrassing.

The words of America’s chief executives are captured after every administration, bound into volumes known as Public Papers of the Presidents. The compilations become the official record of each leader’s writings and speeches, published after they leave office. When I walk into the West Wing of the White House, the Papers are one of the first sights that catch my eye, displayed inside an ornate bookcase directly inside the official entrance. The volumes contain the words that shaped our nation and shook the world, reverberating through history.

Future historians will need only to throw a dart at the calendar to find the vitriol. Let’s say April 1, 2018. That week his Papers will record that the president blasted ABC News, CBS, CNN, MSNBC, NBC, and the Washington Post (all individually) as “fake news”; blamed online retailer Amazon for stores closing “all over the country”; ridiculed the “money-losing” US Postal Service; mocked former US trade negotiators as “foolish, or incompetent”; denounced Mexico on immigration and threatened to cut off their “cash cow, NAFTA”; lamented his own Justice Department and FBI as “an embarrassment to our country”; and rounded it off by deriding his predecessor as “Cheatin’ Obama.”

That “April Fools’” week was not special for any reason. It was like every week. The overall volume of the president’s sensationalist rhetoric is astounding, and it will all be archived for posterity, showing Donald Trump to be the least articulate president of all time. It’s not just that his style of communicating is rambling or contentious. It’s that he’s laid waste to public decency. During the presidential debates, Trump told us not to elect Hillary Clinton—“Such a nasty woman,” he said of her. Well, he got it his way, and instead we ended up with a nasty man.

Fact-checking is an important function in any White House. Before draft remarks ever hit the paper, ideas are discussed in staff meetings and vetted. Perhaps it’s a speech about space travel. A data call goes out to different offices and agencies looking for facts to build around a core narrative. Then a speechwriter takes a first pass. It gets farmed out to policy experts to make sure it’s consistent with administration policy. A second draft is made before it’s passed to an internal fact-checker to independently confirm each detail. Then aides read it again, including maybe the chief of staff, before it goes to the president or vice president for final review.

Earlier, we touched briefly upon President Trump’s tenuous relationship with the truth. He makes outlandish claims, is drawn to conspiracy theories, and regularly spreads half-truths and demonstrably false information. That was not news to anyone when he joined the presidential race. Trump has been prone to misstatements for as long as he’s been in the public eye. His family members laugh it off as harmless. Everyone knows it’s his “style,” they say, so what’s the big deal? When it’s bad facts about the solar system, they’re right. It’s harmless and even comical. But it’s worse when it’s a disproven claim that “millions” of people voted illegally in a national election.

His appointees have the humiliating chore of defending him when he’s wrong. If he says something false, he asks us to spin it closer to the truth. Advisors try to avoid admitting Trump was “wrong,” and hilariously, this creates a second round of misleading statements, as aides create new lies about the president’s old lies in order to bring them more in line with the facts. The ripple effect of excuses actually distorts reality. Because it’s too confusing to follow, it’s easier for people to either accept what the president said in the first place, or not. In the meantime, the truth lies unconscious and bleeding in a ditch along the side of the road.

a 2019 survey found Republicans and Democrats are further apart than ever on the issues they say should be the government’s top priorities. The most recent study found “there is virtually no common ground in the priorities that rise to the top of the lists” between the two sides. Democratic respondents said our nation’s biggest challenges were health care, education, the environment, Medicare, and poverty. Republicans said they were terrorism, the economy, Social Security, immigration, and the military. It’s the least amount of crossover the Pew Research Center has found since it began tracking these metrics more than two decades ago. Trump’s rhetoric reinforces these divisions.

Those of you tempted to vote to reelect Donald Trump, despite the scandals and despite credible evidence of wrongdoing, might want to consider what could happen when that crisis comes. Do we want to keep our nuclear arsenal, and our nation’s military, under the stewardship of a man who ignores intelligence briefings, who puts his self-interest ahead of the country’s needs during international engagements, who enjoys the company of foreign thugs, who our enemies think is a fool they can manipulate, who has shunned our friends, whose credibility has been shattered, and who our national security leaders no longer trust? Consider it.

we are getting the presidency we deserve and the Congress we deserve. Is it not obvious that elected leaders are mimicking our behavior? Their snarky attacks and Twitter jabs sound a lot like the text messages we send, the comments we make below news articles, and the condescending memes we post to Facebook because it’s easier to fire rounds from behind a digital wall than hash out problems face-to-face. It’s no wonder people think Washington is broken. We are broken.