A Warning

by Anonymous

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.

To Stephen, chaos is a deliberate governing strategy.

Well, 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.” In short, it was a version of the cardinal virtues—wisdom, justice, courage, and temperance. His formula is as relevant in today’s fractured political climate as it was during the rockiest days of the Roman Republic, which is why we are going to use it to assess the current president.

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.

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

The lack-of-time argument is dubious. Looking each morning at the president’s daily schedule, any of us could tell you he carves out more than enough time to do what he wants. The demands of the job rarely keep him away from the golf course. 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. In his own words, Trump says he doesn’t need to read to make informed decisions because he acts “with very little knowledge other than the knowledge I [already have], plus the words ‘common sense,’ because I have a lot of common sense and I have a lot of business ability.”

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.

The president flunks Cicero’s “fake news” test badly. The Roman philosopher says it is dishonorable to stumble ignorantly when it comes to the facts and to be deceived. Sadly, Trump has built a reputation on disinformation. Before he was elected, he was a regular booster of Alex Jones, the conspiracy theorist behind the website Infowars. “Your reputation is amazing,” Trump affectionately told Jones in one appearance on his show. This, of course, is the same Alex Jones who suggested that the Sandy Hook elementary school shooting was faked and that the Apollo 11 moon landing never happened.

I can’t think of another elected leader in this country who is so easily lured in by obvious carnival barkers.

The president spreads false claims almost daily. He is the nation’s most prominent re-tweeter of “fake news” while simultaneously being its biggest critic. In fairness, every president gets facts wrong once in a while. The difference is that those presidents seemed to care when they misspoke. They didn’t recite sham information every day as a matter of course without regard for the consequences. Yet after making a demonstrably untrue statement, the president displays zero remorse that he has done so. He’s comfortable being a huckster of half-truths.

The president was insinuating that television networks needed to be investigated and punished for poking fun at him. Thankfully no one was dumb enough to follow up with the Federal Communications Commission to put them on the case.

He regales staff with stories about filing meritless claims in court against other companies in order to coerce them to back down or to get a better deal.

Don’t get me wrong. No one in the Trump White House is a fan of Hillary Clinton, but we started to find the president’s chronic animosity toward her to be a little weird. He has tweeted about Clinton hundreds of times since taking office. He has even flirted with using the powers of his office to investigate and prosecute her, as we will discuss. Electoral defeat is not enough; Donald Trump wants total defeat of his opponents.

An investigation by USA Today found he’d been involved in more than 3,500 lawsuits over the span of three decades, many of which included claims by individuals who said he and his companies failed to pay them. His businesses also received repeated citations from the government for violating the Fair Labor Standards Act and failing to pay overtime or minimum wage.

The president’s surrogates claim he has given away “tens of millions” to charity over his career, yet investigations by journalists have found the cash donations to be far less than he boasts.

Most of Trump’s charitable giving was apparently done by the Trump Foundation. Rather than fund it himself, the businessman reportedly used outside donors to fill the foundation’s coffers, allowing him to write checks with his name on them without diminishing his own wealth. This is not unheard-of. Other personal foundations are boosted by outside donations. But in December 2018, the foundation was forced to dissolve after a state investigation in New York accused it of “a shocking pattern of illegality,” including “functioning as little more than a checkbook to serve Trump’s business and political interests.” In one instance, he used ten thousand dollars in money from his charity to buy a six-foot oil portrait of himself. So much for the spirit of giving.

Many of us who’ve joined his administration recognize he is a vindictive and self-promoting person, one who spends inordinate time attacking others to advance his interests.

Trump is not brave, nor unswayed by the crowd, nor uncommanded by money and pleasure, nor stable through crises. He is a “pretender to courage,” and that should give everyone pause.

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.

How does Trump talk about women? Sex appeal. Beautiful piece of ass. Good shape. Bimbo. Great in bed. A little chubby. Not hot. Crazed. Psycho. Lonely. Fat. Fat ass. Stupid. Nasty woman. Dog. Ugly face. Dogface. Horseface. Disgusting. These are the types of comments he makes. Trump did not spare his opponent—the first female presidential nominee of a major US political party—of his sexism either. “If Hillary Clinton can’t satisfy her husband,” he tweeted in 2015, “what makes her think she can satisfy America?”

Calm leaders are able to let criticism wash over them. President Lincoln claimed to avoid reading personal attacks altogether. When he did encounter a particularly strong critique of his presidency, he would sit at his desk and compose a fiery refutation. After that, he would get up and walk away without sending it. That is not the Trump style. The president takes all criticism personally. He cannot imagine letting it go unanswered. Unlike Lincoln, he does not see temperance as a virtue. He hits “send.”

“Why do people stay?” a close friend asked me at the time. “You all should quit. He’s a mess.” “That’s why,” I responded. “Because he’s a mess.” It was true for a lot of us. We thought we could keep it together. The answer feels more hollow than it used to. Maybe my friend was right. Maybe that was a lost moment, where a rush to the exits would have meant something.

Not long after, as I was walking the State Floor of the White House, I scanned the portraits of American leaders adorning the corridors. One thought started to grip me and never left: Donald Trump does not belong among them. He isn’t a man of great character, or good character. He is a man of none.

A cottage industry has cropped up around the phenomenon of his shifting views. One online entrepreneur created a small business out of it. President Flip Flops. The webstore literally sells sandals with a Trump tweet on the left shoe contradicted by a Trump tweet on the right shoe, including gems such as: his claim that the Electoral College was a “disaster for a democracy”; followed by an online post hailing the Electoral College as “actually genius” after he won the election. His tweet citing an “extremely credible source” with rumors about Barack Obama; followed by a warning to his followers: “Remember, don’t believe ‘sources said’…If they don’t name the sources, the sources don’t exist.” Or his message urging the Obama administration, “DO NOT ATTACK SYRIA” because it would be “VERY FOOLISH”; followed by a tweet praising “our great military” for doing “so well in the Syria attack,” which he ordered.

The brilliant Abigail Adams, one of our earliest First Ladies and a leader in her own right, once said, “I’ve always felt that a person’s intelligence is directly reflected by the number of conflicting points of view he can entertain simultaneously on the same topic.” Donald Trump’s problem is he never lands on a final position. His points of view are in constant conflict and liable to change for no reason whatsoever, and certainly not from thoughtful deliberation.

How can any of us be comfortable with a president having “fake views,” which change by the moment?

he prioritizes convenience, not conviction.

It would be tough for anyone to claim Donald Trump flipped parties on “principle” like Reagan.

Donald Trump became a conservative when it became politically convenient for him. I have no doubt he would have become the raucous rising star of the Democratic Party, too, if that looked like a shorter path to the Oval Office. Either way, he did with his belief system what he did with any Trump product. He outsourced it for low-cost manufacturing to someone else, then slapped his name on it. A handful of hired minions gave him the bare-bones requirements of a “conservative” platform. And he covered it with gaudy gold plating to make it his own.

Conservatives should view this as complete and utter betrayal. Trump promised to do the opposite on federal spending. During the presidential campaign, he said he would eliminate America’s debt during his time in office. That’s right—eliminate it. How he was going to repay trillions in debt during such a short window was never fully explained. But that didn’t matter, because it wasn’t true. He said it to appease worried conservatives and to assure them that he was “one of them,” a budget hawk who wanted to cut spending. More “fake views.” Astoundingly, instead of a mutiny against President Trump, GOP congressmen whistled past the graveyard as they went to cast their votes on his disastrous budget deal, proving yet again that Trump has a Darth Vader chokehold on weak-willed Republicans.

“Why is Barack Obama constantly issuing executive orders that are major power grabs of authority?” That was before Trump himself took office. Now he issues orders at a rate rivaling his Democratic predecessors. In his first three years, Bill Clinton issued 90 executive orders. In that same time period, Barack Obama issued 110. Donald Trump issued 120 before his third year was over.

Time and again, he has put our armed forces in a terrible position by trying to pull the military into political debates or using it to demonstrate his own toughness. This began before he entered office. As a candidate, Trump suggested the military and intelligence agencies embrace torture as a tactic against America’s enemies, vowing, “I would bring back waterboarding. And I would bring back a hell of a lot worse than waterboarding.” Analysts pointed out that such statements are used by terrorists for propaganda, helping them recruit supporters by touting America’s supposed cruelty. It feeds their narrative, putting US forces in danger overseas. Fortunately, the president was persuaded to drop the subject early in his term by the incoming team, who realized Trump’s flip-flopping would impact national defense most of all.

He is more than a minor headache for the Pentagon. He is a blinding migraine.

I have to admit, it’s knee-slappingly hilarious to watch Trump tackle this issue. In late 2015, he said his wall would “be made of hardened concrete…rebar and steel.” At one point in 2017, he proposed that the wall be solar powered to generate clean electricity. A month later, he said that “you have to be able to see through it.” The wall was no longer a concrete slab, but “a steel wall with openings.” Then the wall became “artistically designed steel slats.” Then, in 2018, the president claimed he could have “a steel wall—or it could be a steel fence—but it will be more powerful than any of the concrete walls that we’re talking about.” At the end of 2018 he said “an all concrete Wall was NEVER ABANDONED, as has been reported by the media,” only to tweet less than a week later that “We are now planning a Steel Barrier rather than concrete.” Midway through 2019, he flipped again, touting the “brand-new” “high steel and concrete Wall” that he’d already built and previewed that there was much more to come.

Here’s the truth. Trump has barely built any wall, and his policies have been a thorough failure when it comes to border security. By all accounts, most of what the president has built is replacement of old fences at the border. If there are really hundreds of miles of new wall on the way, as he nervously promises voters, experts say it still won’t solve the problem. Even with a giant concrete wall (or steel fence, or concrete-steel wall-fence) across the entire border, migrants can still come to our border and file for protected status. Then they are let into the United States for years while their cases are reviewed. That is what Republicans begged Trump to address, but instead of using his political capital to fix the broken laws, he fixated on one of his favorite pastimes—a construction project. The result is that the system will remain broken well past his presidency.

“We get these women coming in with like seven children,” he told his listeners, briefly attempting a Hispanic accent. “They are saying, ‘Oh, please help! My husband left me!’ They are useless. They don’t do anything for our country. At least if they came in with a husband we could put him in the fields to pick corn or something.”

Whenever these quotes find their way to the press, a mid-level communications staffer is dispatched to say Trump was joking. I assure you he isn’t.

He has created new barriers to trade, justified by an inverted view of economics that has been discredited for hundreds of years.

Fundamentally, Trump does not understand how trade works.

His favorite weapon in these economic conflicts is the tariff. The president believes adding fees to incoming foreign goods “will bring in FAR MORE wealth to our Country.” We’ve endured years of him spewing this false notion.

Many experts know this is crazy. Why would a president deny Americans the opportunity to pay less for their products? Why would he purposefully make the goods they buy more expensive? 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.

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. He is redefining us to a degree that makes our platform incoherent. Those cheering him on to a second term—with foaming-at-the-mouth excitement that he is “totally owning” the Left—are unknowingly nailing coffins into the GOP, cementing an end to the party as we know it and taking us into inhospitable territory.

We are losing talented professionals every single day because of the president.

The result is that our sprawling government is often run by a skeleton crew of partisans.

The most illustrative example of Trump-maligned government employees is the US intelligence community. These agencies, such as the Central Intelligence Agency and National Security Agency, have some of the most important jobs in America. I wish more Americans could meet these patriots in person to fully grasp their devotion to duty and country. On a day-to-day basis, they are responsible for keeping us safe, going to work in places they cannot discuss to solve problems they must not reveal. Their most stinging defeats are put on public display, while their greatest victories in protecting the American people are celebrated in silence. Many risk their lives—and some give them—without their hard work ever being known. Think about that. It’s one thing to lose your life, but to willingly give up your legacy on top of it is an act of eternal sacrifice. This is the ethos that defines the intelligence community.

He hears what he wants to hear, and disregards what he doesn’t. Intelligence information must comport to his worldview for it to stick. If it doesn’t, it’s “not very good.” As a result, the president of the United States is often ignorant on the most serious national security threats we face and is, therefore, ill-prepared to defend against them. In fact, I’d submit that he’s less informed than he should be on almost every major global threat, from nuclear weapons proliferation to cyber security.

His biggest worry is when they appear in public or before Congress because he knows they will tell the truth. He doesn’t want them sharing information that contradicts his views. On more than one occasion, the president has thought about removing an intelligence chief for offering a nonpartisan, impartial assessment to the American people’s representatives in Congress.

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.

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.”

The unavoidable conclusion is that the president sees himself as above the law, which is a scary point of view for a person who swears before God and the nation to “faithfully execute” it. The perception is evident by his almost mystical fascination with the power of the presidential pardon, which allows him to absolve convicted criminals of guilt. To Donald Trump, these are unlimited “Get Out of Jail Free” cards on a Monopoly board. He has told officials that if they take illegal actions on his behalf, he will pardon them.