INTRODUCTION
Without previously having served in political office Donald trump decided to run for President. He was a businessman and TV personality. His personal level of morality was tolerable by Hollywood culture but several grades below what is usual for an American president. In all my reading on Trump I’ve never come across a discussion of why he wanted to be president. Whatever his motives, he ultimately proved to be uniquely unqualified. He had neither previously held political office, nor been a high ranking general or the head of a well regarded major corporation.
Trump first revealed interest in running for President in 2004. And by 2016 he was committed to the goal of running for the Presidency. From Bob Woodward’s book FEAR: Trump in the White House (1-12), we learn that Trump’s campaign effort was guided by David Bossie and Steve Bannon, right wing conservative republicans.
Early in the 2016 election year, about the same time of the Republican Presidential Debates, republican Senator Mitt Romney gave a prime time televised speech in which he explained why Trump had neither the moral character nor the skills to be president. Romney said Trump’s domestic and foreign policy proposals would lead to: trade wars, inflation, and increased dangers from America’s usual enemies.
Romney pointed out that presidents were role models for citizens and their children; but, Trump’s behavior displayed “bullying, the greed, the showing off, the misogyny, the absurd third grade theatrics.”
What Senator Romney warned about Trump had been visible and continued to be displayed, without credible apologies, in America and around the world. He says he loves America but has been attacking the very foundations of our democracy since 2016.
At the time of Romney’s speech, I thought, along with many others, that Trump’s out-of-bounds behavior would derail his candidacy and that if somehow he was nominated, he would lose in the presidential election. Nope!
Trump legally won! The 2016 election was not unusual. But the “[W]inning candidate is one of the most bizarre figures ever to crash into American politics” (Klein, 2020, xxi). Ezra Klein is the editor at large and cofounder of Vox, the award-winning explanatory news organization.
We voter citizens must not wallow in discouragement and cynicism. We need step up, learn the critical pieces of how politics really works so we don’t fall prey to the deceptions inherent in routine political talking points and behavior in the political arena.
Voters in the primaries chose Donald Trump; those winning results required Republican Primary Electors to choose Trump as the Republican nominee for President. Then during the actual 2016 presidential election, the electors making up the electoral college (in obedience to the voters) gave their electoral votes to Trump. He was elected because the will of the citizen voters was passed—like connections between links a chain-- from voters to state electors. Then, state by state, the candidate with the most electoral votes wins that state. And the candidate with the highest grand total of electoral votes from the states wins the presidential election.
While this is a mind-numbing chain of events, this is how it works. And the point is:
State by state the AMERICAN VOTERS VOTED IN TRUMP for President, kept him for four years, and then voted him out of office. Along the way he was impeached twice and acquitted twice in the polarized Congress. And now he’s back, 30,000+ documented lies later and leading in the race to be the Republican nominee for president (Washington Post,1/21/2021).
A SAMPLING OF ILLUSTRATIONS WHY TRUMP IS UNFIT AS A CANDIDATE TO BE PRESIDENT
The Bulwark ( https://www.thebulwark.com/ ) is the most up-to-date and in-depth online political website I have ever come across. I am both a subscriber and contributor. They provide an important collection of snapshots revealing Trump’s unfitness for public office (Bulwark, 2020).
I recently discovered on line “100 Reasons Trump Is Unfit to Be President,” by Amanda Carpenter at The Bulwark. Here are specifics which together capture some essentials of Trump’s character deficiencies.
https://www.thebulwark.com/100-reasons-trump-is-unfit-to-be-president/
Here are a few of the 100 along with their numbers in the Bulwark's list:
· Businessman Trump: He brags about being a self-made billionaire but he inherited millions from his father (3). He has reported losses of $1.17 billion and has declared bankruptcies of his various businesses six times (1,4).
· Trump Often Makes Unnecessary, Cruel Comments: For example, “Said Vietnam POW John McCain is “not a war hero” and “I like people who weren’t captured” (10). And about immigrants, “Why do we want all these people from shithole countries coming here” (33).
· Often Makes Comments Which Are Known To Incite Violence Or Other Misbehavior: For example said, “Police should not protect suspects’ heads when loading them into squad cars” (12).
· Retaliates With Insults such as when he claimed that a judge was “unfit to rule on a lawsuit filed by Trump University students ‘because he’s a Mexican.’ However, that judge was an American citizen born in Indiana. Trump settled the lawsuit for $25 million.” (66).
· Solicits And Demands Loyalty Inappropriately: For example, he did this with James Comey, FBI Director (which is supposed to be strictly impartial) because Comey wouldn’t commit complete loyalty to him (23). Michael Cohen in his Trump impeachment testimony said Trump was like a mob boss who wanted complete loyalty and would hint at desired criminal actions and could later plead innocence.
· Fires Staff Who Don’t Support His Deceitful Acts: Trump fired a U.S. Attorney who had indicted a foreign firm and opened an inquiry into Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani. (40)
· Trump Has Often Been Overly Friendly With Our Traditional Enemies: Sided with Putin and rejected our own intelligence findings of Russian interference in the 2016 election (44, 49).
HAS TRUMP DAMAGED AMERICAN DEMOCRACY?
Trump’s National Security Advisor in 2019 was John Bolton. In his book The Room Where It Happened, Bolton wrote, “Throughout my West Wing tenure, Trump wanted to do what he wanted to do, based on what he knew and what he saw as his own best personal interests” (446). Bolton describes his observations of Trump administration staff attempting to operate on the basis of multiple conspiracy theories about Ukraine by which they could blame Joe Biden and Ukraine for the election interference by Russia. Bolton, a highly experienced, brilliant ambassador, found that the Trump-Giuliani conspiracy theories were particularly confusing and something he didn’t want any part of. Bolton chose to resign September 10, 2019. Shortly thereafter the whole Trump administration Ukraine plot blew up and the misbehavior of the Trump administration gradually became clear from the straight-forward testimony, under oath testimony of the career ambassadors during the impeachment.
Bolton observed that early on in the Trump administration, the “adults had served Trump so poorly, he second-guessed people’s motives, saw conspiracies behind rocks, and remained stunningly uninformed on how to run the White House, let alone the huge federal government” (2). Moreover, Bolton wrote, “In the early visits to the West Wing, the differences between this presidency and previous ones I had served were stunning.” Bolton found that Trump didn’t understand the fundamentals of how the government as an organization worked.
The 2018 book How Democracies Die, by Levitsky and Ziblatt, contains a discussion of the German political scientist Juan Linz’s work studying European authoritarianism and the breakdown of democratic regimes.
In How Democracies Die the authors show and discuss their rating scale of warning signs “[T]hat can help us know an authoritarian when we see one.”
There are behavioral rating signs of authoritarianism when a politician does any of the following:
Rejects, in words or action, the democratic rules of the game.
Denies the legitimacy of opponents.
Tolerates or encourages violence.
Shows willingness to curtail civil liberties of opponents, even the media.
At the time when the book was written, Levitsky and Ziblatt wrote Trump showed one trait of criteria #1. He showed one trait of criteria #2. He showed two traits of criteria #3. And, he showed four traits of criteria #4 (Levitsky and Ziblatt, 2018).
Now, in July of 2023 the case can be made that Trump meets almost all of the 15 criteria in the whole rating scale. Since Trump showed up at the 2016 presidential debates, he has broken all the rules without apology or signs of empathy for those he has mocked, disrupted, lied about and threatened. This is my opinion after having observed his behavior during the Republican presidential debates; and what I have observed has been observed and documented by reputable news organizations. As noted below, both Bolton and Woodward have in their books written detail about Trump’s misbehavior.
Former ambassador John Bolton has said that Donald Trump’s tendencies are “extraordinarily dangerous to the United States” (1:39 to 1:44 and 2:02 to 2:15). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LYMLOzqSN6Q
HEARING FROM THE EXPERTS FROM INSIDE TRUMP’S WHITE HOUSE
Bob Woodward (2018) is the author of 19 books on government, our presidents, and other vital topics. His book FEAR (Woodward, 2018) gives the reader a detailed account of the early years of the Trump White House. It is based on hundreds of hours of interviews with insiders and contains hundreds of direct quotations of who said what to whom—based on tape recordings in most instances. Woodward was able to interview most of the principal staff. But Trump declined to be interviewed for the book.
The Trump administration was filled with chaos, bickering amongst staff, poor communication, staff finding it impossible to cope with Trump, and resignations by many of the very qualified cabinet officers.
· Trump was obsessed with many old-fashioned ideas in economics, trade, management.
· Despite his cabinet trying to bring him up to date, he showed a lack of interest and repeatedly went back to his own outdated or simply wrong opinions.
· Trump consumed lots of print and TV news early in the day and usually came to work about eleven am. To observers in the White House it seemed that Trump was most interested in news about himself.
· He did not want the typical daily intelligence briefings, so his were only twice weekly—during which he would do most of the talking on topics often irrelevant to intelligence.
Reince Priebus, Chief of Staff described a staff meeting (Woodward,225-226):
· They had a “fundamental problem with goal setting.”
· “The distrust in the room had been thick and corrosive.”
· “This was what craziness was like, Priebus concluded.”
· “It made no sense, Priebus realized, unless you understand the way Trump made decisions. The president has zero psychological ability to recognize empathy or pity in any way’” (235).
A senior White House official who spoke with staff shortly after the meeting reported that,
“The president proceeded to lecture and insult the entire group about how they didn’t know anything when it came to defense or national security. It seems clear that many of the president’s senior advisers, especially those in the national security realm, are extremely concerned with his erratic nature, his relative ignorance, his inability to learn as well as what they consider his dangerous views.”
Finally, I will offer to you the perspective on Trump and the Trump Administration by Elijah Cummings. In his posthumously published book titled, We’re Better Than This: My Fight For The Future Of Our Democracy he wrote:
“I have been in Congress for two decades and I have seen partisan battles. I’ve seen bitter fights. Ugly words. But had never, never in twelve terms in the House of Representative seen this kids of unapologetic, unrepentant, stonewalled, refusal to see, hear, speak, or deal with, or even acknowledge reality” (Cummings, 2020, 137).
Elijah Cummings was the Chairman of the House Oversight and Reform Committee and in that role chaired the impeachment investigation of Trump. Cummings was a Phi Beta Kappa Howard University graduate and then graduated from the University of Maryland School of Law. He died in 2019.
CONCLUSION
This 2000 word blog is a history of Trump’s well-documented character defects which make him unfit as a candidate for the presidency. I am in full agreement with various politicians who share their opinions of his unfitness to be president and that he is dangerous to our democracy. It is clear from Trump’s attitudes and behavior that he is unrepentant and has never deviated from his narcissistic selfishness.
My opinion, based on many substantial sources is that he has been and will continue to be dangerous to America. There is not space in this blog to list out the serious indictments and law suits he faces.
There are certainly other ethical, capable and experienced candidates for president. But Trump continues to be the most popular in the polls.
I strongly believe we need to investigate what’s wrong with a large percentage of American voters. . . and the talking heads. . . and the tsunami of misinformation and politicians brazenly floating their self-serving conspiracy theories. There are very serious systemic problems fueling America’s political ill health.
WORKS CITED
Bolton, John. The Room Where It Happened: A White House Memoir. Simon & Schuster, 2020.
Bolton, John. “Trump Has Damaged Us.” Watch Bolton’s interview at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LYMLOzqSN6Q
Carpenter, Amanda. ”A Hundred Reasons Trump Is Unit to Be President.” https://www.thebulwark.com/100-reasons-trump-is-unfit-to-be-president/. The Bulwark, 2020.
Cummings, Elijah. We’re Better Than This. HarperCollins, 2020.
Klein, Ezra. Why We’re Polarized. Avid Reader Press, 2020.
Levitsky, Steven, and Ziblatt, Daniel. How Democracies Die, 2018.
Romney, Mitt. “Trump Is A Phony, A Fraud.” Watch Romney’s full speech at: https://www.youtube.com September, 2016.
“Trump’s False Or Misleading Claims Total 30573 Over Four Years.” Find this at www.washingtonpost.com, 1/24/2021.
Woodward, Bob. FEAR: Trump in the White House. Simon & Schuster, 2018.
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