What Makes a President Unfit for the Office?

Last Monday, Senator Elizabeth Warren declared her candidacy for the presidency, and Donald Trump responded in a characteristically crude and vulgar manner. During a Fox interview he was asked about running against her and he responded, “We’ll see how she does. I wish her well, I hope she does well, I’d love to run against her.” Then, when asked if he thought she could beat him, Trump answered, “Well, that I don’t know. You’d have to ask her psychiatrist.”

 I wonder if Senator Warren might want to launch her candidacy by saying something like this: “Won’t it be nice when the White House is no longer occupied by a childish vulgarian?”

 It’s clear that the presidency hasn’t changed Trump. He’s still childish and still as vulgar as ever. He entered the Oval Office by indulging in infantile name-calling and schoolyard taunts, and now, two years later, he still prefers infantile blather to intelligent debate. 

 Some people would say his crude and vulgar ways make him unfit for the presidency, and I would agree with these people. But I would not agree that his adolescent mindset is his greatest flaw. (And, by the way, I don’t mean to insult adolescents in general here, so apologies to those of them who do not habitually sink to the level of Donald Trump in their discourse.)

 So, what is Trump’s greatest flaw? For me it’s his contempt for democracy.

 And, truth be told, identifying Trump’s greatest flaw, the one that, above all, makes him unfit to be president, is not that easy. There is so much to consider. You have his crookedness, his pathological lying, his preposterous, self-aggrandizing narcissism, his profound ignorance of American history and government, and his grotesque and disgusting bigotry and misogyny. Any one of these make him unqualified to be president; but the one that gives me the greatest pause is the way he seems to have no interest in promoting or defending democracy.

 The essence of democracy is justice; ideally, a democratic society relies on its institutions to determine who deserves what and makes it possible for every voice to be heard as rewards and punishments are meted out. Of course, we are not and have never been a perfectly democratic society. You could even say that since the 1980s we have grown gradually less democratic as conservative and libertarian politicians have handed over more and more power to the wealthy. But we are still largely democratic, and, unlike Donald Trump, I believe it is worthwhile to carry on the struggle to be more so.

 Trump wants people to be rewarded not in return for what they have to offer society, but on the basis of how much they support or suck up to him. If you are on his side, you are the best. If you criticize him, you are failing, talentless, fake, crooked, clueless or burdened with some other terrible trait that he will try to capture in a puerile nickname.

 One of his favorite targets is the free press. Most Americans believe in the importance of an independent press. But Trump calls media sources that don’t suck up to him (as Fox News routinely does) fake and, in some cases, he speculates about possibly using the law to silence media critics. Recently he tweeted that Saturday Night Live was a “Democrat spin machine” and said its satirical comedy should be tested in court, suggesting it “can’t be legal.” And, as is well known, he routinely denigrates The Washington Post and other non-suck-up news sources, even going so far as to try to kick CNN reporter Jim Acosta permanently out of the White House. And he infamously referred to the media as the enemy of the people.

 It isn’t just the independent media Trump despises. Whenever a court decision goes against him, he is likely to attack the courts or the specific judge making the unwelcome decision. And his newly appointed Acting Attorney General has pointedly argued that the Judicial Branch of our federal government is inferior to the Executive and Legislative Branches.

 No, that is not what the Constitution says.

 One of Trump’s most disturbing undemocratic tendencies is his habit of insulting and otherwise alienating our most crucial allies. He seems to have no awareness of just how vital the alliance of democracies has been in stabilizing the international order and promoting peace and the prosperity that comes with free trade.

 Worst of all is his admiration for international thugs and tyrants like Kim Jong Un (“He wrote beautiful letters and we fell in love” says Trump), Saudi Arabia’s Mohammad Bin Salman (the man behind the murder of Washington Post reporter Jamal Khashoggi), and, of course, Vladimir Putin.

 What is behind Trump’s endless series of compliments for Vladimir Putin, the thuggish Russian dictator who routinely murders his critics and whose heavy-handed interference in our 2016 and 2018 elections has been proven by our intelligence agencies? Trump’s response to Putin's attack on American democracy has been to flatter and kowtow to the Russian tyrant. For starters, he makes it a point to call Putin and congratulate him on his electoral victory last year (a victory that was leveraged by Putin’s control of the Russian press and his assassination of rivals). On top of this, Trump regularly dismisses what our own CIA and other intelligence agencies have established about Russia’s malevolent interference in our elections and accepts Putin’s word when this world-class scoundrel and liar (I mean Putin here, not Trump) claims to be innocent: “I believe that President Putin really feels, and he feels strongly, that he did not meddle in our election,” says Trump.

 Good God. I do not believe we have ever had a president more contemptuous of democracy or of the American institutions that make our democracy possible than Donald Trump. And I’m old enough to remember the villainy of the Nixon White House.

 So, feel free to make your own argument about what is the one quality that makes Trump most unfit to be president. Yes, there is his childish crudeness, his bigotry, his misogyny, his pathological lying, his narcissism, his ignorance and his all-around corruption, but for my money, his most damning failure is his failure to respect and defend democracy.

 

 The Goddess of Democracy - Statue at the University of British Columbia - based on the original 民主女神constructed in 1989 by China's pro-democracy protestors

What's That Smell?

On November 28, 2016, shortly after that year’s disastrous election, I wrote that those who believed Donald Trump could be transmogrified into an honest and worthy public servant by the dignity of the Oval Office were surely mistaken. I predicted that “our beloved White House, this architectural emblem of American democracy, this former residence of Abraham Lincoln, this site where Franklin Roosevelt hosted Winston Churchill as they worked out their strategy for victory in World War II, this elegant mansion -- will, for the next few years, be filled with a skunkish stink.”

And all I can say now is “Pee-yoo!”

I expected that Trump presidency to be Horrible, Horrible, Horrible. But it turns out I underestimated its Horribleness. Not even I thought Trump was such a pathetic jerk that he would rob from his so-called “charity” to pay his son’s seven-dollar Boy Scout dues. Good God. A small token gesture with a powerfully putrid implication.

So, is American democracy doomed because of Trump? Certainly, many of our European allies have worries along those lines, as was revealed this week by the hacked emails of EU diplomats. Among their concerns is Trump’s negative attitude toward Europe’s democracies (but not toward Putin!), an attitude which “had created a lot of insecurity.”

But maybe our democracy will survive Trump after all. I say this because of the comments of Judge Emmet Sullivan in what was supposed to be Michael Flynn’s sentencing hearing yesterday. Though Fox News hosts were drooling all day Monday over the possibility that the Reagan-appointed judge would toss out the charges against Flynn or otherwise throw shade on Robert Mueller, nothing of the sort happened. Instead Judge Sullivan spent almost two hours berating Flynn for the lack of patriotism and the tawdry character that his actions revealed. General Flynn served on the Trump election team – he was the one who led the “Lock her up!” chants against Clinton at the GOP convention – and later was appointed by Donald Trump as the National Security Advisor. Yes, this dishonest, self-serving man is the individual Trump appointed to oversee our national security, mainly, it seems, because the general hated Hillary Clinton and openly admired Donald Trump

Now that every organization associated with Trump is under investigation, it is heartening to know that there are people like Judge Sullivan who believe our democracy and its key institutions are worth preserving. Certainly, the people running Fox News don’t believe this and neither do Mitch McConnell and other members of the Republican leadership. They know Trump is a crook, but he’s a crook that can benefit them, so he gets a pass. 

My friend Jonathan put it thus in a recent email:

“As for the Republicans in Congress and for those in his administration. They are like hordes of great blood filled deer ticks on an aging moose. They are getting what they need from their host — tax cuts, deregulation, judges, lower immigration — and are just along for the ride. They will hop off when the moose falls and wait for the next large ungulate to come along.”

Well said, Jonathan: cogent, vivid, and true.

So the stench of corruption wafts from the White House to the GOP leadership and throughout the offices of the Fox “News” corporation. But, the good news is that if we can continue to count on key officials who believe in our democracy and the rule of law, officials like Robert Mueller and Judge Sullivan, our democracy should survive. In that case, maybe we will be all right after all.

Inshallah.

                              Judge Emmet G. Sullivan

Making America Grate Again

Donald Trump is making America grate again - that is, grate on the nerves of our longstanding friends and allies. He did this recently when he declined to attend a solemn Armistice Day memorial ceremony because of rain, and shortly thereafter sat grimly while France’s President Macron attempted to educate him on the stupidity and bigotry embodied in the concept of “nationalism.”

Here’s what Winston Churchill’s grandson, Sir Nicholas Soames, tweeted after Trump called off his participation in the ceremony: “They died with their face to the foe and that pathetic inadequate @realDonaldTrump couldn’t even defy the weather to pay his respects to The Fallen #hesnotfittorepresenthisgreatcountry”

But let’s not dwell on the crudeness, stupidity and selfishness of the orange and white nationalist now occupying the Oval Office. I’d rather talk about World War I, which ended 100 years ago today and so brought about the birth of Armistice Day.

In The Guns of August, Barbara Tuchman quoted a conversation between two Germans about how the war started: “How did it all happen?” one asked. “Ah,” the other replied, “if only one knew.”

How it all started was through an understanding of national interests among the dominant European powers that took for granted the idea that each country was in the game for its own interest and nobody else’s. A kind of suspicious, trigger-happy nationalism was the order of the day, where power politics were seen as a zero-sum game. If Germany grew strong, France would be weak. Slavic independence was a threat to Austria’s influence, and so on. In this Hobbesian “every country for itself” environment, all that was needed to launch a general conflagration was the assassination of a prominent figure. On July 28, 1914, a Serb nationalist named Gavrilo Princip, provided just such a catalyst for war when he murdered Austria’s Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife.

Princip had reason to be angry at Austria-Hungary which had been pursuing its own nationalistic interests by bullying the Balkan Slavs. Princip’s desire to curtail Austria’s domination of the southern Slavs was justified; his methods were not. Once he had committed his bloody deed, Austria mobilized against Serbia, Russia against Austria, Germany against Russia and then Britain and France against Germany. There you have it: nationalism in the raw. Seventeen million deaths later, on November 11, 1918, an exhausted Germany signed an armistice with the western allies bringing the carnage to an end.

The Hobbesian idea that we are programmed to engage in a “war of all against all” is, I believe, a misleading simplification of human nature. But it was one of the ideological foundations of European nationalism in 1914. It was perhaps more characteristic of Europe’s leaders than of its ordinary citizens. Kaiser Wilhelm may have resented the rising power of Czar Nicholas’s Russia, and France’s President Poincaré may have feared Kaiser Wilhelm’s Germany, but the attitudes of the men who were drafted and sent to war were more complex than these nationalist hostilities imply.

This was evident in December 1914 during the Christmas truce. Peace emerged spontaneously on the western front during this truce as the men on the front lines – who by then had been killing each other relentlessly for four months – began to hear the familiar tunes of Christmas Carols being sung by their “enemies” in neighboring trenches. Different units began to serenade each other across no man’s land and before long, men were getting out of their trenches and walking over to meet with their adversaries to chat and exchange cigarettes and other trifling gifts. Eventually soccer matches were organized and German, British, and French soldiers threw themselves into harmless competitive scrimmages against each other. One has to wonder (at least I do) if, during that Christmas week of 1914, the men at the front had been offered the opportunity to vote on whether to continue the war or not, they might have overwhelmingly voted to put away their weapons and go home. This was not to be, of course, since the Kaisers, presidents, and prime ministers of the warring powers would not have it.

What the spontaneous Christmas truce of 1914 says to me is that philosopher Hobbes’ idea that a general war of all against all is a primary driving force underlying our very beings is mistaken, or, at the very least, an oversimplification. Violent confrontation can, at times, be presented by national leaders as an appealing program of action, but more often it is in our natures to interact in less destructive and more empathetic ways. So why don’t we act on these more positive impulses all the time? Well, obviously, one reason is that unscrupulous or ignorant political leaders succeed in pumping up selfish hatreds in the form of nationalism.

British and German troops mingle and chat during the 1914 Christmas Truce (Photo from Wikipedia)