I’ve been forced to ask myself this question in recent months because what I have assumed should be too glaringly obvious to require explanation is clearly not obvious to about 42 percent of my fellow citizens. That’s the percentage who, according to this week’s polls, plan to vote for Trump’s re-election. Because there’s such a close margin between Donald Trump and Joe Biden, we could easily be facing the dire prospect of Trump’s remaining in office for an undetermined number of years, as he suggested during his acceptance speech at the RNC, when he cajoled the faithful into chanting “12 more years!”
When Barack Obama’s supporters have suggested in jest that they’d like to have him in the White House for another four years, he has immediately flashed his big, warm smile and responded that he couldn’t consider such an idea for two reasons: “The constitution and Michelle Obama.” His lighthearted reference to his wife’s distaste for politics is an aside to the real reason: the constitution limits the number of years one person can serve as president, and Barack Obama respects and honors our founding document. Donald Trump possesses no such qualms or integrity, and it’s doubtful he’s ever read the constitution.
Trump’s continued support is insured by those who really would vote for him even if he shot someone on Fifth Avenue as he famously bragged; but for those willing to see fact and reason, it’s important to sort out just what it is about this man that makes him different from the other 43 men who have held the office of President of the United States. (Remember, Grover Cleveland is counted twice in the number 45 because he served two non-consecutive terms.)
The other 43 men trusted with our highest office were not exactly saints, and they even share a few characteristics with the current POTUS. Trump’s unfitness for office has nothing to do with his odd orange skin tone, his ridiculous-looking combover, his obesity, or his taste for fast food. And many of us have probably spent too much time criticizing his appearance, which is a convenient if unintentional distraction from his real disqualifiers.
The problem with Trump is not even the fact that he’s been divorced and remarried. Ronald Reagan was also divorced and shared the White House with his second wife. The problem with Trump is not that he has had children with more than one wife. The highly revered Thomas Jefferson had six children with his wife Martha Wayles Jefferson and six with his slave Sally Hemings.
What makes Trump different from other presidents is not even his womanizing and genital grabbing. I’m not saying those are admirable or presidential characteristics, just that he’s not the only president of whom those things can be truthfully said. Bill Clinton and John Kennedy were the two most promiscuous, at least so far as we know, members of the presidential hall of shame. However, they were not alone in having wandering eyes. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, most often elected president in history, in addition to his long-time mistress Lucy Mercer, is rumored to have had at least four other mistresses. George Washington, the “Father of Our Country,” is also alleged to be the father of a few children born to his slave named Venus. Historical records suggest at least ten other presidents had sex scandals, so we’ll have to look beyond philandering to define what makes Donald Trump unique among presidents.
Twelve of the 44 men who have served in the office of POTUS were slave owners during their lifetimes, eight of those twelve held slaves during their tenure in office, and four of the twelve are alleged to have had sexual relationships with at least one of their slaves. Not exactly moral high ground.
The problem with Trump is also not Melania’s accent, the slightly creepy look in her eyes, her strange/offensive wardrobe choices, whether his son was high when giving his convention speech, whether he has an inappropriate relationship with his daughter, what his toilets are made of, how long his ties are, the shape of his mouth, or even his misspellings.
The occasional scandal, unpopular decision, misjudgment–none of those is unique to any one president. Presidents are human beings first, chief executives second; so they have all erred more than once. Why, then, is it that we can more or less forgive past presidents for their human frailty but see the prospect of Donald Trump’s re-election as the apocalypse of democracy and life in this country as we know it?
I’ve boiled down what’s really wrong with Donald Trump to five factors which I think we’d all do well to focus on instead of his orange color, his weird hairdo, his untoned body, and his sexual promiscuity. Donald Trump’s utter unfitness for the presidency is based on his lack of preparation, his lack of personal integrity, his infantile deportment, his malignant narcissism, and his cult following. On those five criteria, he has no parallel in our country’s history and I pray not in our country’s future.
The constitution’s skimpy job description for the highest office is either a misdemeanor on the part of our founders or evidence that they perhaps gave future generations far too much credit for using good judgment. Their brief statement includes a mere three qualifications: at least 35 years old, natural-born citizen, and in residence for at least 14 years. There’s no other job in the world for which the requirements are so broad or so low. Every job posting, from street sweeper to CEO, includes specific education, skills, and experience, without which no one need apply. Until 2016, however, in spite of our constitution’s lack of specifics, United States citizens had done a fairly decent job of making up the description as we went along–some years better than others.
Then came 2016, when a failed businessman with six bankruptcies within 18 years, a reality-TV star, and a New York tabloid sensation, with no government or military experience, announced he’d like to be president. Immediately, one of our major political parties chose to sponsor him and the fans started going wild. Donald Trump possesses not one of the assumed job qualifications for the office of POTUS, yet not only did the GOP choose to back him as their party’s candidate once but they have fiercely defended him through almost four years of scandals, mismanagement, and general ineptitude; and they are enthusiastically allowing him to carry their banner a second time.
Hiring a person so devoid of qualification to be the leader of our country and the free world is tantamount to hiring me to teach mathematics, and trust me, no one would do that–even though I am well qualified to teach English, as I did for 40+ years. We all have a skill set; and being a uniter, representing our country well on the world stage, making careful judgments, listening to skilled advisers (or picking the skilled advisers in the first place), caring for all people, keeping peace and order, and working cooperatively with the other two branches of government are simply not in Trump’s golf bag.
His inability and reluctance to read are a direct threat to our national security and standing in the world. Michelle Obama wrote in her book Becoming that her husband would stay up late after the family had gone to bed, poring through his classified briefings. Trump doesn’t read his briefings at all but spends hours every day watching Fox News and making decisions based on what he hears and the advice he receives through phone calls with his favorite anchors. Even if he chose a more reliable news outlet, that’s still not the way presidents should get the information on which they govern our country. His illiteracy endangers us all. He has access to the most highly classified intelligence in the world, but he doesn’t want to read it. He’d rather check our what Sean Hannity, Tucker Carlson, and Steve Doocy are saying on Fox.
In addition to Trump’s own lack of qualifications for the job, he has filled government posts with people just as unprepared and unqualified as he is. Looking at you, Jared and Ivanka. Beyond his nepotistic appointment of inept family members, though, his cabinet is filled with the likes of Ben Carson and Mike Pompeo, who have no previous knowledge or experience to recommend them for the posts they fill. Since the sole criterion for appointment is loyalty to Trump, he has surrounded himself with unknowledgeable sycophants and has left many government agencies permanently in the hands of “acting” directors.
Second among the five attributes that set Trump apart from his 43 predecessors is his lack of integrity. As of July 13, 2020, the Washington Post lie counter had him at 20,000 easily disprovable statements. Imagine what the pandemic period and the RNC have added to that number! Bill Clinton was impeached for telling just one lie, and that about a highly personal matter which did not directly affect our national security. When confronted with Trump’s average of 12 lies every day, his party’s response is either “Meh” or “fake news.”
Although a number of other presidents are known to have had extra-marital affairs, I believe Trump is the only one we know of who paid his lovers to keep silent so as not to hurt his chances for election. He has consistently refused to release pertinent financial information, though doing so has been the precedent for several decades, and his secrecy raises legitimate questions about what he’s hiding. His record of business dealings reveals deep ethics issues, and his failure to fully divest himself from his businesses and his use of the presidency to enhance his business interests are out-in-the-open ethics violations which have been condoned by his party.
His known associates raise further questions about his personal ethics; to date, eight Trump associates have been found guilty of crimes and some are serving prison terms. I don’t know about you, but I can’t think of even one felon in my personal circle of friends and close associates. Would you be friends with someone who has close ties to eight felons, plus a number of others under investigation? I know of no other president who had such questionable characters in his contact book.
Trump’s unfitness and childishness have so diminished our country’s standing in the world that we are now the laughing stock or object of pity among many who have published their sentiments. In fact, we no longer hold the distinction “Leader of the Free World.” That title currently goes to Angela Merkel, Germany’s Chancellor.
The third characteristic that places Trump in a category of one, when compared with past presidents, is his infantile deportment, examples of which would fill an encyclopedia. His name calling, his childish attacks on reporters, and his puerile tweets have turned this country into an object of ridicule. No other president has publicly made a statement like this one about Portland’s Mayor Ted Wheeler: “The big backlash going on in Portland cannot be unexpected after 95 days of watching and incompetent Mayor admit that he has no idea what he is doing. The people of Portland won’t put up with no safety any longer. The Mayor is a FOOL. Bring in the National Guard!” Ignoring the fact that he misspelled the simple word “an,” he is the only president I’ve ever known to publicly attack a city’s leader in such immature fashion.
Any of our real presidents would have met with advisers, determined the best course of action, and then implemented that plan. When a city has been embroiled in civil unrest for months on end, the last thing the mayor needs is the president’s attacking him and calling him names. He needs support from the federal government and should be able to rely on the government’s back-up. If Trump had done nothing else wrong during his tenure in office, this alone should raise questions about his fitness; and it certainly makes him unique among the 44.
Add to that the fact he is the only president in our history to wage war on the free press, and it’s clear how he gets away with much of his malfeasance. Every president has gotten bad press; it goes with the job. But no other president has so relentlessly attacked the press and cast doubt on the legitimacy of respectable news outlets and investigative journalists. He is a master of few things, but gaslighting is one technique at which he excels. Delegitimizing the public’s only source of information about what goes on in our government causes everyone to wonder what is real and what’s not and whether our own perceptions and observations can be trusted.
Democracy cannot survive without a free press. Yes, opinion and bias are far too prevalent in modern news reports; and yes, news is often sensationalized. But that makes all the more urgent our responsibility to hold the media to account and to demand fair and accurate reporting, not to discredit all journalists and portray them as public enemies. Attacks on “the media” are unfair, because as in every other field, there are good sources and bad sources. We know how to tell a good doctor from a bad one or a good minister from a bad one or a good restaurant from a bad one, and we use our knowledge to make informed choices. We should do the same with our news sources, instead of painting them all with one big brush stroke. As the Washington Post motto says, “Democracy dies in darkness.” We must respect, support, and seek out good journalism, because it’s our only way of knowing what happens inside the halls of power.
Fourth, among the few positive outcomes of the Trump “presidency” is that more Americans have now heard the word “narcissism” and know how to define, pronounce, and spell it than ever before. So as you already know, “narcissism” is defined as “excessive interest in or admiration of oneself and one’s physical appearance.” Psychology sources further define the word as “selfishness, involving a sense of entitlement, a lack of empathy, and a need for admiration, as characterizing a personality type.” “Sense of entitlement”: Trump’s assumption that he is the rightful owner of the office of president and his disdain for anyone who would think otherwise or have the audacity to challenge him for it. “Lack of empathy”: Puerto Rico, Gold Star families, victims of gun violence, victims of natural disasters, historically oppressed people groups, people with disabilities, victims of police brutality, families who have lost members to the coronavirus, and anyone else who doesn’t serve his purposes. “Need for admiration”: Do I need to elaborate?
It is said that everyone has a touch of narcissism, especially successful leaders. An article in the Harvard Business Review lists Napoléon Bonaparte, Mahatma Gandhi, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, Thomas Edison, and Henry Ford as narcissists. We can conclude, then, that within a certain range, narcissism is simply supreme confidence in one’s abilities and drive to use one’s knowledge and skills to benefit oneself and the world. Trump’s brand of narcissism, however, is most often branded “malignant narcissism,” which is defined as a “psychological syndrome comprising an extreme mix of narcissism, antisocial behavior, aggression, and sadism.”
Malignant narcissists are sociopathic and cruel. They are sadistic, enjoy the pain and suffering they cause others, and love creating chaos. Although Trump supporters like to paint him as a person who loves his country and is motivated by the desire to serve others, the facts simply don’t corroborate that image. He has promoted violence, praised and/or refused to condemn people who perform acts of violence, mocked a handicapped reporter, ridiculed war heroes, told law enforcement officers to stop being “too nice” to those they are apprehending, and taken children from their parents who were desperate enough to cross our border to escape untenable situations in their home countries and held those children in unthinkable conditions–and those are only the ones he’s done right out in public view. Insider reports of more private acts are too numerous to list.
Any one of these deeds would have been enough to disqualify a previous president or presidential candidate, because for anyone we’ve ever witnessed in the past, just one of these actions would have stood out as an isolated incident. Therefore, it would have been easy to examine on its own merits and to say, “No, this is not acceptable behavior for a president.” One of the ways Trump has gotten away with such outrageous deeds is by doing them every day in plain view, so that people begin questioning their own sanity instead of questioning his. When evil becomes the norm, it no longer has the same shock value or triggers the same repulsion. It’s impossible to single out the one or two things that make him unacceptable; we find ourselves wading through a dark jungle of intertwining lies, cruel acts, violations of laws and precedents, vile tweets, and behaviors unbecoming any functioning adult much less a President of the United States. Where do we begin building a coherent case?
Fifth and last, Donald Trump is the only president in our country’s history to have inspired the kind of cult following he has. Every president has had people who love him and people who hate him; or as I used to say about my position as college prof: “There are some students who think I walk on water, some who wouldn’t care if I died tomorrow, and some who are praying I will.” I think that’s pretty typical of anyone in a position of leadership. All presidents inspire citizens to join their campaigns, to display a bumper sticker or yard sign, to be loyal to them during their tenure in office, and often to support their re-election.
I, however, have never witnessed the level of cult behavior I have seen among Trump supporters. Within the last two weeks, hundreds of trucks formed a parade that drove through Portland, Oregon, and hundreds of boats paraded on a Texas waterway. All of the vehicles were heavily adorned with American flags, Confederate flags, and an abundance of Trump memorabilia. Speaking of memorabilia, I can’t recall ever having a president who inspired whole lines of fan shirts, hats, and other gear. And have you ever heard of a president who continues holding campaign rallies after he’s elected? I’d call them cult meetings.
What’s wrong with a little enthusiasm for your candidate? There’s a difference between enthusiasm and fanaticism. I enthusiastically supported President Obama, but my mind is not closed to his shortcomings. I respect what Bill Clinton accomplished during his presidency while being disgusted by his inability to keep his zipper up for eight years, which I don’t think is too much to ask of the person to whom we entrust our national welfare.
Fanatics, on the other hand, are unable to see or admit any fault in their object of adoration. They show him the same blind loyalty other cult members showed their leaders. From murder to mass suicide to imprisonment, followers of Charles Manson, Jim Jones, Marshall Applewhite and Bonnie Nettles, and David Koresh were loyal to their leaders without regard for their own lives or the consequences of the evil in which they participated. The presidency should not be a fan club or cult of worshipers.
The worst part of a president’s having a cult following is its effect on his judgment and ability to act in the best interests of the whole country. The U. S. tradition of peaceful transfer of power has always gone something like this: two people (or more) vie for the office of POTUS, and lots of people support and vote for each candidate; then an election is held. The candidate who wins fewer votes calls the candidate who wins more votes and offers a gracious concession and congratulations. Then an approximately two-and-half-month period of transition begins, during which the outgoing president welcomes the incoming president (even when the outgoing was the incumbent candidate in the election). The old president and family show the new president and family around their future living quarters, and the two presidents confer about whatever it is that presidents confer about. On inauguration day, the outgoing president and spouse invite the incoming president and spouse for tea/breakfast. They go to the inauguration, then shake hands and say their polite goodbyes, and then the helicopter flies the outgoing president and spouse off to their new home.
Then all of the people who voted for the guy who lost the election come together and support the guy who won, although sometimes reluctantly, at least at the beginning. And the guy who won promises to respect and govern all of the people, even those who didn’t vote for him.
That’s how it usually happens. In no predicted scenario is that how this year’s election will play out. Even Richard Nixon left peacefully and early when it became obvious his staying would further damage the country. Al Gore, more than a month after the hotly contested 2000 election, conceded reluctantly “for the sake of our unity as a people and the strength of our democracy.” Donald Trump stirs division, not unity; he acts only in his own interest and to keep the loyalty of his cult members, never for the whole of our population.
He has made no effort during his almost four years in office to win over or to find common ground with those who did not vote for him but has consistently pandered to his cult and further alienated everyone else with his attacks, including Democrats in congress. He is the only president who has made enemies of over half our country’s citizens and has refused to consider them in his decisions. He has, in fact, chosen to punish cities and states with Democratic leaders. He is the only president ever to make cult loyalty the criterion for receiving needed and deserved support from the federal government to whom we all pay our taxes and pledge our allegiance.
For four years, Democrats have been called “sore losers” for our refusal to accept a reality TV star as a legitimate president. “We put up with Obama for eight years, now you can put up with Trump.” If by “put up with,” you mean calling our president and his family every known racial slur, plus a few I had never heard before, applauding and supporting Mitch McConnell and others who declared in 2008 that their number-one priority was to make Barack Obama a one-term president, and approving McConnell and others’ blocking of Obama’s judicial nominees and legislation, that doesn’t really set the bar very high for “putting up with Trump.” Yet those who make that claim seem to have short memories, especially when they support the cult narrative that Trump is the most persecuted president in history.
Faulty memories aside, though, the fact Trump cult members refuse to see is that Donald Trump’s presidency is so far from normal that there is no precedent. Yes, in a more conventional contest, those on the losing team should shake hands, congratulate the winners, and then get behind the will of the majority and work for the common good. This is not one of those normal times.
Never before have citizens been expected to get behind a president who is a bully, who has criminal ties, who has alienated our allies and cozied up to our adversaries, who has expressed admiration for dictators, who has openly profited from the office of president, and who has refused to say a single negative word about Vladimir Putin even when credible reports say he paid bounties on American troops and even though it’s well known that Trump never hesitates to make negative statements about American citizens and members of our military. Choosing to back this “president” simply because he won an election (but lost the popular vote)–with the help of his good friend Vladimir Putin–would require ignoring our own consciences and abdicating our responsibility as citizens to help protect our country from enemies “both foreign and domestic.” Donald Trump is a clear and present danger, not just your average president.
Joe Biden recently said, “The job of the president is to lower the temperature. As the convention demonstrated, all Trump wants to do is raise it.” On his watch, our country has lost its standing in the world, our streets are filled with violence, thousands more have died from a deadly virus than would have died under responsible leadership, service members and their families have suffered attacks by their commander-in-chief, racial equality has been set back 100 years, we have seen the people’s house desecrated for a political pageant, and the respected office of president has been degraded to a daily reality-TV show starring a lying con man.
Yet even more tragic than all of those things is that 42% of the country’s voters think this is all good and will vote to extend the demolition of our democracy another four years–or more, if they can manage during this next term to completely annul our constitution. This is an unprecedented time, and the stakes have never been higher in any election. They’re even willing to ignore all of the credible evidence of foreign interference, Trump’s failure to condemn that interference and take action to prevent its reoccurrence, and his deliberately tampering with our mail service to limit voting in this November’s election.
I’ll close with a quotation from a social media post written by a man who serves on a casket team: a group of military personnel who greet planes returning fallen soldiers and who carry the flag-wrapped aluminum transfer cases to vehicles which will take them to the place of final preparation and placement in real caskets. In reference to Donald Trump’s reported disgraceful remarks about fallen soldiers, this soldier writes:
“I suppose the one thing we all took for granted is that dignity would always be affirmed by all our civilian leaders to those service members who gave everything. I never would have predicted any official, let alone a sitting president, would insult fallen service members.
I cannot adequately describe my anger at Donald Trump for being so willing to send service members halfway around the world to die on his own behalf and then call them ‘losers’ for doing so. This coward is unfit for his office and the power it holds. He needs to go.”
Amen.