Donald Trump Explained in Quotes

I WAS GOING THROUGH a list of quotes from past readings when it struck me a handful might help us grapple with President Trump and understand the daily tweet storms blowing out of the Oval Office.

What makes Dear Orange Leader tick?

Christopher Logue, writing about the Trojan War, might have had him in mind when he described Agamemnon, the grasping Greek king:

   “Behold his cause:

Me first, me second—

And if by chance there is a little left—me third.”                      

It’s unfortunate Trump gets all his best ideas from watching Fox and Friends every morning. Far better, before tweeting or talking (to Lester Holt about why he fired James Comey), if he recalled Sophocles:

“Second thoughts are wisest.”

It might also benefit the Chief Executive—who hates Mexicans, Muslims and F.B.I. investigators—if he learned to temper his bowel-impacted, septuagenarian, morning fury. He and many of his most avid supporters might well keep in mind what James Russell Lowell said in 1848:

“Folks never understand the folks they hate.”

How about the false argument that we should forgive Trump a rash of sins, since he’s not really a politician? Mark Sullivan, writing about America after World War I, described politics this way:

“Politics is merely the name for the process by which whatever force or group is at any time dominant in society achieves its will in government.”

In an era where the Koch brothers spend hundreds of millions to prop up GOP lawmakers and influence decisions, where Jared Kushner sucks up to bankers tied directly to Vladimir Putin, and billionaire brigands turn Marxist ideology upside down in China and rake in even more billions, those with vast wealth are clearly the “greatest” politicians.

In terms of Trump and the other mercenaries who make up his family, historian John Fiske clearly offered pertinent comment a century ago: 

“Devices for appropriating the fruits of other people’s labor have in all countries been multifarious, from tomahawks to tariffs.”

Conservatives will always focus on “taxes” as their least favorite form of appropriation. Those of us of liberal bent will counter with: Trump University! Bailouts for Wall Street! Big Pharma spending hundreds of millions to lobby (bribe) Congress, reaping a hundred times as much in profit!  

Based on the sophomoric level of vocabulary we see in Trump’s tweets, we may be in trouble. Lowell, again, provides a perfect summary:

“Language is the soil of thought.”

Alas, the mind of President Trump is apparently a barren wasteland, where empathy and human decency wither and die.

When it comes to wisdom, Mark Twain nailed it perfectly when he said of someone much like our current Commander-in-Chief:

“As for the contents of his skull, they could have changed place with the contents of a pie, and nobody would have been the worse off for it but the pie.”

Speaking of leadership—and this one bodes ill for Trump and all of us—Harry Truman once said:

“Readers of good books, particularly books of biography and history, are preparing themselves for leadership. Not all readers become leaders. But all leaders must be readers.”

Trump has been called many things, but no one has ever dared call him a “reader.” Sarah Palin is a bibliophile by comparison.

For those struggling to come to grips with the man in the Oval Office, General Winfield Scott perfectly described the current resident of the White House, a century ago, when he said of a fellow officer, that the man was: 

“The only person I have ever known who was wholly indifferent in the choice between truth and falsehood.”

ON THE OTHER HAND, those of us who love this nation and believe Trump is a menace to core American values may find consolation in the past. In 1837, Justice Joseph Story of the U.S. Supreme Court, studied the world round him, shuddered at the condition of our young nation, and offered grim assessment:

“The Republic is daily sinking. I have lost my confidence in the practical administration of our government. I am in utter despair. I can see little or no ground of hope for our country.”  

Yet there was hope.  The country recovered from the Panic of 1837.  We weathered a Civil War, overcame a century of Jim Crow prejudice, battled through the Great Depression, survived two World Wars, granted women equal rights, handled the challenges of Watergate and fought terror in the wake of 9/11.

We can survive four years of Trump.

To do so we must rest on the bedrock of our values. When Trump attacks the free press and leading right-wing voices applaud body-slamming reporters, the wisdom of Thomas Jefferson applies:

“ The basis of our governments being the opinion of the people, the very first object should be to keep that right; and were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.”

When GOP lawmakers howl about raising taxes for health care—but swoon at adding $50 billion in defense spending—a liberal may rightly quote President Dwight D. Eisenhower:

“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.”

THE LAST WORD GOES to Sherman Alexie, a Native American author. As far as any prejudice aimed at Mexicans, Muslims, liberals, or loyal Donald J. Trump supporters by supporters from our liberal side—it pays not to generalize. Alexie is correct:

“The world is only broken into two tribes: The people who are assholes and the people who are not.”

Sadly, it seems clear where the President belongs in that categorization.