9/10/20: The president and his band
of enablers spend a hectic day trying to explain away the damaging revelations included
in Bob Woodward’s latest book. Several news agencies have advanced copies and begin
quoting select passages from a work titled simply, Rage.
(This blogger is definitely buying one Tuesday,
when the book goes on sale.)
If the
quoted passages and stories are indicative of the full portrait Woodward paints,
it may stand as the most damning work ever written about a U.S. president. It certainly
should be enough to give even ardent Trump supporters pause on November 3.
(Okay, we know it won’t.)
____________________
Mattis would pray for the
country every Sunday.
____________________
First,
remember, President Trump agreed to go on record in talking to Woodward.
So, we often get Trump unfiltered. That is: Trump at his manic, lying,
bragging, ill-informed best. Or: his worst.
Woodward sums up the man in full, writing that
Trump has “enshrined personal impulse as a
governing principle of his presidency.”
At one point, Trump makes clear to the journalist (he called Woodward a
“whack job” on Thursday, after hearing some of what he wrote) that one of his
main goals as president has been to undo Obama’s accomplishments: “Ninety
percent of the things he’s done, I’ve taken apart,” Trump boasts. Policy
differences from one administration to another are to be expected. For Trump this
is more than policy or the give-and-take of partisan politics. It’s personal. It’s
an obsession. He hates his predecessor. He can’t help himself. And if that
means he must stand on a pile of wreckage that will represent his
presidential monument in the end, he gladly will. Smash Obamacare.
Bulldoze DACA. Withdraw from the Iran deal, all of these with nothing to show
for the effort. Quit the Paris Climate Accord.
Watch the world burn, like Nero writ large. Like Nero, take pride in
your fiddle-playing expertise.
Woodward also has many who worked in Trump’s administration on record,
including several who have not spoken out before. Secretary of Defense James
Mattis would go to church every Sunday and pray for the country, Woodward
writes, not just in the normal way, but knowing the danger his boss represented.
True to an
unspoken code in this country, Mattis said when he resigned his cabinet post in
2018, that he owed his commander-in-chief a period of silence. It is tradition,
in this country, that generals and admirals do not undermine civilian
leadership, as in your typical banana republic.
Mattis had
warned that his silence would not be permanent. Woodward puts him on record, describing Trump as both “dangerous”
and “unfit.”
*
THESE
AREN’T ANONYMOUS SOURCES, as Trump’s lackies said just days ago, in trying to
blunt the damage done by stark revelations in The Atlantic (see: 9/5/20 and
9/6/20). These are men who worked for Trump, who were chosen by
Trump.
These
voices tell us what should be obvious to all by now. Trump is a liar. Even worse,
he’s the kind of liar who falls for his own lies.
Woodward includes
a telling anecdote involving Dan Coats’s wife. At a dinner one evening, Marsha
Coats sits next to Vice President Mike Pence. Appalled by what she has seen of the
president, and what she has heard about him behind the scenes, “I just looked
at him, like, how are you stomaching this?” she tells Woodward. “I just looked
at him like, this is horrible. I mean, we made eye contact. I think he
understood. And he just whispered in my ear, ‘Stay the course.’”
Vice
President Pence might have the capacity to hold his nose and back the president
in the name of policy or personal gain.
It’s hard
for others to ignore the stench wafting from the Offal Office.
“Truth is no longer governing
the White House.”
A reporter
for Business Insider picked out some of Mattis’s other comments from the Woodward book. It
has long been known that Mattis and the president disagreed about policy. Normal
in any administration. But Mattis came to see Trump as a danger to the nation.
Like many of us, watching from the sidelines, watching up close, he found it
impossible to understand why Trump kept picking fights with allies, while
sucking up to some of the world’s worst dictators.
“What we’re doing is we’re actually showing
[emphasis added, unless otherwise noted] how to destroy America,” he says of
his old boss. “That’s what we’re showing [our enemies]. How to isolate us from
all of our allies. How to take us down.”
Mattis is not the first survivor of this administration to describe the
president as ill-informed. He is one of the most potent. Trump “doesn’t
understand,” Mattis tells Woodward. The president “has no mental framework for
these things. He hasn’t read.” In one brutal passage, Mattis
vents to Dan Coats, Trump’s Director of National Intelligence. “The president,” he says, “has no moral compass.” Coats
doesn’t disagree. He doesn’t try to calm his colleague.
“True,” he
replies. “To him, a lie is not a lie. It’s just what he thinks. He doesn’t
know the difference between the truth and a lie.”
Coats is as true a
conservative as ever lived, a Republican, heart and soul. Yet during his entire
tenure as Director of National Intelligence, he finds it impossible to shake
the feeling that Vladimir Putin “had something” on Trump. There seemed no other
way to explain the president’s reluctance to confront one of America’s most
dangerous rivals. “He suspected the worst but found nothing that would show
Trump was indeed in Putin’s pocket,” Woodward writes. “There was no proof,
period. But Coats’s doubts continued, never fully dissipating.”
Trump’s own words, in
this regard, are deeply troubling. He may not be able to get along with Merkel
of Germany, or Macron of France, two of our top allies. Yet he fits in well with
the authoritarian crowd. “It’s funny, the relationships I
have, the tougher and meaner they are, the better I get along with them,”
the president tells Woodward. “You know? Explain that to me someday, okay?”
I would
argue that Gen. Mattis already has. Trump is a man with no moral compass. He
has no overarching goals or principles, except to do and say whatever he has to
do and say to make himself look good.
In eighteen
separate interviews – all on tape – the president reveals who he is. The picture
is ugly. After the Saudis murder the Washington Post writer, Jamal
Khashoggi, and cut his corpse up with a bone saw, Trump does not stand up for
the free press in a contest with killers. He does not seem to know that
Khashoggi’s children are U.S. citizens and deserve support. When U.S.
intelligence agencies make clear there could be no murder without the approval
of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, Trump refuses to face the
fact. He brags to Woodward, saying of the Prince, “I saved his ass.”
“I was able
to get Congress to leave him alone,” Trump said. “I was able to get them to
stop.”
Trump stopped lawmakers
from slapping Saudi Arabia with stiff sanctions, arguing in part that
the Saudis bought billions of dollars’ worth of U.S. weapons. So what if they
cut up a reporter?
No moral compass.
None.
Quoting a mass murder to denigrate a
former U.S. president?
Even weirder, if possible, is Trump’s love
affair with Kim Jong-un of North Korea. While Trump may rage about our
relationship with South Korea, and insist we’re “suckers” for defending our
allies, he tells Woodward that he and Kim, a bloody killer, have some kind of chemistry. “You
meet a woman. In one second, you know whether or not it’s going to happen.”
(Just
be glad Trump didn’t try to grab Kim’s pussy.)
“I don’t think Obama’s smart,” Trump tells Woodward at one
point. “I think he’s highly overrated. And I don’t think he’s a great speaker.”
Trump adds, as if in validation, that Kim Jong-un thought Obama was “an
asshole.”
Quoting a mass murder to denigrate a former U.S. president? Something
is fundamentally wrong, at his core, with Donald J. Trump.
Trump tells Woodward that he was awestruck meeting the North
Korean dictator for the first time in 2018, thinking to himself, “Holy shit,”
and finding Kim to be “far beyond smart.” Trump bragged that Kim “tells me
everything.” That included a graphic account of Kim having his uncle killed.
CNN plucked another bizarre episode from the pages of Rage:
A week later, on December 13,
2019, when Woodward returned to interview the President again, Trump was still
fixated on the photos [he had of his meeting with Kim] and insisted on giving
Woodward a poster-sized print of Trump and Kim.
“Do you have a round thing for
this so he can take it? Or even a rubber band or something. Because you can’t
fold it, you’ll ruin it. I don’t even know why I’m giving it to you. That’s my
only one,” Trump said.
Some people – teenage boys
– want posters of super models and sports
icons to grace their walls.
Trump?
How would you like a poster of him and the guy who has
starved millions of his people, and slaughtered critics with anti-aircraft
guns?
“Like a
minus number.”
Woodward manages
to get the normally discreet Dr. Anthony Fauci on record, though until I see
the book, I suspect he has been quoted second hand. In one meeting with top health
officials, including people like Dr. Robert Redfield, head of the CDC, Dr.
Fauci says that in dealing with the coronavirus, the president’s attention span
“is like a minus number.” He warns the others that Trump “is on a separate channel.” The
president, he says, is “rudderless.” According to Woodward, Dr. Fauci came to believe
that Trump’s “sole purpose was to get reelected.”
Perhaps most telling, and most damaging, are Trump’s own words
on his handling (or mishandling) of the coronavirus crisis. In a recorded conversation on
February 7, Trump makes it clear he knows the virus is deadly. “You just breathe the air and that’s
how it’s passed,” he says. “And so that’s a very tricky one. That’s a very
delicate one. It’s also more deadly than even your strenuous flus.”
“This is deadly stuff,” the president repeats for
emphasis.
Trump’s defenders will try to blame Dr. Fauci and others
for giving the president bad advice in those early days of crisis. Here we have
Trump explaining that the disease is easily spread through the air. It’s far
more dangerous than flu. Yet when Trump speaks in public, he will discount
wearing masks for months. He will tell the nation that COVID-19 is in fact no
worse than flu. His supporters will hear his words – will repeat them and
spread them like a second kind of virus. Rush Limbaugh and the fools who pose
as pundits at Fox News will pick up the story and spread it as surely as a sick
patient spreads disease by coughing on a nurse. Hundreds of healthcare workers
will be infected and die. Millions of Americans will be infected. Nearly
200,000 will die. Other nations will face the threat with clear eyes and honest
leadership and handle it with greater success.
In fact, Trump
admits in a March 19 call to Woodward that he has deliberately minimized the danger. “I
wanted to always play it down,” he tells the reporter. “I still like playing it
down, because I don’t want to create a panic.”
The danger Americans face is acute. In April, at the same time he is calling on states to reopen, he
warns Woodward about the virus.
“It’s so easily transmissible, you wouldn’t even believe it.”
Thursday, with all these damaging revelations dominating
the news, Trump picks that one word, “panic” from his conversations with the
author. He claims that even though he knew how the disease spread, how easily, how
dangerous it was, he was discounting the danger because he wanted the American
people to remain calm.
By the way, let’s show up for big rallies and celebrations,
and wear our red MAGA hats, but not masks.
As Mattis and Coats and many others who have seen Trump up
close, could tell us, the president was going to lie.
And, once again, he had.
It didn’t matter to Trump if tens of thousands of Americans
died. His only purpose was to win a second term.
*
FINALLY, a minor matter to discuss, but a
telling one, nevertheless. Woodward himself learned how ill-informed Trump
could be, or perhaps how happy he was to lie. “I’m number one on Twitter,” he boasted
during one conversation. “When you’re number one and when you have hundreds of
millions of people, whether they’re against you or not they still read what you
say,” Trump continued. On Twitter, actually, he has 88.5 million “followers”
and that includes people like me, who only go to his threads to find out how insane
he sounds.
It would no doubt pain the president to know
that his nemesis, Barack Obama, has 122.4 million followers on Twitter.
(Trump also trails a number of celebrities,
including Justin Bieber, Katy Perry, Rihanna, and Taylor Swift.)
Often, in their conversations,
Trump is suspicious about what Woodward will do with what he says. “You’re
probably going to screw me,” the president predicts. “You know, because that’s
the way it goes.”
On the contrary, from what we
know of the book so far, the president screws himself. He reveals
himself.
“When
his performance as president is taken in its entirety,” Woodward finally writes,
“I can only reach one conclusion: Trump is the wrong man for the job.”
POSTSCRIPT: Even the Taliban have the brains to wear masks in a time of
COVID-19, and their only profession is murder.
Above, a
Trump crowd, from a September 10 tweet by the bombastic liar, President Donald
J. Trump.
A reporter
for The New York Times tweets another picture of this rally, noting that
not one in ten in the audience is wearing a mask. Security tracks her down,
using her picture, and has her thrown out.
Putin and
Kim and their ilk would understand the president’s impulse to stifle the free
press.
Give Trump
a second term. Maybe we’ll have anti-aircraft guns and bone saws in the next
four years.
