The Trump Disaster

In what seems like a nightmarish Saturday Night Live skit, Donald Trump somehow became the 45th president of the United States. Certainly in modern history, no person taking the office has been as unworthy and as unqualified as Trump.

How did Trump win?

Trump won through this combination of ingredients, as I see it:

Dislike of Hillary: Despite all her qualifications, experience, and command of facts, many people just could not like Hillary. This is obviously very unfortunate, as public office — particularly high public office — should be about qualifications, rationality, and competency. People were turned off by Hillary's cavalier attitude, as evidenced in the implementation of a private email server without regard for the rules governing her position. It was also the case that Hillary was embittered by having her chance at the presidency eight years ago essentially stolen from her, electing the younger Barack Obama instead, when the reverse should have been the case, allowing Obama to gain more experience for the demanding role. Hillary was thus eight years older, less energetic, and less interested in her appearance. (Let's face it, those Walmart style outfits she chose to wear throughout the campaign did not help.)
Debbie Wasserman Schultz and the DNC: This was a mess. Under Schultz, the DNC was being run as though it were a little club of entrenched insiders who would rule according to their preferences and prejudices. It became known that the DNC leadership marginalized Bernie Sanders, undercutting his campaign in preference to Hillary Clinton, whose turn it was to become President, in their view. This alienated a large swath of Sanders' following — a large number of voters who may well have been the cause of Hillary losing the election, as those voters stayed away from the polls, or left their ballot blank in the presidential column, or voted for a minority candidate having no chance of winning. This also played into Trump's narrative that "the system is rigged". And then there was the horribly mismanaged IT in the DNC, allowing Russian agents to readily hack DNC computers. It was reported that the FBI repeatedly warned DNC leadership about attacks on DNC computers, but that leadership did nothing about it. DNC leadership's ignorance of cybercrime allowed spearphishing to succeeed, where campaign chairman John Podesta or his aides clicked through to an attacker Internet address and blithely provided sensitive information which gave the hackers access to Podesta's Gmail account.
Russian leadership wanting Trump to win: It was clear that Hillary would be tough on Putin and his government — as should be the case. Putin perceived that he would have a much easier time with Trump — particularly as it became known how easy it is to push Trump's buttons in order to get him to dance the way you want. (Hillary's comment about Trump being a Russian puppet was insightful.) To do that, Putin got agents to hack the DNC's easily hackable computers, and then feed all the sordid emails to Wikileaks for exposure to the world.
Failure of the Democratic party to connect with their base: The Democrats turned into a somewhat self-satisfying elitist organization, becoming distant from their traditional base.
People getting their information from social media: This has been a distressing trend, where people entrench themselves in Facebook and the like rather than going to established, reliable sources of information. Social media is a cesspool, full of people spewing uninformed opinions, contriving "facts", insulting and threatening others, etc. (It would later be revealed that Russian operatives bought ads in Facebook and Google to disparage unfavored candidates, praise preferred candidates, and otherwide spread misinformation.)
People getting their information from Donald Trump: Depending upon a politician for information is dubious. Depending upon a habitual liar for information is inexcusable.
Fake news: There's an epidemic of this crap these days, where malicious people think that deceiving as many people as possible is a fun thing to do. You don't need Russian government types to inject such subversive narratives into the infosphere: there are plenty of people in the world generally who are eager to undermine civilization, such as Michael Flynn's son.
Shortage of substance from legitimate media: If you've ever watched your local TV station's 6 pm news and finding them using the news segment to cover what's happening in local sports teams or what one of sport doofuses have been doing recently. News outlets have been devaluing themselves by pandering to audiences with what they deem is popular and thus garners commercial income for the station. The term created for this is "infotainment", and there's way too much of it, displacing in-depth journalism. At least as bad is the habit of media sources to simply regurgitate what was published elsewhere, with no critical review of the content. The media source thus avoids having to expend any effort on investigative reporting. We see a lot of this in the major TV networks, where ABC News will air a piece on some story, and the next night you'll see NBC News copy-cating the same thing to fill their broadcast.
Clinton's insistence upon keeping Huma Abedin as her personal aide despite Abedin's husband Anthony Weiner posing an obvious risk to everyone around him, in his destructively aberrant behaviors. Had Clinton had the sense to dismiss Abedin a year or more earlier, she might have won the election.
FBI director James Comey's impulsive October 28th letter to Congress about further emails found (on Anthony Weiner's computer) relating to long-concluded Clinton email investigation.

Were Trump voters "deplorable"? Yes

Those who voted for Trump disregarded his lack of credentials, his lack of knowledge, his lies, his bragging of assaulting women, his persistent insulting of people and institutions who slighted him in any way — in short, his lack of presidential qualifications. This was an electorate voting out of spite rather than reason, who would be willing to jeopardize the very nation and freedoms that millions have fought to protect and build over the past two hundred years.

Democracy depends upon a well-informed electorate. Those who voted for Trump chose him as their information source — a man who has no respect for truth or facts, and is known to either make up his "information" or get it from conspiracy websites or valueless sources such as The National Enquirer.

One person, from Conway, New Hampshire who was interviewed at the inauguration appropriately characterized Trump's election as "not a landslide, but a mudslide".

More than deplorable, Trump voters were fools. Fools buy the false message that Trump is dedicated to helping the downtrodden. Fools believe that someone from the upper 1% is going to help the little people. Had they paid attention to Trump's behavior during the campaign, they would realize the reality: throughout the campaign, when he was down on the floor, Trump would never engage with the people there: he always kept his distance from them, at most scribbling autographs, not speaking to the rabble.

Trump voters claimed they wanted change. "Change" is not something, unto itself, that you should want: you should want improvement. People who wanted something better for the country: they had the opportunity to vote for Bernie Sanders as an alternative candidate.

Trump is not a Republican

Anyone who listened to Trump throughout the duration of his campaign noted one conspicous thing: Trump never once referred to himself as a Republican when addressing his mobs, nor did he promote the Republican party. Trump is a party of one — it's him against everyone else. The Republican leadership is very aware of this, and has been since Trump became a candidate. They fear what Trump will do, as he has firmly established that their agenda is not his agenda. As punctuation to this, note the presence of Steve Bannon ever at Trump's side: Bannon is the self-avowed enemy of the Republican leadership.

A business owner will inherently make a great president, right? Wrong!

If you give no thought to it, a business person might seem to bring all the right qualities to the office, but the experience and inclinations of such a person are incongruent with the requirements. The United States is a democracy. A democracy inherently runs on consensus, operating according to the will of the people, depending upon the other branches of government, and operating through many offices, bureaus, and regulations, all within the framework of the Constitution and laws relating thereto. A business is a dictatorship, where the leader unilaterally defines what is to be done, where the employees of that business hold no sway in how things run. A business person's method of operation within that enterprise is completely different from how a government needs to operate. So, no, a business person has no inherent qualifications to be a successful president of the United States.

Trump did not run to be president

Anyone who actually believed that Donald Trump ran to be president of the United States has not been paying attention. Donald Trump ran to be dictator of the United States. A person who aspires to be president is well grounded in civics, knows the U.S. Constitution well, and is familiar with laws. A person who seeks to be a leader of this great nation is well read, and has a thorough grounding in history so as to make wise decisions in the context of the many nations of the world, and to avoid making mistakes that one learns from history. Trump believes that all that is unnecessary — that he only has to come to office with his intentions and beliefs. It is known that Donald Trump does not read books: his belief is that his life experience is all that is needed to succeed in any context. Is this really sufficient? No — it means that he is utterly unprepared for the office, and will make countless mistakes, some of which will be disastrous for the country and the world (and the planet).

The bleak inauguration address

Trump left the writing of the speech to the notorious Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller, according to Wall Street Journal research. It amounted to a call for nationalistic selfishness, stressing "America first", with no sense of international context, cooperation, or recognition. Predictably, the speech had its inanities, such as "an education system flush with cash, but which leaves our young and beautiful students deprived of all knowledge". Really? Students go to school and, over a period of years, are taught nothing? This absurd statement from a president?

So why the bleakness? Partly it's a self-defining excuse for Trump to take whatever actions he wants. If everything is a hopless mess — much as Trump entoned potential African American voters during his campain — then what do you have to lose? It also lowers the bar on what he should accomplish in office, where he would not have to do much to make things better. Again, this is Trump establishing a falsehood to suit his objectives.

Trump's inauguration speech was him defining himself as the enemy of the Washington establishment, and that there will be battles. Trump's arrival in Washington amounts to a hostile takeover.

The buck never stops here

It is apparent by now that Donald Trump's life tenet is that regardless of whatever he says or does that he shall be blameless. If he says something that is provably false, he will not own up to it. If he supports his cause by citing and aligning himself with something that someone has said or written, and that something is proven to be wrong, Trump will then disavow any resposibility for using it, saying that you should instead take up the issue with that other person. All this despite it being antithetical to the tenets of the presidency, and indeed leadership principles in general.

"Alternative facts"

If there was any doubt about the ethical depravity of Trump and those who serve him in the White House, witness the reprehensible Kellyanne Conway's response to Chuck Todd's questioning on the Sunday January 22, 2017 Meet The Press program. White House press secretary Sean Spicer said that Mr. Trump had drawn "the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration". Anyone who saw all the pictures of the empty parade route bleachers and the National Mall clearly perceived that the number of people there was, as formal estimates enumerated, about 1/3 that of the number attending President Obamaas inauguration in 2009. Reality is always the enemy of the Trump ego, and thus he dispatched his press secretary to perpetrate the bald-faced lie of largest-ever attendance. When Chuck Todd questioned Conway about this, her response was that "Sean Spicer, our press secretary -- gave alternative facts". In the normal universe, there are only facts. In the Trump universe, there are alternative facts.

This is not humorous — it is dangerous. This defines an administration to whom "facts" are to be disregarded, and where fabrications are to stand in their stead. This is abject denial; from the White House; from the most powerful position in the world. This signifies that the next four years will be filled with denials of reality, in order to put forth and support Trump distortions of reality, no matter how outrageous and readily contradictable they may be.

Lie, misrepresent, conceal, distract

It's now well established that Donald Trump is an egomaniac. It's always about him. Howard Fineman of the Huffington Post has remarked that he has been to Trump's office multiple times, and noted that Trump surrounds himself with awards such that they are even overflowing onto the couch, which can no longer be used for sitting. Trump believes himself to be some kind of supreme being, where no one should ever challenge what he says or does. If he is challenged, he lashes out, his favorite method being to hurl the 140 character darts called tweets at his foes. And it doesn't matter that he contradicts himself in the tweets. In 2015 Trump said "Meryl Streep is excellent; she's a fine person, too." When she criticized him at the 2017 Golden Globes, Trump then denigrated her with: "Meryl Streep, one of the most over-rated actresses in Hollywood". When numerous media sources published the photograpically supported observation that Trump's inauguration crowds were not as large as in past inaugurations, contradicting his ego-based assertion of superior numbers, Trump launched into a campaign to castigate "the lying press", going before the cameras in an absolutely embarrassing performance, then having his press secretary lambast the press as an extension of that, then continuing to go on about it for days afterward. Of crowd size, Trump said "It went all the way back to the Washington Monument": photos and numerous reporters showed that the crowd was nowhere near the Washington Monument. Trump also claimed that the rain should have scared people away, "But God looked down, and He said, 'We're not going to let it rain on your speech,'" and that, though he "got hit by a couple of drops" when he started his speech that the rain "stopped immediately ...and then it became really sunny.": the truth is that it was raining through Trump's speech. The worst fixation of his is on the factual reality that Hillary Clinton bested him in the popular vote. This absolutely sticks in his craw, not just the numerical aspect of it, but that he was out-voted by a woman — a class of being who should be subservient to him, never superior. Even two months after the election, he is still going on about this, seeking to establish some, any illegitimacy to the numbers, which he is persistently attributing to massive voter fraud. As is traditional with Trump, he makes the fraud assertion with no evidence whatever to support his claims. (The basis for Trump's assertion has been traced back through his following of wacko conspiracy sites on the Internet such as the right-wing website Infowars.com, who simply parroted the tweet of conspiracy nut Greg Phillips.) Every fact-finding authority and state attorney general has debunked this nonsense. The New York Times seldom uses the word "lie" in its headlines, but was compelled to do so on January 24, 2017: "Trump Repeats Lie About Popular Vote in Meeting With Lawmakers", because that was the reality. Even the Republican leadership has lost patience with this crap, calling upon Trump to either put forth evidence or retract his baseless statements, as his behavior in his position is undermining the basis of democracy (much to the delight of Vladimir Putin and other world leaders down on the United States). It's absurd. As Chris Matthews said on January 24, 2017 about this, if 3 to 5 million illegal aliens took the risk of exposing themselves and went to the polls, they are even more conscientious citizens than established Americans; and if those 5 million fraudulent voters who cast their votes for Hillary Clinton represented an orchestrated attempt to alter the outcome of the election, isn't it strange how they voted in the wrong states? As part of his fraudulent voter outrage, Trump cites it unacceptable that voters should be registered in two states. Well, guess what? Tiffany Trump, son-in-law Jared Kushner, chief counsel Steve Bannon, spokesman Sean Spicer, and Trump's treasury secretary-designee Steve Mnuchin are all registered in two states.

As an extension of his business practices, Trump conceals what is inconvenient to him. In response to calls for him to release his tax returns, as candidates for high office do as part of full disclosure, Trump refused to do so, claiming that he could not, because his tax returns were under audit. False: there is no law or regulation prohibiting the release of tax returns when under audit. It became clear that he was refusing to do so for two reasons. First, it would show him not paying taxes (as all the "little people" whose votes he sought have to). Second, it would reveal him not having made the "tens of millions of dollars" in charitable donations that he claimed to have made over his life. (The Washington Post conducted an exhaustive search for any donations to charity having been made by Trump, and could find almost none: The Post called 326 charities with connections to Trump, asking if they had received a gift of the nominee's own money. Between 2008 and this May, that search turned up just one gift, from 2009, it worth less than $10,000. At the same time, Trump raided his own charitable foundation, taking more than a quarter-million dollars from it to settle lawsuits that involved the billionaire's for-profit businesses.)

Trump doesn't hesitate to makes stuff up, no matter how ridiculous or demonstrably false or hurtful. In his mind, if he says it, it must be factual and true. Think back to when he sought to find something to hurt Ted Cruz and found it in that bastion of factual reporting, the National Enquirer, which claimed that Cruz's father was an associate of Lee Harvey Oswald and thus some form of accomplice to the assassination of John F. Kennedy. In October 2016 he told his mobs that Hillary Clinton was likely to be indicted soon (the email server issue) and that she was under review in "multiple open criminal investigations" — neither of which were true. During the vitriolic period of the campaign, Trump was asked if he would continue in that style if/when he became president. He replied that, no, he would be presidential. He is not. There is only one Trump, and what we are seeing in the White House is the same erratic, mean-spirited, obsessive-compulsive behavior that everyone saw on the campaign trail. Even now, on the world stage, he just doesn't care. What's particularly troubling is that Trump will expect and demand that those he put into White House and cabinet positions are going to support everything he says, which will put them into increasingly untenable positions, causing them to consider where they stand relative to their personal credibility. If all this seems disturbingly familiar, it is: it is just how the Kim Jong-un regime is run in North Korea.

What's most deplorable is that Donald Trump doesn't hesitate to enrich himself by lying to people — and society in general — at the most basic level, at the level of human hope. A conspicuous example of this is how he went to West Virginia coal country to pander for votes, preying upon the desperation of people there. Trump vowed to bring back coal jobs. This is wrong on multiple levels. First, it's telling these people that they should continue to go down into deep, dark holes in the ground to labor in filthy, very dangerous jobs; this, instead of offering them the prospect of having task force teams come into the region to reshape the economy so that people could have safe, productive, enduring jobs in the modern economic world. Second, it is simple deceit to promise the return of jobs in the coal industry, where the loss of jobs has been due to mechanization, not competition from foreign governments or immigrants or other factors. (In a town hall meeting with Chris Hayes in the same town that Trump visited, coal workers acknowledged that they knew that jobs would not be coming back, as mechanization did the work.) Third, Trump concealed the reality that graphs reveal, that coal has been steadily declining as a source of energy, being displaced by far cleaner energy sources that do not entail all the toxic coal combustion waste solids. Instead of hope, Trump guaranteed these people continued lack of jobs, a low standard of living, and despair. When he could have offered an innovative solution to their situation, Trump chose to give them nothing but lies.

What's wrong with Trump?

He's an insecure egomanaiac:
Everything is always about him, and he needs continual reassuring adulation. As we've seen, even in humanitarian crises, when Trump is there to make a public statement he can't refrain from applauding himself for the great job he's doing. The co-author of "Trump: The art of the Deal" has described his observations on Trump's insecurities after long exposure to Trump. "Looking back, I also hear the plaintive wail of a desperate child who believes he is alone in the world with no one to care for him." Trump tries to live up to his contrived reputation, and at the same time fears insignificance. His life-long goal has been to be accepted as peers by people who have actually accomplished major, adult things in life.

He doesn't understand the way loyalty works:
Trump is notorious by demanding loyalty from his minions, but with Trump, loyalty is unidirectional: he doesn't hesitate to undermine, humiliate, bully, disparage, or outright discard those around him. Contrast this behavior with how Vladimir Putin operates: he demonstrates strength, commanding respect and accompanying loyalty from his inner circle. In return, Putin rewards that loyalty with exemption from Russian laws and policies, a blatant example being massive migration of capital out of Russia as his wealthy friends have invested in real estate in Britain and elsewhere.

Seemingly incapable of strategy:
Trump is notoriously given to impulsive behavior, where he will can't control himself and reflexivly reacts to things with no thought to consequences or chain of effects. The things he does cannot be described as strategic, or even rise to the level of being considered tactical. The behavior we see is that of a child simply acting out, as abundantly seen in his juvenile tweets — and in his needs to make such attacks public at all, via Twitter.

A habit lying and deceit:
As has been abundantly documented in his presidency, and before, Donald Trump is a habitual liar, saying anything, with the self-assurance that he can get away with it — and that he should be allowed to get away with it. And as evidenced in the notorious Access Hollywood "hot mic" audio recording, Donald Trump is in the habit of deceitfully concealing his more egregious behaviors, from the public as well as his family. If accused of those behaviors, he will deny and lie and attempt to elicit consensus of innocence from observers by attempting to convince them that he is innocent. We saw this on the campaign trail as he repeatedly denied sexually assaulting over a dozen women (despite what he said on the Access Hollywood recording) by portraying those victims as too unattractive to be worth any attention.

Valuing loyalty above competence:
As a sign of his lifelong insecurity, Trump values loyalty above all else, even if it means that the people he chooses to be around him are hardly the best and brightest that he so often claims. A conspicuous case in point is Michael Cohen, whom many lawyers describe as inepts, as witness his gross mishandling of the Stormy Daniels fiasco.

"Make American great again"?

This campaign slogan was lifted from the standard Republican wistful daydream that things were better in times past, where if they could only dictate how everyone lives their lives in homogenous thinking and behaviors that the country could return to those idyllic times. This, of course, disregards the reality that the past has always been full of ugly, hurtful, and calamatous events. How about thousands being killed for nothing in Vietnam; the tension of the Cold War; The McCarthy persecutions; the polio epidemic; millions being killed or maimed in the second world war; Nazi death camps; the flu epidenic of 1918 which killed millions; African Americans being terrorized and lynched; rampant discrimination against Irish and other immigrants; native Americans slaughtered and driven onto bleak reservations; slavery; and the list goes on. The past is the past, and it has always been a mixed bag. The responsibility of the living is to learn from the past, and to persistently work to make the present and future ever better. Unfortunately, we now have a president who has demonstrated himself to be ignorant of the past, indifferent to history. For that, we now face at least four years of backsliding instead of progress, where whim will take the place of intelligence and reflective actions.

The great irony is that the "Make American great again" slogan will be most appropriate when the next president to succeed Trump will have the task of undoing the damage that Trump will have wrought.

"The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge'."

Isaac Asimov, in his Newsweek article A Cult of Ignorance, January 21, 1980

"...in the big lie there is always a certain force of credibility; because the broad masses of a nation are always more easily corrupted in the deeper strata of their emotional nature than consciously or voluntarily; and thus in the primitive simplicity of their minds they more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie, since they themselves often tell small lies in little matters but would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods. It would never come into their heads to fabricate colossal untruths, and they would not believe that others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously. Even though the facts which prove this to be so may be brought clearly to their minds, they will still doubt and waver and will continue to think that there may be some other explanation. For the grossly impudent lie always leaves traces behind it, even after it has been nailed down, a fact which is known to all expert liars in this world and to all who conspire together in the art of lying. These people know only too well how to use falsehood for the basest purposes."

Adolph Hitler "Mein Kampf"

The opinions put forth on this page are solely those of the author.