Is Trump the Worst President in History?
by Richard Striner
Richard Striner, a professor of history at Washington College, is
the author of many books including Father
Abraham: Lincoln’s Relentless Struggle to End Slavery and Lincoln’s
Way: How Six Great Presidents Created American Power.
As the
chance of getting rid of Donald Trump — through impeachment or by voting him
out — continues to dominate the headlines, the historical challenge
is compelling. No president has been a greater threat to the
qualities that make the United States of America worthy (at its best) of our
allegiance.
The rise of
Trump and his movement was so freakish that historians will analyze its nature
for a long time. From his origins as a real estate hustler, this
exhibitionist sought attention as a TV vulgarian. Susceptible
television viewers found his coarse behavior amusing. Then he announced that he
was running for the presidency and it looked for a while like just another
cheap publicity stunt.
But
his name-calling tactics struck a chord with a certain group of
voters. Our American scene began to darken. Before
long, he was hurling such vicious abuse that it ushered in a politics of
rage. As his egomania developed into full megalomania, the “alt-right”
gravitated toward him.
The
“movement” had started.
More
and more, to the horror of everyone with power to see and understand, he showed
a proto-fascist mentality. So alarms began to spread: mental health
professionals warned that he exemplifies “malignant narcissism.”
Never
before in American history has the presidential office passed into the hands of
a seditionist. And the use of this term is
appropriate. With no conception of principles or limits — “I want”
is his political creed —he mocks the rule of law at every turn.
At a
police convention in 2017, he urged the officers in attendance to ignore their
own regulations and brutalize the people they arrest. He pardoned
ex-Arizona sheriff Joe Arpaio, who was convicted of criminal contempt of
court. He appointed Scott Pruitt to head the EPA so he could wreck
the agency and let polluters have the spree of their lives.
Trump
is fascinated by powerful dictators with little regard to human rights or
democracy. He compliments Vladimir Putin and hopes to invite that murderer
to stay in the White House. He likes Rodrigo Duterte of the
Philippines, a tyrant who subverts that nation’s democracy.
So,
Trump certainly has the personality of a fascist. But he is not
quite as dangerous as other authoritarians in history.
In the
first place, he lacks the fanatical vision that drove the great tyrants like
Hitler and Stalin to pursue their sick versions of utopia. He is
nothing but a grubby opportunist. He has no ideas, only
appetites. The themes that pass for ideas in the mind of
Donald Trump begin as prompts that are fed to him by others — Stephen Miller,
Sean Hannity, and (once upon a time) Steve Bannon. To be sure, he would fit
right in among the despots who tyrannize banana-republics. But that
sort of a political outcome in America is hard to envision at the moment.
Second, American
traditions — though our current crisis shows some very deep flaws in our
constitutional system — are strong enough to place a limit on the damage Trump
can do. If he ordered troops to occupy the Capitol, disperse the
members of Congress, and impose martial law, the chance that commanders or
troops would carry out such orders is nil.
Third,
Americans have faced challenges before. Many say he is our very worst
president — bar none. And how tempting it is to
agree. But a short while ago, people said the same thing about
George W. Bush, who of course looks exemplary now when compared to our
presidential incumbent.
The
“worst president.”
“Worst,”
of course, is a value judgment that is totally dependent on our standards for
determining “badness.” And any number of our presidents were very
bad indeed — or so it could be argued.
Take
Andrew Jackson, with his belligerence, his simple-mindedness, his racism as
reflected in the Indian Removal Act of 1830. Take all the
pro-slavery presidents before the Civil War who tried to make the enslavement
of American blacks perpetual: John Tyler, Franklin Pierce, James
Buchanan. Take James K. Polk and his squalid war of aggression against
Mexico. Take Andrew Johnson, who did everything he could to ruin the
lives of the newly-freed blacks after Lincoln’s murder.
The
list could go on indefinitely, depending on our individual standards for
identifying “badness.” Shall we continue? Consider
Ulysses S. Grant and Warren G. Harding, so clueless in regard to the
comparatively easy challenge of preventing corruption among their
associates. Or consider Grover Cleveland and Herbert Hoover, who
blinded themselves to the desperation of millions in economic depressions. And
Richard Nixon, the only president to date who has resigned the office in
disgrace.
Which
brings us to Trump.
However
incompetent or even malevolent some previous American presidents were, this one
is unique. The Trump presidency is a singular aberration, a defacement of norms
and ideals without precedent. However bad some other presidents were
all of them felt a certain basic obligation to maintain at least a semblance of
dignity and propriety in their actions.
Not
Trump.
Foul
beyond words, he lurches from one brutal whim to another, seeking gratification
in his never-ending quest to humiliate others. He spews insults in every
direction all day. He makes fun of the handicapped. He
discredits journalists in order to boost the credibility of crackpots and
psychopathic bigots. He accuses reporters of creating “fake news” so
he can generate fake news himself: spew a daily torrent of hallucinatory
lies to his gullible followers.
He
amuses himself — with the help of his money and the shyster lawyers that it
pays for — in getting away with a lifetime’s worth of compulsive frauds that
might very well lead to prosecutions (later) if the evidence has not been
destroyed and if the statute of limitations has not expired.
So
far, however, he is always too brazen to get what he deserves, too slippery for
anyone to foil.
Anyone
with half of ounce of decency can see this wretched man for what he
is. They know what’s going on, and yet there’s nothing they can do
to make it stop. And that adds to Trump’s dirty
satisfaction. Any chance to out-maneuver the decent — to infuriate them —
quickens his glee. It makes his victory all the more rotten, incites
him to keep on taunting his victims.
It’s
all a big joke to Donald Trump, and he can never, ever, get enough of
it.
The
question must be asked: when in our lifetimes — when in all the
years that our once-inspiring Republic has existed — have American institutions
been subjected to such treatment? How long can American morale and
cohesion survive this?
Nancy
Pelosi has said that in preference to seeing Trump impeached, she would like to
see him in jail. Current Justice Department policy — which forbids
the indictment of presidents — makes it possible for Trump to break our
nation’s laws with impunity. Impeachment is useless if the Senate’s
Republicans, united in their ruthlessness and denial, take the coward’s way
out.
So the
prospect of locking him up may have to wait. But the day of
reckoning for this fake — this imposter who will never have a glimmer of clue
as to how to measure up to his office — may come in due time. Then
the presidential fake who accuses his victims of fakery will live with some
things that are real: stone walls, iron bars, a nice prison haircut,
and the consequences of his actions.
Field of
Anonymous Trump Donors Getting Crowded
|
WASHINGTON
-- Last year, when a "senior administration official" wrote an
anonymous New York Times opinion piece -- "I Am Part of the Resistance
Inside the Trump Administration" -- the unknown author's essay prompted
praise and approbation.
Now, we
learn, it has spawned a book.
"The dilemma -- which (Trump) does not fully
grasp," Anonymous wrote in September 2018, "is that many of the
senior officials in his own administration are working diligently from within
to frustrate parts of his agenda and his worst inclinations. I would know. I am
one of them."
Critics on the right called the author a coward for penning a
piece under the cloak of anonymity. Critics on the left pounced on the author's
failure to openly denounce Trump -- the only act that they would consider
courageous.
Trump branded the piece "TREASON" and urged
then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions to find the dirty rat.
Journalists did not miss the irony in the author's
identification as a "senior administration official." The Trump White
House was indignant, even though the press office routinely conducts briefings
after directing reporters to identify the briefers as "senior
administration officials." Then Team Trump denounced the press for relying
on unnamed sources.
I saw the piece as confirmation that good people worked in
the administration out of a sense of public service -- and that some stayed
because they felt a duty to curb Trump's worst instincts. The book deal, alas, suggests the
unknown civil servant has a hunger for self-promotion, as well as a poor sense
of timing.
For one
thing, the Mueller report tells voters everything they need to know about
Trump. To wit: There was no collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign. And
Trump frequently pushed those around him to do his dirty work, and they often
failed to do his bidding.
Former campaign manager Corey Lewandowski, for example, chose not to tell
Sessions to "unrecuse" himself from the Russian probe, lest Trump
fire him. Instead, Lewandowski passed on the assignment to a White House aide,
who also chose not to act.
In words that echoed the New York Times piece, special
counsel Robert Mueller wrote, "The president's efforts to influence the
investigation were mostly unsuccessful, but that is largely because the persons
who surrounded the president declined to carry out orders or accede to his
requests."
Trump voters don't care. They believe the Russian probe was a
witch hunt. Who can blame them? Mueller allowed the investigation to slog on
long past any reasonable suspicion that Moscow was pulling Trump's strings.
Federal officials throwing everything they've got at Trump isn't really a good
look right now.
The field of anonymous Trump accusers is getting crowded. In
August, an identity-shielded whistleblower came forward with a complaint that
"the president of the United States is using the power of his office to
solicit interference from a foreign country in the 2020 U.S. election." It
was in reference to a July 25 phone call during which Trump asked Ukrainian
President Volodymyr Zelensky to look for political dirt that could be used in
next year's presidential race.
The unidentified whistleblower's lawyer said he represents
another unidentified whistleblower. Democrats argue these individuals must be
shielded for their own protection, but everyone knows they'll be feted as
heroes when their identities -- predictably -- are revealed.
Book
deals? You know it.
Perhaps the anonymous New York Times author decided to cut a
deal to beat the pack of Ukraine scolds.
House Democrats have even been holding impeachment hearings
behind closed doors to question known individuals. After releasing damning
tidbits, they've yet to release full testimony. In contrast, Trump made public
a rough transcript of the July 25 conversation.
If there's something voters don't know that Anonymous thinks
they need to, he or she could pen another op-ed, not a bestseller -- or better
yet, with an election a year away, come forward and face the wrath of the right
in the light of day.
Of course, Anonymous has an agent. Matt Latimer told CNN that
the author of the 272-page "A Warning," published by Twelve, a
division of Hachette, "refused the chance at a seven-figure advance and
intends to donate a substantial amount of any royalties to the White House
Correspondents Association and other organizations that fight for a press that
seeks the truth."
As a member of the association, I suppose I should be
grateful and not at all curious about how much of the proceeds will go to
worthy causes. If only I knew whom to thank.
Contact Debra J. Saunders at dsaunders@reviewjournal.com or
202-662-7391. Follow @DebraJSaunders on Twitter.
The Kitchen-Table Case for Impeaching Trump
The president’s abuses of power are
materially hurting regular people.
After months of waiting, the House
Judiciary Committee has finally voted to open an impeachment inquiry into
President Donald Trump. With that tedious “will-they-or-won’t-they” question
out of the way, the logical next question is: can impeachment succeed? The
answer is a resounding yes. But getting there will require a strategic
reorientation away from a sluggish and legalistic examination of Trump’s
offenses via recalcitrant witnesses and toward a broader consideration of how
his systemic abuses of power have materially hurt regular people.
The continued
reticence of so many Democrats, led by Speaker Nancy Pelosi, to support
impeachment is based on two premises. The first is that impeachment is modestly
unpopular, which is true, so far as it goes. The second is the
conventional wisdom that impeaching President Clinton backfired on House
Republicans.
Look a little
closer at the second contention, however, and it quickly falls apart. The case
against Trump is vastly stronger than that against Clinton. While Clinton’s alleged
crimes were largely committed in the interest of avoiding embarrassment,
Trump’s represent clear abuses of power with malignant implications. The second
flank of the argument—that impeaching Clinton “backfired” on Republicans—is
more myth than reality. Republicans may have
lost the House in the next election cycle, but Clinton’s impeachment was a
nontrivial factor in Al Gore’s 2000 loss. Therefore, we join other observers in choosing to view this “example”
as evidence in support of impeaching Trump.
But the
polling argument is particularly short-sighted. Voters take cues from political
leaders about how to react to political events. For months, the overwhelming
cue on impeachment from Democratic leaders like Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, and Joe
Biden has been to stand down. This inhibition has created a negative feedback
loop in which impeachment-phobic lawmakers convince voters not to support
impeachment, and then point to lukewarm public support to justify their
passivity. Rinse and repeat.
Five months
after the release of the Mueller report, this message has pretty well stuck.
After all, if the special counsel’s findings were so serious, they should have
been acted on immediately, right? Much as a gourmet meal is never as good
reheated, Democrats cannot expect to ignore evidence of impeachable conduct in
the spring and have it be as fresh and tasty when zapped in the autumn. Just
take a gander at this week’s House Judiciary hearing with Corey Lewandowski to
see how unappetizing this fare has become.
While the
Mueller report surely provided enough evidence to justify impeaching Trump on
substantive grounds, hesitant lawmakers have largely drained it of much of its
political force (and impeachment is an inherently political process).
To overcome
this damage, impeachment backers will have to make opposition to impeachment
untenable with voters, thereby short-circuiting the aforementioned negative
feedback loop. That means focusing on the ways in which Trump’s corruption has
made life harder and more dangerous for millions of Americans. In other words, impeachment
should focus above all on his failure to carry out his constitutional duty under Article II, Section 1 of the
Constitution “to take care that the laws be faithfully executed.” By
emphasizing how impeachment is relevant to the “kitchen-table” issues that keep
regular people up at night—like low wages or exorbitant healthcare premiums—the
House Judiciary Committee can inspire a swell of grassroots pressure that will
give reluctant legislators no choice but to back the effort.
The issues tackled in Mueller’s report,
like obstruction of justice, are removed from people’s day-to-day lives. Of
course, there is nothing inherently insufficient with such a basis for impeachment;
were it not for the Democratic leadership’s opposition, impeachment proceedings
would have begun in April. Still, more Americans agonize over how to pay back
their student loans, or whether to incur the costs of seeing a doctor when
uninsured, than discuss “the role of law.” The Mueller report, therefore.
likely strikes most Americans as “political” and is less likely to
inspire new broad-based support for impeachment.
The same goes
for the proposed lines of inquiry in Judiciary’s newly expanded investigations. The committee will
reportedly examine Trump’s alleged abuse of presidential pardons, hush-money
payments, and use of office for personal enrichment. While these scandals are
undoubtedly important, they don’t penetrate the lives of ordinary people.
That doesn’t
mean that Democrats should not pursue any of these alleged crimes; the public
deserves to know as much as possible about any president’s corruption, and
Congress is best suited to furnish those answers. But these matters should not
sit alone at the center of the Democrats’ case for impeachment. An impeachment
inquiry is a way to control the national conversation. While bills passed by
House Democrats predictably get little attention from most of the media, an
impeachment hearing is guaranteed to achieve the scarcest political resource in
2019—the attention of voters.
Given that
platform, lawmakers have a lot to choose from. In light of recent revelations
that the number of uninsured people has risen for the first time since 2009, lawmakers might want to
start by investigating how Trump has undermined the Affordable Care Act (ACA).
You might say
that Trump’s health care moves are reprehensible, but are they really
impeachable? Ask Thaddeus Stevens, the Pennsylvania representative who was the
catalyst behind Andrew Johnson’s impeachment and the author of an article of impeachment
accusing Johnson of failing to “take care” that the Tenure of Office Act be
faithfully executed. Other articles accused Johnson of offenses including
insulting Congress and unlawfully firing his Secretary of War, but this one got
at his most serious transgression: failing to honor and enforce the laws as
Congress had intended.
Trump has made
no secret of his disdain for Obama’s healthcare law, but whether he likes it or
not, it’s his duty to administer it unless and until Congress passes a new one
or repeals it. Rather than faithfully carrying out that responsibility, Trump
has sought to destroy the law. On his first day in office, he signed an executive order directing agencies to use all of the tools at their
disposal to undermine the statute—and they have faithfully complied. His administration
also shortened the open enrollment period,
cut ACA’s advertising budget, and slashed tax credits for enrollees. Trump
is not coy about his intentions. “I have just about ended Obamacare,” he once said. Congress should
demonstrate its commitment to improving Americans’ health care access by
nailing Trump for his considerable efforts to “end” a lawful program by
executive action that he could not repeal legislatively.
There are
other matters that need a deeper probe. Lawmakers should investigate whether
Trump’s administration has intentionally slowed the allocation of aid to Puerto
Rico. Last week, as Puerto Ricans braced for Hurricane Dorian’s potential
landfall, many did so without a proper roof over their heads, surrounded by many other reminders of
Hurricane Maria’s destruction. This hardly seems like an accident: two years
after Maria, the scandal-riddled Federal Emergency Management
Agency (FEMA) has only approved funding for nine projects out of
10,000 applications. Meanwhile, in an unprecedented move, the executive branch
is holding up a Community Development Block Grant for Disaster Recovery
(CDBG-DR) headed for the U.S. territory. The administration’s refusal to
effectively administer this recovery aid is not some distant problem. Puerto
Ricans (including the diaspora living in Florida and elsewhere on the U.S.
mainland) feel it every day in the way of destroyed roads, damaged schools, the
lack of a proper roof over many of their heads, or having been forced to leave
the island altogether.
It seems
impossible to imagine that Trump’s failure “to take care” is unrelated to the
animus he has shown toward Latinx communities since the day he announced his presidential campaign. More
broadly, it is even harder to argue that a president can faithfully execute the
law under our Constitution when he openly views the government’s obligations to
people as dependent on their race or religion—as his “Muslim ban” makes
evidently clear.
Lawmakers
should also look into Trump’s decision to allow three unconfirmed, unqualified,
Mar-a-Lago members to essentially run the Department of Veterans’
Affairs from the resort. Has Trump’s reliance on his paying customers to run
the VA in any way hurt the millions of veterans who rely on the department’s
services each year? The public has a right to know. The House Committee on
Veterans’ Affairs opened an investigation into these
puppeteers last winter, but the administration’s stonewalling appears to
have hindered meaningful progress.
Trump’s
appointees have harmed regular people in myriad other ways. Take, for example,
Education Secretary Betsy DeVos’ failure to administer loan forgiveness
programs, even after having been ordered by a court to do so. That has left thousands
of people suffering under the crushing yoke of student loans they were promised
would be discharged. At the same time, her department’s laughable oversight of loan servicers
is delaying forgiveness for hundreds of
thousands more. Given her absolute disregard for her responsibilities as
Education Secretary, why has she not been removed? Quite clearly, Trump feels
no compunction about running afoul of his obligation to “take care” to execute
the law, even if that means flat out ignoring court orders.
House members must not only persuade
voters to embrace impeachment with the righteousness of their case, but also
with the urgency of their actions. That means issuing subpoenas far more
liberally—and suing when necessary to enforce them without delay. Indeed, the
fact that Trump admits “we are fighting all the
subpoenas” reflects acknowledgement that he is undermining Congressional
oversight, which was itself a key
element of the
third article of impeachment against Richard Nixon.
Basic
political horse sense suggests that investigating how Trump’s team is hiding
evidence of their alleged lawlessness would help generate attention to the
actions they are covering up. If pursued effectively, such a probe can impose a
steep political cost.
Ultimately,
Congress should view its investigatory scope broadly. It should vigorously
examine as many instances of Trump’s corruption as possible. But his crimes
against the American people should sit at the center of their effort.
To treat them
as secondary, as lawmakers have done thus far, misses the larger point. The
intentional harm Trump has inflicted on Americans, whom he is tasked with
protecting, represents by far his most egregious violation of his
Constitutional oath of office. Lawmakers should respond accordingly.
The (Full) Case for
Impeachment
A menu of high crimes and misdemeanors.
The crimes for which impeachment is the prescribed punishment are notoriously undefined. And
that’s for a reason: Presidential powers are vast, and it’s impossible to
design laws to cover every possible abuse of the office’s authority. House
Democrats have calculated that an impeachment focused narrowly on the Ukraine
scandal will make the strongest legal case against President Trump. But that’s
not Trump’s only impeachable offense. A full accounting would include a wide
array of dangerous and authoritarian acts — 82, to be precise. His violations
fall into seven broad categories of potentially impeachable misconduct that
should be weighed, if not by the House, then at least by history.
I. Abusing Power for
Political Gain
Explanation: The single most
dangerous threat to any democratic system is that the ruling party will use its
governing powers to entrench itself illegitimately.
Evidence: (1) The Ukraine scandal is fundamentally about the president abusing his authority
by wielding his power over foreign policy as a cudgel against his domestic
opponents. The president is both implicitly and explicitly trading the U.S.
government’s favor for investigations intended to create adverse publicity for
Americans whom Trump wishes to discredit. (2) During his campaign, he
threatened to impose policies harmful to Amazon in retribution for critical
coverage in the Washington Post. (“If I become president, oh do they have problems.”) He has
since pushed the postmaster general to double rates on Amazon, and the Defense Department held
up a $10 billion contract with Amazon, almost certainly at
his behest. (3) He has ordered his officials to block the AT&T–Time
Warner merger as punishment for CNN’s coverage
of him. (4) He encouraged the NFL to blacklist Colin Kaepernick.
II. Mishandling
Classified Information
Explanation: As he does with
many other laws, the president enjoys broad immunity from regulations on the
proper handling of classified information, allowing him to take action that
would result in felony convictions for other federal employees. President
Trump’s mishandling of classified information is not merely careless but a
danger to national security.
Evidence: (5) Trump has habitually
communicated on a smartphone highly vulnerable to foreign espionage. (6–30) He has reversed 25
security-clearance denials (including for his
son-in-law, who has conducted potentially compromising business with foreign
interests). (31) He has turned Mar-a-Lago into an unsecured second White
House and even once handled news of North Korea’s
missile launch in public view. (32) He gave Russian
officials sensitive Israeli intelligence that blew “the most valuable source of
information on external plotting by [the] Islamic State,” the Wall Street Journal reported. (33) He tweeted a
high-resolution satellite image of an Iranian launch site for the sake of
boasting.
III. Undermining Duly
Enacted Federal Law
Explanation: President Trump has abused his authority either by distorting the
intent of laws passed by Congress or by flouting them. He has directly ordered
subordinates to violate the law and has promised pardons in advance, enabling
him and his staff to operate with impunity. In these actions, he has undermined
Congress’s constitutional authority to make laws.
Evidence: (34) Having failed to
secure funding authority for a border wall, President Trump unilaterally ordered funds to be moved from other budget accounts. (35) He has undermined regulations on
health insurance under the Affordable Care Act
preventing insurers from charging higher rates to customers with more expensive
risk profiles. (36) He has abused emergency powers to impose tariffs, intended to protect the supply chain in case of war, to seize
from Congress its authority to negotiate international trade agreements. (37–38) He has ordered border
agents to illegally block asylum seekers from
entering the country and has ordered other aides to
violate eminent-domain laws and contracting procedures in building the border wall, (39–40) both times promising
immunity from lawbreaking through presidential pardons.
IV. Obstruction of
Congress
Explanation: The executive branch
and Congress are co-equal, each intended to guard against usurpation of
authority by the other. Trump has refused to acknowledge any legitimate
oversight function of Congress, insisting that because Congress has political
motivations, it is disqualified from it. His actions and rationale strike at
the Constitution’s design of using the political ambitions of the elected
branches to check one another.
Evidence: (41) Trump has refused to abide by a
congressional demand to release his tax returns, despite an unambiguous law granting the House this authority.
His lawyers have flouted the law on the spurious grounds that subpoenas for his
tax returns “were issued to harass President Donald J. Trump, to rummage
through every aspect of his personal finances, his businesses and the private
information of the president and his family, and to ferret about for any
material that might be used to cause him political damage.” Trump’s lawyers
have argued that Congress cannot investigate potentially illegal behavior by
the president because the authority to do so belongs to prosecutors. In other
litigation, those lawyers have argued that prosecutors cannot investigate the
president. These contradictory positions support an underlying stance that no
authority can investigate his misconduct. (42) He has defended his refusal
to accept oversight on the grounds that members of Congress “aren’t, like,
impartial people. The Democrats are trying to win 2020.” (43) The president has
also declared that impeachment is
illegal and should be stopped in the courts (though,
unlike with his other obstructive acts, he has not yet taken any legal action
toward this end).
V. Obstruction of Justice
Explanation: By virtue of his control over the federal government’s
investigative apparatus, the president (along with the attorney general) is
uniquely well positioned to cover up his own misconduct. Impeachment is the
sole available remedy for a president who uses his powers of office to hold himself
immune from legal accountability. In particular, the pardon power gives the
president almost unlimited authority to obstruct investigations by providing
him with a means to induce the silence of co-conspirators.
Evidence: (44–53) The Mueller report contains ten instances of President Trump engaging in
obstructive acts. While none of those succeeded in stopping the probe, Trump
dangled pardons and induced his co-conspirators to lie or withhold evidence
from investigators. Former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen testified to
Congress that Trump had directed him to lie to it
about his negotiations with the Russian government during the campaign to
secure a lucrative building contract in Moscow. And when Cohen stated his
willingness to lie, Robert Costello, an attorney who had worked with Rudy
Giuliani, emailed Cohen assuring him he could “sleep well tonight” because he
had “friends in high places.” Trump has publicly praised witnesses in the
Russia investigation for refusing to cooperate, and he sent a private message
to former national-security adviser Michael Flynn urging him to “stay strong.”
He has reinforced this signal by repeatedly denouncing witnesses who cooperate
with investigators as “flippers.” (54–61) He has exercised his pardon power for a series of Republican
loyalists, sending a message that at least some of his co-conspirators have
received. The president’s pardon of conservative pundit
Dinesh D’Souza “has to be a signal to Mike
Flynn and Paul Manafort and even Robert S. Mueller III: Indict people for
crimes that don’t pertain to Russian collusion and this is what could happen,”
Roger Stone told the Washington Post. “The special counsel has awesome powers, as you know, but the
president has even more awesome powers.”
VI. Profiting From Office
Explanation: Federal
employees must follow strict rules to prevent them from being influenced by any
financial conflict. Conflict-of-interest rules are less clear for a sitting
president because all presidential misconduct will be resolved by either
reelection or impeachment. If Trump held any position in the federal government
below the presidency, he would have been fired for his obvious conflicts. His violations are so gross
and blatant they merit impeachment.
Evidence: (62) He has
maintained a private business while holding office, (63) made decisions that
influence that business, (64) and accepted payments from parties both domestic and foreign who
have an interest in his policies. (65) He has openly signaled that these parties can gain his favor by
doing so. (66) He has refused even to disclose his interests, which would at
least make public which parties are paying him.
VII. Fomenting Violence
Explanation: One of the
unspoken roles of the president is to serve as a symbolic head of state.
Presidents have very wide latitude for their political rhetoric, but Trump has
violated its bounds, exceeding in his viciousness the rhetoric of Andrew
Johnson (who was impeached in part for
the same offense).
Evidence: (67) Trump called for locking up
his 2016 opponent after the election. (68–71) He has clamored for the deportation
of four women of color who are congressional
representatives of the opposite party. (72) He has described a wide
array of domestic political opponents as treasonous, including the news
media. (73–80) On at least eight occasions, he has encouraged his
supporters — including members of the armed forces — to attack his political
opponents. (“I have the support of the police, the support of the military, the
support of the Bikers for Trump — I have the tough people, but they don’t play
it tough until they go to a certain point, and then it would be very bad, very
bad.”) (81) He has threatened journalists with violence if they fail to
produce positive coverage. (“If the media would write correctly and write
accurately and write fairly, you’d have a lot less violence in the
country.”) (82) There have been 36 criminal cases nationwide in which the
defendant invoked Trump’s name in connection with violence; 29 of these cited
him as the inspiration for an attack.
PRESIDENT of the UNITED STATES DONALD TRUMP: pathological
liar, swindler, con man, huckster, golfing cheat, charity foundation fraudster,
tax evader, adulterer, porn whore chaser and servant of the Saudis dictators
THE TRUMP FAMILY FOUNDATION SLUSH FUND…. Will they see
jail?
VISUALIZE REVOLUTION!.... We know where they live!
“Underwood is a
Democrat and is seeking millions of dollars in penalties. She wants Trump and
his eldest children barred from running other charities.”
ANN COULTER
TRUMP’S PARASITIC
FAMILY
Jared’s BFF, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman
(MBS), and the crown prince of Abu Dhabi, Muhammad bin Zayed (MBZ), refer to
Jared as “the clown prince.” Bone-cutter MBS assured those around him that he
had Jared “in my pocket.”
Following meetings at the White House
and also with the Kushners over their 666 Fifth Avenue property, former Qatari
Prime Minister Sheikh Hamad bin Jassim reported back to the emir that “the
people atop the new administration were heavily motivated by personal financial
interest.”
“Truthfully,
It Is Tough To Ignore Some Of The Gross Immoral Behavior By
The President” WASHINGTON
POST
Trump's sister
quits as a federal judge 10 days into formal probe of her possible role in
massive family tax scam that could have ended in her impeachment
·
Trump's older sister resigned as an
appellate court judge shortly after a probe opened into her involvement in
a family tax scheme
·
·
10 days ago an investigation into whether
Maryanne Trump Barry violated judicial conduct rules launched
·
·
The case was closed after Barry resigned
because retired judges are not subject to the rules
·
·
Barry had not heard a case in two years after
transitioning to inactive shortly after Trump's inauguration
·
·
The Trump siblings were probed after an
investigation found they were involved in a tax scheme related to the transfer
of their father's real estate empire
·
President Donald Trump’s older sister Maryanne Trump Barry, 82,
retired as a federal judge just days after an investigation opened into her
possible role in family tax fraud scheme.
Barry was a federal appellate judge in the
third district, which includes Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Delaware, and the
investigation could have led to her impeachment.
She had not presided over a case in more than
two years, but was still listed as an inactive senior judge in the third
district – usually the step taken before full retirement.
Barry did not give any reasons for her
retirement.
The probe into the Trumps was first opened
last fall, after a New York Times investigation found the Trump siblings
engaged in tax schemes in the 1990s, including fraud, that increased their
inherited wealth.
+4
Maryanne Trump Barry resigned as a federal
appellate judge 10 days into an investigation into whether she violated
judicial conduct rules
An investigation into the Trump siblings
opened after the New York Times reported that they transferred their father's
real estate assets improperly in the 1990s
The formal investigation into whether Barry
violated judicial conduct rules started ten days ago, but was closed after
Barry announced her retirement since retired judges are not subject to judicial
conduct rules.
These reviews could result in the censure or
reprimand of federal judges, but in some more extreme cases, the judge could be
referred to the House of Representatives for impeachment.
It appears Barry will receive somewhere
between $184,500 and $217,600 annually, the same salary she earned when she
last met certain workload requirements before changing her status to inactive.
The Times investigation into the Trump’s alleged
that Fred Trump transferred his real estate empire profits and ownership to his
four children, including the president, Barry, brother Robert Trump, and their
sister Elizabeth Trump Grau, in ways designed to dodge gift and estate taxes.
+4
Barry, pictured above with sister Elizabeth
Trump Grau, was a senior inactive judge, which is the step taken usually before
full retirement, and had not heard a case in over two year.
Trump's lawyer Charles Hardner said that the
allegations made as a result of the Times' investigation is '100 per cent
false' and accused the newspaper of defamation
“The New York Times’s allegations of fraud
and tax evasion are 100 per cent false, and highly defamatory,” a lawyer for
Trump, Charles Hardner, said last October.
Barry was elevated to the United States Court
of Appeals for the Third Circuit by President Bill Clinton in 1999, and shortly
after Trump’s inauguration, in February 2017, she notified the court she would
stop hearing cases without citing a reason.
At this point she became a senior inactive
judge and gave up her staff and chambers.
ANN COULTER: WILL THE
GLOBALIST DEMOCRAT PARTY FOR BANKSTERS AND BILLIONAIRES DESTROY AMERICA?
I would also go to all of the working class that are in America,
construction workers in particular. Their salaries have not just
stagnated, they have gone down in the last 20 years. These are the least among us. We are the only ones not speaking
out of self-interest. …
Most of the people who are advocating for open borders … they have a vested in interest in having either the cheap labor or the
Democratic voters. Their neighborhoods aren’t the ones being
overwhelmed. They get the cheap maids, the cheap nannies,
and then they strut around like they’re Martin Luther King.
No, you are talking in your
self-interest, Chamber of Commerce, and Koch brothers, and Nancy Pelosi, and
Chuck Schumer. It’s Donald Trump and our side who are actually
caring about our fellow Americans — the kids who are getting addicted to black
tar heroin. …
The heroin problem in this country is 100 percent a problem of not
having a wall on the border. And 70,000 Americans are dying every year. That’s
more that died in the entire Vietnam War. That is a national emergency.
ANN COULTER
ANN
COULTER EXPOSES TRUMP’S “WALL” HOAX
In fact,
Trump is steadily moving in the precise opposite direction of what he promised.
Illegal immigration is on track to hit the highest levels in
more than a decade, and Trump has willfully decided to keep amnesty advocates
Jared, Ivanka, Mick Mulvaney, Marc Short, and Mercedes Schlapp in the White
House. For all his talk about immigration, did he ever consider hiring people
who share his MAGA vision?
THE TRUMP FAMILY
FOUNDATION SLUSH FUND…. Will they see jail?
VISUALIZE
REVOLUTION!.... We know where they live!
“Underwood is a Democrat
and is seeking millions of dollars in penalties. She wants Trump and his eldest
children barred from running other charities.”
TRUMP’S
CRAP ON BORDERS AND HIS PRETEND WALL IS ONLY ONE MORE TRUMP HOAX!
Only a
complete fool would believe that Trump is any more for American Legal workers
than the Democrat Party for Billionaires and Banksters!
“Trump
Administration Betrays Low-Skilled American Workers.”
The
latest ad from the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) asks Trump
to reject the mass illegal and legal immigration policies supported by Wall
Street, corporate executives, and most specifically, the GOP mega-donor Koch
brothers.
Efforts by the big business
lobby, Chamber of Commerce, Koch brothers, and George W. Bush Center include
increasing employment-based legal immigration that would likely crush the historic wage gains that Trump has delivered
for America’s blue collar and working class citizens.
Mark
Zuckerberg’s Silicon Valley investors are uniting with the Koch network’s
consumer and industrial investors to demand a huge DACA amnesty
*
A handful of
Republican and Democrat lawmakers are continuing to tout a plan that gives
amnesty to nearly a million illegal aliens in exchange for some amount of
funding for President Trump’s proposed border wall along the U.S.-Mexico
border.
THE DEATH OF THE
AMERICAN MIDDLE-CLASS
THE ASSAULT ON THE AMERICAN WORKER BY
PHONY POPULIST SWAMP KEEPER TRUMP
Companies say they often pay good
wages to their imported H-2B workers, often around $15 per hour. But that price
is below the wages sought by Americans for the seasonal work which leaves them
jobless in the off-season. The lower wages paid to H-2Bs also allows companies
to pay lower wages to their American supervisors. NEIL MUNRO
WHAT WILL TRUMP AND
HIS PARASITIC FAMILY DO FOR MONEY???
JUST ASK THE
SAUDIS!
JOHN DEAN: Not
so far. This has been right by the letter of the special counsel’s charter.
He’s released the document. What I’m looking for is relief and
understanding that there’s no witting or unwitting likelihood that the
President is an agent of Russia. That’s when I’ll feel comfortable, and no
evidence even hints at that. We don’t have that yet. We’re still in the process
of unfolding the report to look at it. And its, as I say, if [Attornery General
William Barr] honors his word, we’ll know more soon.
“Our entire crony capitalist system, Democrat and
Republican alike, has become a kleptocracy approaching par with
third-world hell-holes. This is the way a great country is raided by
its elite.” ---- Karen McQuillan AMERICAN THINKER
ANN COULTER EXPOSES TRUMP’S “WALL” HOAX
In fact, Trump is steadily moving in the precise opposite
direction of what he promised.
Illegal immigration is on track to hit the highest levels in
more than a decade, and Trump has willfully decided to keep amnesty advocates
Jared, Ivanka, Mick Mulvaney, Marc Short, and Mercedes Schlapp in the White
House. For all his talk about immigration, did he ever consider hiring people
who share his MAGA vision?
TRUMP’S CATCH AND
RELEASE… all the “cheap” labor climbing our borders, jobs and welfare lines!
THE ENTIRE REASON TRUMP NOMINATED KIRSTJEN NIELSEN WAS BECAUSE
OF HER LONG HISTORY OF ADVOCATING OPEN BORDERS TO KEEP WAGES DEPRESSED!
In newly confirmed federal data from the Immigration and Customs
Enforcement (ICE) agency, Breitbart News has learned the massive scale and
scope of DHS’s ramped up Catch and Release policy.
For months, DHS officials have said privately that the Catch and
Release program has been taken to new heights, while ICE
union officials declared this week that the program was
in “overdrive” under the direction of DHS Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen. JOHN BINDER
TRUMP AND THE MURDERING 9-11 MUSLIM SAUDIS…
Why is the Swamp Keeper and his family of parasites up their
ar$es??
TRUMP’S TAX BILL:
A massive tax cut for his plundering Goldman Sachs infested
administration.
TRUMP’S SECRET AMNESTY, WIDER OPEN BORDERS DOCTRINE TO KEEP
WAGES DEPRESSED.
"During the same month that
Schlafly had backed Trump for his “America First”
agenda, Nielsen’s committee
released an ideologically-globalist report, promoting
the European migrant crisis
as a win for big business who would profit greatly
from a never-ending stream
of cheap, foreign
migrants."
TRUMPERNOMICS FOR THE
RICH…. and his parasitic family!
Report:
Trump Says He Doesn't Care About the National Debt Because the Crisis Will Hit
After He's Gone
"Trump's
alleged comment is maddening and disheartening,
but at least he's being straightforward about his indefensible
and self-serving neglect. I'll leave you with this reminder of the scope of the problem, not that anyone in power is going to do a damn thing about it."
but at least he's being straightforward about his indefensible
and self-serving neglect. I'll leave you with this reminder of the scope of the problem, not that anyone in power is going to do a damn thing about it."
TRUMPERNOMICS:
THE RICH APPLAUD TWITTER’S
TRUMP’S TAX CUTS FOR THE SUPER RICH!
"The tax overhaul would mean an unprecedented windfall for the
super-rich, on top
of the fact that virtually all income gains during the period of
the supposed
recovery from the financial crash of 2008 have gone to the top 1
percent income
bracket."
TRUMPS INFORMS NARCOMEX:
THE PACT BETWEEN MEXICO AND TRUMP… NO WALL, NO REAL
ENFORCEMENT.
http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2017/08/did-trump-promise-mexico-no-pardon-for.html
Swamp Keeper Trump prepares
for the inevitable move to impeach him and ask for asylum in Scotland.
Fox News host Tucker
Carlson said in an interview Thursday that President Donald Trump has succeeded
as a conversation starter but has failed to keep his most important campaign
promises.
“His chief promises were
that he would build the wall, de-fund Planned Parenthood, and repeal Obamacare,
and he hasn’t done any of those things,” Carlson told Urs
Gehriger of the Swiss weekly Die Weltwoche.
TRUMP
POSITIONS HIMSELF FOR IMPEACHMENT
MAY LEAVE
THE COUNTRY FOR HIS GOLF COURSE IN SCOTLAND
“Truthfully, It Is Tough To Ignore Some Of The Gross Immoral Behavior
By The President” WASHINGTON POST
“Mueller and the anti-Trump camp within the ruling elite know
very well that the billionaire New York real estate and gambling
speculator-turned president is mired in criminal activity, which is certain to
be reflected in the material seized from Cohen. They have Trump by the throat,
and Trump knows it.”
*
“Our entire crony capitalist system, Democrat and Republican
alike, has become a kleptocracy approaching par with third-world
hell-holes. This is the way a great country is raided by its elite.”
----Karen McQuillan AMERICAN THINKER
*
Former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen testified before the House Oversight
Committee Wednesday that the “whole Trump family” was potentially
comprised by a foreign power ahead of the 2016 presidential election.
"Trump's alleged comment is
maddening and disheartening, but at least he's being straightforward
about his indefensible and self-serving neglect. I'll leave you
with this
reminder of the scope of the problem,
not that anyone in power is going to do a damn thing about it."
Banks
Give Congress Documents on Possible Trump Dealings with Russians
ROBYN BECK/AFP/Getty Images
8 Aug 20195,146
2:41
A group of
banks has turned over documents on Russians who may have done business with
President Donald Trump following a request from Congress, a Thursday report
states.
According to the Wall Street Journal, Bank of
America, JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo, and Deutsche Bank gave
lawmakers thousands of documents as part of a joint investigation
by the House Financial Services and Intelligence Committees into possible
foreign influence over President Trump and members of his family. The former committee is chaired by none other than impeachment
crusaders Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA). These financial institutions are expected
to transfer more documents to congressional investigators in the coming weeks,
the Journal said.
Lawmakers issued subpoenas for the information in April.
“Separately, Deutsche Bank, Mr.
Trump’s primary bank, has turned over emails, loan agreements and other
documents related to the Trump Organization to the office of New York Attorney
General Letitia James, in response to a civil subpoena sent earlier this year,
according to people familiar with the New York investigation,” the
newspaper reports.
In April, President Trump, his
three oldest children, and the Trump Organization sued Deutsche Bank
and Capital One to prevent them from handing over their financial records
to Congress. The president and his former real estate company also filed a
lawsuit to block a subpoena from the House Oversight Committee seeking
financial documents from Mazars, an accounting firm.
Last month,
President Trump filed a civil lawsuit to
prevent the House Ways and Means Committee from obtaining his tax returns
from New York state officials.
The lawsuit, which was filed July 23rd in Washington against the
House panel, New York State Attorney General Letitia James, and New
York State Department of Taxation and Finance commissioner Michael
Schmidt, seeks an injunction to block a new state law. The law would allow the
Democrat-controlled House and Ways Means Committee to obtain the president’s
tax returns.
“Once it became clear that Treasury
would not divulge the President’s federal tax returns, New York passed a law
allowing the Committee to get his state returns,” reads the court filing. “That
hyper-specific condition was, not coincidentally, already satisfied for the
intended target of the Act: President Trump.”
The committee sued the Treasury Department and IRS officials in
an attempt to enforce a law that allows its chairman, Rep. Richard Neal
(D-MA), to obtain any taxpayer’s returns.
Millennials lose it when
the guy who owns their favorite companies fundraises for Trump
While the multiple mass shootings and
stabbings in the U.S. in the past few weeks upset many, nothing exercised the
minds of wealthy fit liberals as learning that the investor of their favored,
elitist, expensive gyms, or as the wealthy fit liberals refer to them, fitness
centers, they attend was hosting a fundraiser last night for... President
Donald J. Trump (R). And hosting it, no less, in the exclusive,
elitist playground of the East Cost liberal and wealthy: the Hamptons.
Entrust it to Vox, to
ponder the dilemma of the oh, so self-labeled hip who exercise at, or work out
as they refer their imposed sweat inducing contortions at, Equinox and Soul
Cycle, to keep their butts tight and their minds closed.
But it can be
particularly surprising to consumers when brands that have cultivated
progressive and inclusive images are found to be associated with campaigns or
causes that stand for the opposite.
Stephen Ross
is a billionaire real estate developer (reported net worth: $7.7 billion) and
owner of a private investment firm that has backed many of the latter kind of
brands. He’s also hosting a fundraiser for the Trump 2020 campaign at his
Hamptons mansion on Friday, August 9, where tickets will range from $100,000
for a lunch and photo opp to $250,000 to attend a roundtable discussion,
according to the Washington Post.
Rich people hosting fundraisers for Trump is not itself particularly notable,
but the fact that Ross’s firm has financed companies beloved in part for their
progressive images has caused many patrons to call for a boycott. Among the
brands Ross has invested in are Equinox, which has supported LGBTQ charities in
the past; the spinning behemoth SoulCycle; the organic tampon brand Lola; and
the budget gym Blink Fitness, as well as food chains like Momofuku and its
pastry offshoot Milk Bar, and the fast-casual pizza spot &pizza.
OMG! What to do?
New York Magazine to the rescue with additional information on those boycott targets for the
morally outraged, tight-bodied, and narrow-minded. And it is
extensive.
When the news
broke that Stephen Ross, a real-estate executive and venture capitalist, was
set to throw an extravagant fundraiser for Donald Trump in the Hamptons on
Friday, reverberations of shock and horror were felt in millennial communities
far and wide, from Brooklyn to downtown L.A. to Austin and Portland,
Oregon. Why? Because Ross is the chairman of the Related
Companies, a parent company of both Equinox and SoulCycle, where many a young
urban professional flocks daily to sweat out their existential dread. ...
Unfortunately
it gets even worse. Ross has a hand in so many millennial lifestyle
entities that there are probably a few influencers whose entire feeds must be
cleansed of products tied to Trump cash. If you think you’re
untouched, don’t be so sure[.] ... The giant, tangled rat king of capitalism
means that unless you live like my friend John, who still has a flip phone and
claims to have never ordered anything online, you’re part of a teeming network
of unsavory dealings.
But anyway,
here is a list of all the pertinent things Ross partly owns as you decide how
much of your life must be canceled[.]
Read the list to learn how those with
unfit morals will suffer. Then, exercising your rights, smile
and then go for a nice walk.
Top Military Officers
Unload on Trump
The commander in
chief is impulsive, disdains expertise, and gets his intelligence briefings
from Fox News. What does this mean for those on the front lines?
Illustration: Paul Spella; Michael Heiman / Getty
For
most of the past two decades, American troops have been
deployed all over the world—to about 150 countries. During that time, hundreds
of thousands of young men and women have experienced combat, and a generation
of officers have come of age dealing with the practical realities of war. They
possess a deep well of knowledge and experience. For the past three years,
these highly trained professionals have been commanded by Donald Trump.
To get a sense of
what serving Trump has been like, I interviewed officers up and down the ranks,
as well as several present and former civilian Pentagon employees. Among the
officers I spoke with were four of the highest ranks—three or four stars—all
recently retired. All but one served Trump directly; the other left the service
shortly before Trump was inaugurated. They come from different branches of the
military, but I’ll simply refer to them as “the generals.” Some spoke only off
the record, some allowed what they said to be quoted without attribution, and
some talked on the record.
Military officers are
sworn to serve whomever voters send to the White House. Cognizant of the
special authority they hold, high-level officers epitomize respect for the
chain of command, and are extremely reticent about criticizing their civilian
overseers. That those I spoke with made an exception in Trump’s case is
telling, and much of what they told me is deeply disturbing. In 20 years of
writing about the military, I have never heard officers in high positions
express such alarm about a president. Trump’s pronouncements and orders have
already risked catastrophic and unnecessary wars in the Middle East and Asia,
and have created severe problems for field commanders engaged in combat
operations. Frequently caught unawares by Trump’s statements, senior military
officers have scrambled, in their aftermath, to steer the country away from
tragedy. How many times can they successfully do that before faltering?
Amid threats spanning
the globe, from nuclear proliferation to mined tankers in the Persian Gulf to
terrorist attacks and cyberwarfare, those in command positions monitor the
president’s Twitter feed like field officers scanning the horizon for enemy
troop movements. A new front line in national defense has become the White
House Situation Room, where the military struggles to accommodate a commander
in chief who is both ignorant and capricious. In May, after months of threatening Iran, Trump ordered the carrier group led by the USS Abraham Lincoln to shift
from the Mediterranean Sea to the Persian Gulf. On June 20, after an American
drone was downed there, he ordered a retaliatory attack—and then called it off minutes before it was to be launched. The next day he said he was “not looking for war” and wanted to talk with Iran’s leaders, while also promising
them “obliteration like you’ve never seen before” if they crossed him. He threatened North Korea with “fire and fury” and dispatched a three-aircraft-carrier flotilla to waters
off the Korean peninsula—then he pivoted to friendly summits with Kim Jong Un, with whom he announced he was “in love”; canceled long-standing U.S. military exercises with South Korea;
and dangled the possibility of withdrawing American forces from the
country altogether. While the lovefest continues
for the cameras, the U.S. has quietly uncanceled the canceled military
exercises, and dropped any mention of a troop withdrawal.
Such rudderless
captaincy creates the headlines Trump craves. He revels when his tweets take
off. (“Boom!” he says. “Like a rocket!”) Out in the field, where combat is more
than wordplay, his tweets have consequences. He is not a president who thinks
through consequences—and this, the generals stressed, is not the way serious
nations behave.
The generals I spoke
with didn’t agree on everything, but they shared the following five
characterizations of Trump’s military leadership.
I. HE DISDAINS
EXPERTISE
Trump has little
interest in the details of policy. He makes up his mind about a thing, and
those who disagree with him—even those with manifestly more knowledge and
experience—are stupid, or slow, or crazy.
As a personal
quality, this can be trying; in a president, it is dangerous. Trump rejects the
careful process of decision making that has long guided commanders in
chief. Disdain
for process might be the defining trait of
his leadership. Of course, no process can guarantee good decisions—history makes
that clear—but eschewing the tools available to a president is choosing
ignorance. What Trump’s supporters call “the deep state” is, in the world of
national security—hardly a bastion of progressive politics—a vast reservoir of
knowledge and global experience that presidents ignore at their peril. The
generals spoke nostalgically of the process followed by previous presidents,
who solicited advice from field commanders, foreign-service and intelligence
officers, and in some cases key allies before reaching decisions about military
action. As different as George W. Bush and Barack Obama were in temperament and
policy preferences, one general told me, they were remarkably alike in the
Situation Room: Both presidents asked hard questions, wanted prevailing views
challenged, insisted on a variety of options to consider, and weighed potential
outcomes against broader goals. Trump doesn’t do any of that. Despite
commanding the most sophisticated intelligence-gathering apparatus in the
world, this president prefers to be briefed by Fox News, and then arrives at
decisions without input from others.
One prominent example
came on December 19, 2018, when Trump announced, via Twitter, that he was
ordering all American forces in Syria home.
“We have defeated
ISIS in Syria, my only reason for being there during the Trump presidency,” he
tweeted. Later that day he said, “Our boys, our young women, our men, they are
all coming back, and they are coming back now.”
This satisfied one of
Trump’s campaign promises, and it appealed to the isolationist convictions of
his core supporters. Forget the experts, forget the chain of command—they were
the people who, after all, had kept American forces engaged in that part of the
world for 15 bloody years without noticeably improving things. Enough was
enough.
At that moment,
however, American troops were in the final stages of crushing the Islamic
State, which, contrary to Trump’s assertion, was collapsing but had not yet
been defeated. Its brutal caliphate, which had briefly stretched from eastern
Iraq to western Syria, had been painstakingly dismantled over the previous five
years by an American-led global coalition, which was close to finishing the
job. Now they were to stop and come home?
Here, several of the
generals felt, was a textbook example of ill-informed decision making. The
downsides of a withdrawal were obvious: It would create a power vacuum that
would effectively cede the fractured Syrian state to Russia and Iran; it would
abandon America’s local allies to an uncertain fate; and it would encourage a
diminished ISIS to keep fighting. The decision—which prompted the immediate
resignations of the secretary of defense, General James Mattis, and the U.S.
special envoy to the mission, Brett McGurk—blindsided not only Congress and
America’s allies but the person charged with actually waging the war, General
Joseph Votel, the commander of U.S. Central Command. He had not been consulted.
Trump’s tweet put General Votel in the position of telling our
allies, in effect, We’re screwing you, but we need you now more than
ever.
Trump’s tweet put
Votel in a difficult spot. Here was a sudden 180-degree turn in U.S. policy
that severely undercut an ongoing effort. The American contingent of about
2,000 soldiers, most of them Special Forces, was coordinating with the Iraqi
army; the Syrian Democratic Forces, or SDF, consisting primarily of Kurdish
militias and Syrians opposed to President Bashar al-Assad; and representatives
of NATO, the Arab League, and dozens of countries. This alliance had reduced
ISIS’s territory to small pockets of resistance inside Syria. America’s troops
were deep in the Euphrates Valley, a long way from their original bases of
operation. An estimated 10,000 hard-core Islamist soldiers were fighting to the
death. Months of tough combat lay ahead.
Votel’s force in
Syria was relatively small, but it required a steady supply of food,
ammunition, parts, and medical supplies, and regular troop rotations. The
avenue for these vital conveyances—through hundreds of miles of hazardous Iraqi
desert—was truck convoys, protected almost exclusively by the SDF. To protect
its troops during a retreat, America could have brought in its own troops or
replaced those truck convoys with airlifts, but either step would have meant
suddenly escalating an engagement that the president had just pronounced
finished.
For the American
commander, this was a terrible logistical challenge. An orderly withdrawal of
his forces would further stress supply lines, therefore necessitating the SDF’s
help even more. Votel found himself in the position of having to tell his
allies, in effect, We’re screwing you, but we need you now more than
ever.
Field commanders are
often given orders they don’t like. The military must bow to civilian rule. The
generals accept and embrace that. But they also say that no careful
decision-making process would have produced Trump’s abrupt about-face.
Votel decided to take
an exceedingly rare step: He publicly contradicted his commander in chief. In
an interview with CNN he said that no, ISIS was not yet defeated, and now was
not the time to retreat. Given his responsibility to his troops and the
mission, the general didn’t have much choice.
Votel held everything
together. He took advantage of the good relationship he had built with the SDF
to buy enough time for Trump to be confronted with the consequences of his
decision. A few days later, the president backed down—while predictably
refusing to admit that he had done so. American forces would stay in smaller
numbers (and France and the U.K. would eventually agree to commit more troops
to the effort). The 180-degree turn was converted into something more like a
90-degree one. In the end, the main effects of Trump’s tweet were bruising the
trust of allies and heartening both Assad and ISIS.
II. HE TRUSTS ONLY
HIS OWN INSTINCTS
Trump believes that
his gut feelings about things are excellent, if not genius. Those around him
encourage that belief, or they are fired. Winning the White House against all
odds may have made it unshakable.
Decisiveness is good,
the generals agreed. But making decisions without considering facts is not.
Trump has, on at
least one occasion, shown the swiftness and resolution commanders respect: On
April 7, 2017, he responded to a chemical-warfare attack by Assad with a
missile strike on Syria’s Shayrat Airbase. But this was not a hard call. It was
a onetime proportional retaliation unlikely to stir international controversy
or wider repercussions. Few international incidents can be cleanly resolved by
an air strike.
“How did we even get to that point?” one general asked me in
astonishment. What kind of commander in chief would risk war with Iran over a
drone?
A case in point is
the flare-up with Iran in June. The generals said Trump’s handling of it was
perilous, because it could have led to a shooting war. On June 20, Iran’s air
defenses shot down an American RQ-4A Global Hawk, a high-altitude surveillance drone the Iranians said had
violated their airspace. The U.S. said the drone was in international airspace.
(The disputed coordinates were about 12 miles apart—not a big difference for an
aircraft moving hundreds of miles an hour.) In retaliation, Trump ordered a military strike on Iran—and then abruptly called
it off after, he claimed, he’d been informed that
it would kill about 150 Iranians.
One general told me this explanation is highly improbable—any careful
discussion of the strike would have considered potential casualties at the
outset. But whatever his reasoning, the president’s reversal occasioned such
relief that it obscured the gravity of his original decision.
“How did we even get
to that point?” the general asked me in astonishment. Given what a tinderbox
that part of the world is, what kind of commander in chief would risk war with
Iran over a drone?
Not only would a
retaliatory strike have failed the litmus test of proportionality, this general
said, but it would have accomplished little, escalated the dispute with Iran,
and risked instigating a broad conflict. In an all-out war, the U.S. would
defeat Iran’s armed forces, but not without enormous bloodshed, and not just in
Iran. Iran and its proxies would launch terrorist strikes on American and
allied targets throughout the Middle East and beyond. If the regime were to
fall, what would come next? Who would step in to govern a Shiite Muslim nation
of 82 million steeped for generations in hatred of America? The mullahs owe
their power to the American overthrow of Iran’s elected government in 1953, an
event widely regarded in Iran (and elsewhere) as an outrage. Conquering
Americans would not be greeted by happy Persian crowds. The generals observed
that those who predicted such parades in Baghdad following the ouster of Saddam
Hussein instead got a decade-long bloodbath. Iran has more than twice Iraq’s
population, and is a far more developed nation. The Iraq War inspired the
creation of ISIS and gave renewed momentum to al‑Qaeda; imagine how war with
Iran might mobilize Hezbollah, the richest and best-trained terrorist
organization in the world.
Sometimes, of course,
war is necessary. That’s why we maintain the most expensive and professional
military in the world. But a fundamental reason to own such power is to avoid wars—especially
wars that are likely to create worse problems than they solve.
General Votel, who
commanded American forces in the region until he retired in March, told me that
if the U.S. had carried out a retaliatory strike, “the trick for the military
in this case would be to orchestrate some type of operation that would very quickly
try and get us to an off-ramp—give them an off-ramp or provide us with an
off-ramp—so we can get to some kind of discussion to resolve the situation.”
Trump’s attack might have targeted some of the Iranian navy’s vessels and
systems that threaten shipping in the Strait of Hormuz, Votel said, or it might
have leveled a measured strike against the air defenses that struck the drone.
Ideally it would have been followed by a pause, so diplomatic processes could
kick in. The strike would have demonstrated to Iran that we have the capability
and willingness to strike back if provoked, and made clear that in a serious
fight, it could not prevail. But all of this presumes a sequence that would
unfold in an orderly, rational way—a preposterous notion.
“This is all
completely unpredictable,” Votel said. “It’s hard for me to see how it would
play out. We would be compelled to leave large numbers of forces in the region
as a deterrent. If you don’t have an off-ramp, you’re going to find yourself in
some kind of protracted conflict.” Which is precisely the kind of scenario
Trump has derided in the past. His eagerness to free the U.S. from long-term
military conflicts overseas was why he made his abrupt announcement about
pulling out of Syria. Evidently he didn’t fully consider where a military
strike against Iran was likely to lead.
The real reason Trump
reversed himself on the retaliatory strike, one general said, was not because
he suddenly learned of potential casualties, but because someone, most likely
General Joseph Dunford, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, aggressively
confronted him with the extended implications of an attack.
“I know the chairman
very well,” the general said. “He’s about as fine an officer as I have ever
spent time around. I think if he felt the president was really heading in the
wrong direction, he would let the president know.” He added that Secretary of
State Mike Pompeo may have counseled against an attack as well. “Pompeo’s a
really bright guy. I’m sure he would intervene and give the president his best
advice.”
III. HE RESISTS
COHERENT STRATEGY
If there is any broad
logic to Trump’s behavior, it’s Keep ’em confused. He believes that
unpredictability itself is a virtue.
Keeping an enemy
off-balance can be a good thing, the generals agreed, so long as you are not
off-balance yourself. And it’s a tactic, not a strategy. Consider Trump’s
rhetorical dance with the North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un. No president in
modern times has made progress with North Korea. Capable of destroying Seoul
within minutes of an outbreak of hostilities, Pyongyang has ignored every
effort by the U.S. and its allies to deter it from building a nuclear arsenal.
Trump has gone back
and forth dramatically on Kim. As a candidate in 2016, he said he would get China
to make the North Korean dictator “disappear in one form or another very
quickly.” Once in office, he taunted Kim, calling him “Little Rocket Man,” and
suggested that the U.S. might immolate Pyongyang. Then he switched directions
and orchestrated three personal meetings with Kim.
“That stuff is just
crazy enough to work,” one of the generals told me with a what-the-hell? chuckle.
“We’ll see what happens. If they can get back to some kind of discussion, if it
can avert something, it will have been worth it. The unconventional aspect of
that does have the opportunity to shake some things up.”
In the long run,
however, unpredictability is a problem. Without a coherent underlying strategy,
uncertainty creates confusion and increases the chance of miscalculation—and
miscalculation, the generals pointed out, is what starts most wars. John F.
Kennedy famously installed a direct hotline to the Kremlin in order to lower
the odds of blundering into a nuclear exchange. Invading Kuwait, Saddam Hussein
stumbled into a humiliating defeat in the first Gulf War—a conflict that killed
more than 100,000 people—after a cascading series of miscommunications and
miscalculations led to a crushing international response.
Unpredictability
becomes an impediment to success when it interferes with orderly process. “Say
you’re going to have an engagement with North Korea,” a general who served
under multiple presidents told me. “At some point you should have developed a
strategy that says, Here’s what we want the outcome to be. And then
somebody is developing talking points. Those talking points are shared with the
military, with the State Department, with the ambassador. Whatever the issue
might be, before the president ever says anything, everybody should
know what the talking points are going to be.” To avoid confusion and a sense
of aimlessness, “everybody should have at least a general understanding of what
the strategy is and what direction we’re heading in.”
Which is frequently
not the case now.
“If the president
says ‘Fire and brimstone’ and then two weeks later says ‘This is my best
friend,’ that’s not necessarily bad—but it’s bad if the rest of the relevant
people in the government responsible for executing the strategy aren’t aware
that that’s the strategy,” the general said. Having a process to figure out the
sequences of steps is essential. “The process tells the president what he
should say. When I was working with Obama and Bush,” he continued, “before we
took action, we would understand what that action was going to be, we’d have
done a Q&A on how we think the international community is going to respond
to that action, and we would have discussed how we’d deal with that response.”
To operate outside of
an organized process, as Trump tends to, is to reel from crisis to
rapprochement to crisis, generating little more than noise. This haphazard
approach could lead somewhere good—but it could just as easily start a very big
fire.
If the president
eschews the process, this general told me, then when a challenging
national-security issue arises, he won’t have information at hand about what
the cascading effects of pursuing different options might be. “He’s kind of
shooting blind.” Military commanders find that disconcerting.
“The process is not a
panacea—Bush and Obama sometimes made bad decisions even with all the options
in front of them—but it does help.”
IV. “HE IS
REFLEXIVELY CONTRARY”
General H. R.
McMaster, who left the White House on reasonably good terms in April 2018 after
only 14 months as national security adviser, is about as can-do a professional
as you will find. He appeared to take Trump seriously, and tailored his
briefings to accommodate the president’s famous impatience, in order to equip
him for the weighty decisions the office demands. But Trump resents advice and
instruction. He likes to be agreed with. Efforts to broaden his understanding
irritate him. McMaster’s tenure was bound to be short. Weeks before accepting
his resignation, the president let it be known that he found McMaster’s briefings
tedious and the man himself “gruff and condescending.”
Distrusting
expertise, Trump has contradicted and disparaged the intelligence community and
presided over a dismantling of the State Department. This has meant leaving
open ambassadorships around the world, including in countries vital to American
interests such as Brazil, Canada, Honduras, Japan, Jordan, Pakistan, Russia,
and Ukraine. High-level foreign officers, seeing no opportunities for
advancement, have been leaving.
“When you lose these
diplomats and ambassadors that have all this experience, this language
capability, this cultural understanding, that makes things very, very difficult
for us,” one of the generals said. “And it leads to poor decisions down the
line.”
Trump so resists
being led that his instinct is nearly always to upend prevailing opinion.
“He is reflexively
contrary,” another of the generals told me.
According to those
who worked with him, McMaster avoided giving the president a single consensus
option, even when one existed. He has said that he always tried to give the
president room to choose. After leaving the White House, he criticized others
in the national-security community for taking a different approach, accusing
them of withholding information in hopes of steering Trump in the direction
they preferred. McMaster has not named names, but he was most likely talking
about Mattis and General John Kelly, who, after serving as Trump’s
homeland-security secretary, became the president’s second chief of staff.
McMaster has said that he considered such an approach tantamount to subverting
the Constitution—but if his allegation is true, it shows how poorly equipped
those people felt Trump was for the job. Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s
report records numerous instances of civilian advisers trying to manage the
president, or simply ignoring presidential directives they deemed ill-advised
or illegal.
During his brief
tenure on Trump’s staff, McMaster oversaw the production of a broad
national-security strategy that sought to codify Trump’s “America first”
worldview, placing immigration at the head of national-security concerns, right
alongside nuclear proliferation and terrorist attacks. The idea was to build a
coherent structure around the president’s scattershot diplomacy. Trump rhapsodized
about the document at its unveiling, according to someone who was there,
saying, “I love it! I love it! I want to use this all the time.”
He hasn’t. Like its
author, the document has been dismissed. Those who were involved in writing it
remain convinced, somewhat hopefully, that it is still helping guide policy,
but John Bolton, McMaster’s successor, said scornfully—a few months before he,
too, was ousted by Trump—that it is filed away somewhere, consulted by no one.
Trump is no more
likely to have read the thing than he is to have written his own books. (Years
ago, after he published The Art of the Deal, he asked me if I was
interested in writing his next book. I declined.) Trying to shape this
president’s approach to the world into a cogent philosophy is a fool’s errand.
For those commanding America’s armed forces, it’s best to keep binoculars
trained on his Twitter feed.
V. HE HAS A
SIMPLISTIC AND ANTIQUATED NOTION OF SOLDIERING
Though he disdains
expert advice, Trump reveres—perhaps fetishizes—the military. He began his
presidency by stacking his administration with generals: Mattis, McMaster,
Kelly, and, briefly, Michael Flynn, his first national security adviser.
Appointing them so soon after their retirement from the military was a mistake,
according to Don Bolduc, a retired brigadier general who is currently running
as a Republican for the U.S. Senate in New Hampshire. Early on, the biggest
difference Bolduc saw between the Trump administration and its predecessors,
and one he felt was “going to be disruptive in the long term,” was “the
significant reliance, in the Pentagon at least, on senior military leadership
overriding and making less relevant our civilian oversight. That was going to
be a huge problem. The secretary of defense pretty much surrounded himself with
his former Marine comrades, and there was, at least from that group, a distrust
of civilians that really negatively affected the Pentagon in terms of policy
and strategy in Afghanistan, Syria, and Iraq, by following the same old failed
operational approaches.” Trump’s reliance on military solutions is problematic
because “there are limits to what the military can solve. I think initially the
Trump administration held this idea that general officers somehow have all the
answers to everything. I think the president discovered in short order that
that’s really not the case.”
Bolduc also pointed
out an unusual leadership challenge caused by having a general of McMaster’s
rank serve as national security adviser—he did not retire when he assumed the
post. “McMaster, for whom I have tremendous respect, came in as a three-star
general. Leaving him a three-star forces him on a daily basis to have to engage
with four-star generals who see his rank as beneath theirs, even though his
position is much more than that.”
The problems posed by
Trump’s skewed understanding of the military extend beyond bad decision making
to the very culture of our armed forces: He apparently doesn’t think American
soldiers accused of war crimes should be prosecuted and punished. In early May,
he pardoned former Army Lieutenant Michael Behenna, who had been convicted of
murdering an Iraqi prisoner. Two weeks later, he asked the Justice Department
to prepare pardon materials for a number of American servicemen and contractors
who were charged with murder and desecration of corpses, including Special
Operations Chief Edward Gallagher, a Navy SEAL who stood accused by his own
team members of fatally stabbing a teenage ISIS prisoner and shooting unarmed
civilians. (He was ultimately acquitted of the murders but convicted of posing
for photos with the boy’s body.) Trump subsequently chastised the military
attorneys who had prosecuted Gallagher, and directed that medals awarded to
them be rescinded. All of the generals agreed that interfering with the
military’s efforts to police itself badly undermines command and control. When
thousands of young Americans are deployed overseas with heavy weaponry, crimes
and atrocities will sometimes occur. Failing to prosecute those who commit them
invites behavior that shames everyone in uniform and the nation they serve.
“He doesn’t
understand the warrior ethos,” one general said of the president. “The warrior
ethos is important because it’s sort of a sacred covenant not just among
members of the military profession, but between the profession and the society
in whose name we fight and serve. The warrior ethos transcends the laws of war;
it governs your behavior. The warrior ethos makes units effective because of
the values of trust and self-sacrifice associated with it—but the warrior ethos
also makes wars less inhumane and allows our profession to maintain our
self-respect and to be respected by others. Man, if the warrior ethos gets
misconstrued into ‘Kill them all …’ ” he said, trailing off. Teaching soldiers about ethical conduct in
war is not just about morality: “If you treat civilians disrespectfully, you’re working for the enemy! Trump doesn’t understand.”
Having never served
or been near a battlefield, several of the generals said, Trump exhibits a
simplistic, badly outdated notion of soldiers as supremely “tough”—hard men
asked to perform hard and sometimes ugly jobs. He also buys into a severely
outdated concept of leadership. The generals, all of whom have led troops in
combat, know better than most that war is hard and ugly, but their
understanding of “toughness” goes well beyond the gruff stoicism of a John
Wayne movie. Good judgment counts more than toughness.
Bolduc said he came
up in a military where it was accepted practice for senior leaders to blame
their subordinates, lose their temper, pound on desks, and threaten to throw
things, and the response to that behavior was “He’s a hard-ass.
Right? He’s tough. That is not leadership. You don’t get
optimal performance being that way. You get optimal performance by being
completely opposite of that.”
Bolduc worries that,
under Trump’s command, a return to these antiquated notions of “toughness” will
worsen the epidemic of PTSD plaguing soldiers who have served repeated combat
tours. Senior military officers have learned much from decades of war—lessons
Bolduc said are being discarded by a president whose closest brush with combat
has been a movie screen.
The military is hard
to change. This is bad, because it can be maddeningly slow to adapt, but also
good, because it can withstand poor leadership at the top. In the most crucial
areas, the generals said, the military’s experienced leaders have steered Trump
away from disaster. So far.
“The hard part,” one
general said, “is that he may be president for another five years.”
Opinion: Trump’s
emoluments transgressions don’t stop with the Doral fiasco
By NORMAN J. ORNSTEIN
When the
White House announced that Donald Trump would host the 2020 Group of Seven
meeting at his Doral golf resort in Florida — an in-your-face bit of self-dealing and a blatant violation of the Constitution’s foreign
emoluments clause — Republicans and Democrats howled. Reporters had only just
begun to tally the ways awarding himself a government contract could enrich
Trump and the Trump Organization when the president backed down, but not before
he publicly decried the “phony” emoluments clause.
The Doral
reversal dimmed the spotlight on emoluments, but that should not lead us to
drop the focus on the rest of Trump’s self-dealing and conflicts of interest.
For strategic reasons, the House of Representatives may not include emoluments
transgressions among potential impeachment charges. Nonetheless, the number of
Trump’s violations are staggering, and growing by the day.
There are two
separate emoluments sections in the Constitution; neither are phony, and both reflect the deep concern the Framers
had about possible corruption in the highest offices in the land.
“Emoluments”
are anything of value. The first constitutional clause, forbidding any officer
of the United States from taking “any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of
any kind whatever” from a foreign government, is in Article I. It has no
loopholes; the Framers feared that a rich foreign government could influence or
sway American policy by giving something of value to a policy-maker. It is not
limited to the president or vice president, but to all holding an office of
trust in the U.S. government.
The second
emoluments clause is in Article II and is limited to the president. It reads,
“The President shall, at stated Times, receive for his Services, a Compensation,
which shall neither be increased nor diminished during the Period for which he
shall have been elected, and he shall not receive within that Period any other
Emolument from the United States, or any of them.” Here, the fear was
that Congress could shake down the president by withholding his salary or bribe
him by increasing it, and that a president could use the leverage of his office
with states or the federal government to enrich himself.
We have never
had occasion in our history to be deeply concerned about violations of these
constitutional clauses. Most previous presidents have scrupulously adhered to
them in spirit and letter. Jimmy Carter, to pick one example, put his peanut
farm in a blind trust to avoid any appearance of conflict or attempt to profit
via his office.
Trump, whose
chief of staff on Sunday said the president still thought of himself as an
innkeeper, has kept ownership of all his properties and has lied about not
participating in their operations. He pushed officials at the General Services
Administration to allow him to keep his federal lease for his Washington hotel
while pressuring the District of Columbia to lower his property taxes. Trump’s
daughter, Ivanka, holding an office in his administration, has taken valuable
trademarks, including, staggeringly, one on voting machines, from China.
Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, holding an office of trust in the
administration, has promoted Trump and Kushner properties and solicited loans
from foreign governments.
In other
words, the president is unique in his corruption in American history. The watchdog group Citizens
for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington has regularly compiled a tally of
Trump’s conflicts of interest and violations of the emoluments clauses. The
latest numbers are stark: 1,493 trips to Trump properties by government
officials, usually spending taxpayer money that will enrich the president; 292
promotions of Trump properties by White House officials; 63 foreign trademarks
awarded to Trump brands, mostly from China and Brazil, while he has been
president.
The president
himself had made 387 trips to his properties, 240 of them to play golf. He
regularly does semi-official infomercials for his properties, and he’s told
couples considering staging a wedding reception at Mar-a-Lago in Florida or the
Trump country club in Bedminster, N.H., that, if they do, he might be available
for a photo op. He famously doubled the initiation fee at Mar-a-Lago, to $200,000, when he became president,
enabling foreign figures (and others) to gain entrée to the president for a
price his businesses collect.
The message
has been received: Foreign governments, including Romania, Kuwait and Saudi
Arabia, moved events from other venues to Trump properties, and foreign
countries or other foreign-connected entities have held 13 events at his
properties, surely enriching him along the way. (He claims profits from
foreigners are repaid to the Treasury; without his tax records, this can’t be
checked). One hundred and twenty-one foreign officials from 71 foreign
governments have visited his properties; lobbyists of all stripes have
scheduled events there. Trump has openly talked about his ventures in places
like Saudi Arabia and Turkey even as he has bent American foreign policy in
ways that benefit those countries’ autocrats.
The president
likes to pretend that there is no such thing as a conflict of interest, that
his actions are ”perfect” and “innocent.” But we should not let his lies
obscure what are ongoing, direct and outrageous abuses of the Constitution for
financial gain by the president and his cronies. The House impeachment hearings
are concentrating on other abuses of power, but there is no doubt our Framers
would see the emoluments violations as a long series of impeachable and
unconscionable offenses.
Norman
J. Ornstein is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. His
latest book, with Thomas E. Mann and E.J. Dionne Jr., is “One Nation After
Trump: A Guide for the Perplexed, the Disillusioned, the Desperate and the
Not-Yet-Deported.”
“He likes
porn stars, as we’ve seen throughout his life. And he has these habits. He’ll
push somebody against the wall and try and kiss them. He’ll grab a breast or a
buttock. When he’s in a property that he owns, whether it be a hotel or Mar-a-Lago,
he feels that he has the right to walk in on a woman in her room.”
Donald
Trump And The Making Of A Predatory President
In “All The President’s Women,”
journalists Barry Levine and Monique El-Faizy uncover 43 new sexual assault
allegations against the world’s most powerful man.
In “All The
President’s Women,” journalists Barry Levine and Monique El-Faizy uncover 43
new sexual assault allegations against the world’s most powerful man.
In the New
York Military Academy’s 1964 yearbook, there is a striking photo of a young man
with a young woman by his side. He stares smugly into the camera under the
caption “Ladies Man.”
This young
man would go on to become president of the United States.
“The young lady in the picture, however, was
not graduating senior Donald Trump’s girlfriend. Nor was she a visiting
friend,” write journalists Barry Levine and Monique El-Faizy in their new book,
“All The President’s Women: Donald Trump and the Making of a Predator.”
“The woman in
the picture is 19-year-old Fran D’Agati Dunn, a secretary who worked at the
school at the time and was asked to step in for the photo. Nothing more than a
prop.”
It is this
sort of narration, combined with a stunning 43 new allegations of Trump’s
sexual misconduct, that makes “All The President’s Women” such an impactful
read. Levine and El-Faizy painstakingly document Trump’s decadeslong history of
treating women as objects and accessories, from making derogatory comments to
walking into the dressing rooms of underage beauty queens to alleged rape.
In early
2018, when adult film star Stormy Daniels was dominating the news cycle, Levine
took notice. Between Daniels’ claim that Trump had paid her hush money and the
accounts of 20 other women who came forward against Trump during the 2016
election, Levine knew there had to be more there.
Once he
started digging, he realized he wanted to collaborate with another seasoned
journalist, specifically a woman, on the project. After a couple of initial
conversations, he decided he wanted to work with El-Faizy to tell a story that
went beyond individual allegations of inappropriate behavior.
“I think we
wanted to look at not just what he had done, but why and what it meant,” said
El-Faizy. “How he came to be formed as the predator he became.”
HuffPost
spoke with Levine and El-Faizy about the more than 100 interviews they
conducted over the year they were writing the book, the patterns that emerged,
and what the predatory behavior of the “most visible man on earth” says about
our culture at large.
You reported
43 new allegations of misconduct against the president in this book. How did
you all just go about locating the women that you spoke to? And also what made
these women want to share their stories publicly?
Levine: It
was extremely difficult. It was a very intensive period to cover, and that’s
why I focused on the reporting while Monique was able to shape the narrative.
But in terms of the women, I was fortunate ― in addition to finding Monique ―
there were two other journalists that I was able to put together on my small
team. One was Whitney Clegg, an investigative producer who re-interviewed some
of the victims who came forward in 2016. And then I also was able to
collaborate with Lucy Osborne, a producer for the BBC in London, who had done a
documentary on Donald Trump and women. She had some leads on some women,
particularly young models, that she had wanted to chase down. So she went off
in one direction, Whitney went off in another direction, Monique was taking all
the interviews as we were filing them and, under a tremendous deadline, turned
the book into what I would consider a great read.
But I’ll just
tell you one story, about Karen Johnson. She’s the woman who made the
allegations about the night at Mar-a-Lago during a New Year’s Eve party,
[during the time] when Melania Trump was dating Donald Trump. [Johnson says
that] when Melania was upstairs, she was attacked [by Trump]. She said he had
actually done to her [what he described doing in] the “Access Hollywood” tapes,
in terms of grabbing her. She was someone who held onto this story for many,
many years, and was fearful originally to come out with this story because she
had been a dancer in her earlier life. And she thought, if I come out and say
this, they’re going to attack me, they’re going to call me a liar because I had
once been a dancer. And so she kept this secret.
It took me
two full months before she even felt comfortable to begin telling me the
details. So, it’s been a very emotional journey in terms of getting these brave
and courageous women to come forward. And I just have to say, I’m just so
thankful that I was able to work with Monique and Lucy and Whitney to pull all
this together.
What patterns
emerged for you as you were going through all of the reporting?
El-Faizy: To
me, that was the unexpected power of the book. We’ve all heard the stories, the
women would come forward one by one. But when you put it all in one space,
first of all, it’s enormous, and that’s shocking in and of itself, but these
patterns really do emerge. [Trump] clearly has a thing for younger women. He
started talking about Ivanka being sexy when she was around the same age as
these models that he was kind of staring at backstage and pursuing at parties.
So that’s one of the patterns.
He likes porn
stars, as we’ve seen throughout his life. And he has these habits. He’ll push
somebody against the wall and try and kiss them. He’ll grab a breast or a
buttock. When he’s in a property that he owns, whether it be a hotel or
Mar-a-Lago, he feels that he has the right to walk in on a woman in her room.
What’s
interesting is that there were very few one-offs. We only put things in [the
book] that fit the pattern, because he has such well-established patterns over
the years. What was powerful about that is, when we would interview the women,
almost all of them in some way blamed themselves: “What kind of vibe was I
putting off? What was I wearing?” And when you look at them in the context of
these patterns, you realize it has almost nothing to do with that woman. If it
wasn’t that woman, it would’ve been another woman wearing something else and
putting off a totally different vibe.
He’ll push
somebody against the wall and try and kiss them. He’ll grab a breast or a
buttock. When he’s in a property that he owns, whether it be a hotel or
Mar-a-Lago, he feels that he has the right to walk in on a woman in her
room.El-Faizy
I think that
really comes across in the book, especially when you get to the end and you’re
reading the appendix, which outlines every single allegation. There are stories
that you’ll get to one and say, oh, that sounds exactly like that other woman’s
story, down to the details. It’s very striking.
Levine: About
six months into the reporting, we were getting all these new stories, in
addition to cataloging the earlier allegations that were made in 2016. And at
the same time, I was also digging into research and finding stories about
[Trump’s] inappropriate behavior with women that had popped up in the media but
had never really been cataloged ― everything from making horrible comments to a
model that was seated at a table with Graydon Carter, to incidents where he
himself said that he attacked women, [like] pouring a glass of wine on a
reporter in New York.
To me, [these
incidents] all needed to be cataloged. I think it’s very powerful, after you go
through the beautifully shaped narrative that Monique wrote, that you then get,
in very black and white fashion, every single allegation of inappropriate
behavior, in addition to the disparaging comments that I found he made
involving so many women. I just think when you read them one after another, it
is extremely impactful. And so the appendix of this book, to me, is as
important as the narrative itself.
As you both
alluded to earlier, you take a deep look into Trump’s early years, which is
probably something that most readers will know less about. To me, it seemed
like his treatment of women as objects and accessories began very early. Would
you say that that’s accurate?
El-Faizy:
Absolutely. That’s why I chartered the book the way I did. In his graduation
photo from the military academy, the woman standing next to him is an
accessory. To me, that said it all.
And I think
that that comes from his father, too. His father would bring these young,
pretty girls up to the academy. From what his classmates say, these were not
women that Donald Trump knew or had any kind of relationship with. They were
just girls that his dad would bring up for him, presumably for the image of it.
So I think that he didn’t develop that attitude in a vacuum.
And how do
you think those early experiences with women then impacted his relationship
with women later on in his life?
El-Faizy:
What’s interesting is that he never changes. We interviewed one of his
classmates, Sandy McIntosh, who said, “We were in an all-male academy. We
learned about women and girls from Playboy magazine. But then we got out and
realized, oh no, that’s not an appropriate way to look at women.”
And Trump
just never made that change. To me, what’s interesting is that nothing later in
his life impacted him enough to force him to reconsider his attitude.
The book also
gets into Trump’s obsession with models, with Playboy, and with beauty
pageants. You include a quote from a former Miss Arizona who says that she
believes Trump purchased the Miss Universe organization explicitly “to utilize
his power to get around beautiful women.” What did you take away from that?
El-Faizy:
Trump is, at his heart, a business guy. And if that’s your mind state, you buy
whatever you want in life. He had the money to do it; he wanted these women, so
he just went out and bought access to women, with the beauty pageant, with the
modeling agency. And I think for a lot of these men, it’s as much about being
around the women as it is how it looks to other men.
There’s a
story in the book from a hairstylist who used to blow-dry Marla Maples’ hair.
And he told me that Trump would come into the salon and just stand by her chair
and look around and see who was watching him be with Marla. So it wasn’t that
much about, “Oh, I want to see my girlfriend Marla.” It was about, “I want to
be seen in the presence of this young, beautiful blonde.” It’s the equivalent
of driving a red Ferrari.
Levine: I
tend to take a much darker view of those years. It’s absolutely clear in the
book that for Donald Trump, creating his own modeling agency and being a part
of some of these other beauty pageants and contests that he would arrange
parties for at the Plaza Hotel in the ’90s — that became his personal hunting
ground.
Take the
story, for instance, that Heather Braden told. Heather was a model, and she
told a story where Trump and these actors were in this giant Miami Beach
mansion with like 50 models. It really wasn’t a party. The whole thing was an
exercise for Donald Trump and these three other men to see how many of these
models they could take in the private rooms, sometimes two or three women at a
time.
Heather was
older at the time, and she was kind of watching everything take place. She
turned down Trump, but she said these younger models didn’t know any better.
And they would come out disheveled; they would look very uncomfortable when
they came out of the private rooms, and there was no question in her mind that
these were sexual experiences taking place. Donald Trump had created this
private hunting ground to allow himself access to young models. And he formed a
very tight relationship with John Casablancas, the founder of the Elite
modeling agency.
For Donald
Trump, creating his own modeling agency and being a part of some of these other
beauty pageants and contests ... that became his personal hunting ground.Barry
Levine
This book
puts all of these allegations together and uncovers a lot of new information,
but for years now, there has been a pretty well-documented history of Trump’s
misogyny and sexual misconduct. And yet it largely has not been seen as a
dealbreaker for his supporters. Why do you think that there are a lot of people
who feel allegations of sexual misconduct can be dismissed or overlooked?
El-Faizy:
Yeah, it’s interesting. I had written a book about evangelical Christianity
years ago, so I went back to that community for this book because, of course,
the evangelical community is probably what put Trump over the edge in 2016.
That community is very much run by male leaders, and so it was the men who
really drove that train for Trump.
One of the
evangelical women I spoke to and I said, “What is it? Why are they supporting
him?” She said, “I think that a lot of them think, ‘If I wasn’t a Christian,
that’s what I would be doing.’” Trump is surrounded by porn stars and beautiful
blondes and whatever. And so she thought there was a certain kind of male envy.
The structure
of the evangelical church, where Trump gets the bulk of his support, is very
patriarchal. For them, this kind of patriarchy is what God has instructed them
to do, and they find all kinds of different ways of rationalizing it. Early on,
I called an old source of mine. I said, “how on earth are you supporting him?”
And they said, “God uses imperfect vessels.” So they rationalize it by saying,
[Trump] is being used, he’s a tool of God. He doesn’t need to be perfect, we’re
all sinners. But at the very core of their support is just a comfort with
patriarchy and the idea that women are supposed to be submissive to men.
And then the
more cynical answer is the community supports him because he does what they
want him to do. He gets them conservative judges, he’s helping roll back
abortion laws, things like that. But in terms of the women being able to
support him, it’s because they live within a world in which they’ve completely
accepted the idea of patriarchy.
I feel like
another sentiment that I hear a lot, even among people who believe that Trump
is predatory, is exhaustion and frustration that these allegations don’t seem
to stick to him. So, why bother? What would you say to those people?
El-Faizy: I
think that’s part of the reason why it was important to put all these
[allegations] in one place, because it is easier to dismiss individual
behaviors. But when you look at it all in the aggregate, you realize it’s not
really just about one man’s behavior; it is about systems that allow this
behavior to go on for decades and decades. Trump is one of many men who has
been able to be predatory with women. I would argue, right now, he’s the one we
should be looking at because he’s the most visible man in the world and he sets
an example. But there needs to be a look at the systems that allow this to go
on.
When we brush
aside or when we say we’re tired of this, we’re being complicit, we’re letting
it go on. We have to get outraged about every one of these things. I’m now sort
of going off-topic a little bit, but when I read the Ta-Nehisi Coates book
“Between the World and Me,” that was the thing that I came away with. We can’t
just say, “Oh, there’s another black kid getting shot.” We have to be outraged
every time or this never ever changes.
It’s not
really just about one man’s behavior; it is about systems that allow this
behavior to go on for decades and decades.El-Faizy
Levine: This
is a man who wants another four years to be president of our country. You can’t
say, ‘Who cares?’ You can’t turn away from the truth.
Given the
sheer breadth of allegations that exist against President Trump, do you think
that we should be speaking about him in the same way that we speak about
predatory men like Bill Cosby or Harvey Weinstein?
El-Faizy: I
think absolutely.
Levine: The
reporting shows that Donald Trump has been a predator over the course of many
decades. There needs to be a reckoning here of his behavior. And we had to
attempt to connect the dots to show not only the actual instances of the allegations
but also to talk about how he became a predator. And I hope that the readers
will get answers to that.
Why is it so
essential for the American public to grapple with Trump’s predatory behavior?
What does this one man’s story say about our culture at large?
El-Faizy: I
think it’s his behavior, but also his policies. His behavior reveals an
attitude about women, and that attitude is being held by the man who formed
policy for American women and also for women around the globe. And we see the
manner in which those attitudes are affecting women around the world, and the
systems that are supporting these kinds of things.
What was so
hurtful about the confirmation [of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh] was
that you had an accuser [Christine Blasey Ford] who came forward, she was
credible, people listened to her. And yet there was very little investigation
and he was confirmed anyway. So I think a lot of women felt like, we thought we
made all these advances since the ’60s, but in fact, the patriarchy is alive
and well and still completely in control of the system. And I think that’s
important to examine.
So now the
book is out there in the world and we have this information. What should we be
doing with it? What do you hope comes next?
Levine: I
really think it is so important now, despite everything else going on with the
impeachment inquiry, that investigative news organizations take the time to
pick up these allegations and dig deeper because there are still so many
stories. There is so much more material out there on Donald Trump and women.
When I was
wrapping up the book, the E. Jean Carroll allegations [that Trump had attempted
to rape Carroll in the mid-’90s] surfaced. And first of all, after the
reporting I had done, everything that she said rang true. But beyond that,
there were news organizations who were wrestling with whether they were going
to present her allegations to begin with. And to me, that is the absolutely
wrong thing. We need to allow these women to tell their stories. To me, that’s
the most important thing.
El-Faizy: I
think that we’ve seen that women are not fully valued in society and we need
massive change. And I think that the midterm elections with all these young,
newly elected women, were the beginning of that. And I hope that that’s not
just a one-off and that that continues, because until we reach parity in the
power structures of organizations and in government, this is not going to be
fully addressed and fully changed. We need to see more women getting elected
and that this is not just a moment, but actually the beginning of some real
change.
Levine: I
hope that even if people hear these allegations and don’t even read the book,
that it will make them aware that the story of Donald Trump and women, his
predatory behavior, has not been fully written, and that this is something they
should remember when they consider whether or not they want him to be president
for another four years.
This
interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
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