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CHAPTER 1
TRUMP'S UNFIT FOR THE JOB
In judging any president, it's his policies that count the most. And that's the way it should be. When all is said and done, what has the president done to make America an even greater and stronger country and to improve the everyday lives of average Americans? What has he done to address new problems, take advantage of new opportunities, and lead the nation in responding to unforeseen crises?
That's the measure by which we weigh the presidencies of every national leader from George Washington to Barack Obama. But there's something different about Donald Trump, something you must deal with first before you get to his policies and programs, good or bad.
Before you consider Donald Trump the president, you have to deal with Donald Trump the person. Because his bizarre personality "trumps" all. We have never had a more loathsome, disreputable, obnoxious person in the Oval Office, nor anyone so manifestly unfit for the job of president.
Conservative voices agree.
After a phone conversation about immigration, media mogul Rupert Murdoch, a friend of Trump's, allegedly exclaimed, "What a fucking idiot."
Eliot Cohen, counselor to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, summed up Trump's presidency: "This fundamentally boils down to character, and his character is rotten. He's a narcissist who happens to have taken control of the Republican party."
In response to a presidential tweet attacking him, Republican senator Bob Corker famously observed, "It's a shame the White House has become an adult day care center. Someone obviously missed their shift this morning."
National security experts agree.
In August 2016, fifty national security and foreign policy experts who had served in Republican administrations from Richard Nixon to George W. Bush issued a public letter opposing the candidacy of Donald Trump. "We know the personal qualities required of a President of the United States," they wrote. "Mr. Trump lacks the character, values, and experience to be President. Indeed, we are convinced that he would be a very dangerous President and would put at risk our country's national security and well-being ... None of us will vote for Donald Trump."
Even members of his cabinet agree.
Following a Pentagon meeting on nuclear weapons, where Trump proposed increasing our nuclear arsenal tenfold, then secretary of state Rex Tillerson called him "a fucking moron."
According to BuzzFeed, at a private dinner party in July 2017, national security advisor H. R. McMaster reportedly unloaded about Trump, referring to him as an "idiot," a "dope," and a man with the intelligence of a "kindergartner."
And the American people agree.
According to a Quinnipiac University poll conducted in January 2018, at the end of his first year in office, Americans said 69–28 percent that Donald Trump was not levelheaded, and a stunning 57–40 percent agreed he was not fit to serve as president.
In that same poll, 69 percent of voters described his first year in office as a "disaster," followed by 62 percent who say "chaotic." Asked to grade his performance in office, 39 percent gave Trump an F, while 17 percent gave him a D.
"It is on a supposition that our American governors shall be honest, that all the good qualities of this Government are founded," Patrick Henry, of "Give Me Liberty or Give Me Death!" fame, warned us in 1788 during the debates over the Constitution. "But its defective, and imperfect construction, puts it in their power to perpetrate the worst of mischiefs, should they be bad men."
My fellow Americans, we have ourselves a bad man.
There are many aspects of Donald Trump's personality that are offensive, starting with what's arguably his core defect: He is psychologically incapable of telling the truth.
1. HE'S A PATHOLOGICAL LIAR
If there's one trait that defines Donald Trump more than any other, it's that he's an inveterate, pathological liar. He lies about what he's said. He lies about what he's done. He lied about the weather at his inauguration. He probably lies about what he's had for breakfast.
Usually, these are not little lies or slight exaggerations that have an element of truth in them and could be taken either way. No, these are big, bold lies that are often manifestly ridiculous and easily disprovable.
To take one of innumerable examples: After his first State of the Union speech on January 30, 2018, Trump issued several tweets claiming that he'd pulled in the biggest TV audience ever to watch a presidential State of the Union, including this one on Thursday morning, February 1:
Thank you for all of the nice compliments and reviews on the State of the Union speech. 45.6 million people watched, the highest number in history.
Except it wasn't. According to Nielsen, which has been tracking State of the Union viewers, there have been four TV audiences since 1994 bigger than Trump's. The largest were actually for George W. Bush: 51.8 million in 2002, and a whopping 62 million in 2003, after the start of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Barack Obama also outdrew Trump, scoring 48 million viewers in 2010, his first State of the Union.
Ironically, Donald Trump's State of the Union audience was also beaten by — Donald Trump! His first address to a joint session of Congress, on February 28, 2017, was watched by 47.7 million. But that's Trump for you. He lies instinctively, without purpose or thought. Whatever demonstrable falsehood bubbles up to the surface of his brain is always, for him, the right thing to say at that moment. And if he said it, then it must be true.
Of course, it's no surprise that Trump ended his first year with a big lie about the size of his TV audience. He began his first year with a big lie about the size of his inaugural crowd — "the audience was the biggest ever." He soon followed by claiming:
• That rain clouds disappeared and the sun broke out once he began his inaugural address
• That he had the largest electoral college win since Ronald Reagan
• That (as he claimed after the election) he also won the popular vote; because
• Millions of people voted for Hillary Clinton illegally.
Lies, lies, lies.
He can't help himself. Like the scorpion crossing the river, it is his nature. At a March 2018 fund-raiser, in what alcoholics sometimes refer to as a moment of clarity, Trump confessed he was basically bullshitting his way through a recent meeting with Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau. When Trudeau said the United States has a trade surplus with Canada, Trump insisted the opposite. "I didn't even know," he later admitted. "I had no idea. I just said, 'You're wrong.'" As if getting away with an outright presidential lie were a sign of leadership. Another surprising moment of honesty occurred in June 2018, just after Trump's summit with North Korea. When asked what would happen if the deal had gone wrong in six months, Trump confessed: "I don't know that I'll ever admit that, but I'll find some kind of an excuse."
Charting new grounds for White House reporting, both The New York Times and The Washington Post kept a running total of Trump's lies. In fact, for the first time, both papers shunned the normal euphemisms like exaggerations, embellishments, or misstatements, and called Donald Trump's untruths exactly what they were: knowingly, deliberately, not telling the truth. As BuzzFeed reminded its readers: "A lie isn't just a false statement. It's a false statement whose speaker knows it's false."
Even on the front page, The Times and The Post called the president's statements lies. They accused Donald Trump of lying to the American people over and over again.
According to The Post's official Trump Fact Checker, Trump told a total of 2,140 lies in his first 365 days in office, or an average of 5.8 lies a day — several of them repeated many times. In one two-week period in June 2018, he told 71 outright lies. The week after that, he went for 103. And remember, those are just the lies we know about. God knows how many lies a day he privately tells to his staff, his friends, or his wife.
His supporters occasionally try to defend him by arguing that all presidents lie, that Trump's no different. Which is simply not true. Sure, all presidents, for whatever reason, may occasionally not tell the truth or not tell the whole truth. The difference is, they usually know when they're fudging. Donald Trump doesn't know and doesn't care. Facts simply don't matter to him. He lives in his own fact-free universe. He doesn't bother to find out what the truth is. He believes that the truth is whatever he says it is. Yes, he actually believes that shit.
Not only that. When they realized, or were caught not telling the truth, other presidents stopped doing it. Obama didn't continue claiming you could keep your existing health insurance under Obamacare. George W. Bush softened his claims about Saddam Hussein's nuclear arsenal. Not Donald Trump. He has not once backed down from a lie or apologized. He just doubles down and attacks anybody who challenges his "truthiness."
It would be foolhardy here to list all the known Donald Trump lies. After he's gone, maybe somebody will publish The Collected Lies of Donald Trump in twelve volumes! But to make the point, here are some of his greatest hits: twelve whoppers great and small, about every subject imaginable, that stand out from 2017 and 2018.
1. On Time magazine, he still claims, "I have been on their cover fourteen or fifteen times. I think we have the all-time record in the history of Time magazine."
Fact: Trump was on the cover eleven times. Richard Nixon — fifty-five times.
2. On Florida 2016, "The Cuban Americans, I got 84 percent of that vote."
Fact: He actually received 54 percent of the Cuban American vote.
3. On health care, some sixty times he claimed that Obamacare is "dying" or "essentially dead."
Fact: Despite all of Trump's attempts to gut it, Obamacare is still very much alive for now, covering over twenty-two million people.
4. On tax cuts, at least forty times, he bragged about delivering the biggest tax cut in history, and he fifty times claimed the United States pays the highest corporate taxes or is one of the highest-taxed nations.
Fact: According to Trump's own Treasury Department, the GOP tax cut of 2017 is only the eighth largest, and corporations, in fact, after deductions and benefits, pay a far lower rate than many other countries.
5. More on tax cuts: "No, I don't benefit. I don't benefit. In fact, very, very strongly, as you see, I think there's very little benefit for people of wealth."
Fact: Since he won't release his tax returns, we don't know how much Donald Trump actually benefits. But according to Vox, 82.8 percent of the Trump tax cuts go to the top 1 percent.
6. On 2016 results, "We got 306 because people came out and voted like they've never seen before, so that's the way it goes. I guess it was the biggest electoral college win since Ronald Reagan."
Fact: As noted above, George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama all won bigger margins in the electoral college.
7. On voter fraud, Trump claimed "thousands" of people were "brought in on buses" from Massachusetts to vote in the New Hampshire Republican primary.
Fact: The New Hampshire secretary of state, the Massachusetts attorney general, and the U.S. Attorney's office from Boston found zero evidence to support Trump's claim. He keeps repeating it anyway.
8. On Obama: "Terrible! Just found out that Obama had my 'wires tapped' in Trump Tower just before the victory. Nothing found. This is McCarthyism!"
Fact: Even though he repeated this charge several times in March 2017, he has produced zero evidence of a wiretap. The Justice Department told Congress that no wiretap on Trump Tower had been sought or authorized.
9. On gun safety: "When you look at the city with the strongest gun laws in our nation, it's Chicago."
Fact: Several other cities, notably New York and Los Angeles, have tougher gun laws. At one time, so did Washington, D.C.
10. On crime: Shortly after taking office, Trump told a group of sheriffs that the murder rate in the United States is the highest it's been in "forty-five to forty-seven years."
Fact: Just the opposite. The murder rate today is roughly half of what it was twenty years ago. According to FBI records, in 1980, the murder rate was 10.2 per 100,000 people — compared to 5.3 per 100,000 in 2016.
11. On the Muslim ban: Donald Trump blamed the huge crowds of protestors that showed up at airports the day after his Muslim ban on computer problems by Delta Airlines. "Only 109 people out of 325,000 were detained and held for questioning. Big problems at airports were caused by Delta computer outage."
Fact: At least 746 people were detained. And Delta's computer crash happened two days later.
12. On the Mueller investigation: As part of his never-ending efforts to discredit special counsel Robert Mueller, Trump often claims, "The story that there was collusion between the Russians and Trump campaign was fabricated by Dems as an excuse for losing the election."
Fact: The FBI investigation began months before the election, when Trump aide George Papadopoulos was discovered bragging about his secret meetings with Russians.
We're just getting started. As we will see, there are many more reasons why Trump must go. But this may be the most important of all. Because once you realize that Donald Trump lies with every breath he takes, and once you know you can't believe a word the president of the United States or anybody else at the White House says, then you've already hit a brick wall.
For the basic building block of our political system, and the key to getting anything done, is trust. Nobody can trust Donald Trump, the Liar in Chief.
2. HE'S WOEFULLY IGNORANT
Donald Trump is the smartest man ever to occupy the Oval Office. Just ask him. He'll tell you he's not just smart. He's a genius.
When Michael Wolff, in his book Fire and Fury, quoted anonymous White House sources questioning Trump's mental acuity (and sanity), Trump lashed back. On Twitter, of course.
"Actually, throughout my life, my two greatest assets have been mental stability and being, like, really smart," he asserted.
Rule #1: When somebody feels compelled to tell you they are mentally stable and really smart, that's a pretty good sign they're neither.
Trump continued making his case. "I went from VERY successful businessman, to top T.V. Star to President of the United States (on my first try). I think that would qualify as not smart, but genius ... and a very stable genius at that!"
Naturally, to qualify as a genius, Donald Trump must have a very high IQ — which he will gladly tell you, and often has, is the case. In countless tweets, he includes some version of "my I.Q. is one of the highest." And early in his administration, when Secretary of State Rex Tillerson reportedly called him a "moron," Trump challenged him to a duel. "I think it's fake news, but if he did that, I guess we'll have to compare IQ tests. And I can tell you who is going to win."
Genius? Remarkably high IQ? That's not how White House aides, off the record, describe him.
Frustrated with trying to brief Trump on basic facts about the economy, chief economic advisor Gary Cohn described him as "dumb as shit." After threatening to resign over Trump's racist comments on the Charlottesville protests, Cohn finally threw in the towel and resigned his post in March 2018 over a disagreement on tariffs.
In his interviews for Fire and Fury, author Michael Wolff heard several top Trump staffers identify a central difficulty in dealing with their boss: "He didn't read. He didn't really even skim. Some believed that for all practical purposes he was no more than semiliterate."
Indeed, because Donald Trump doesn't read, doesn't listen, and doesn't think, how to brief him on national security issues became one of the first challenges of the Trump White House, especially after he told Fox News during the transition he was going to cancel the presidential daily brief (PDB) used by seven previous presidents because he didn't need it. "I'm like a smart person," he told Chris Wallace.
White House aides soon learned it was impossible to schedule the PDB first thing in the morning, as with George W. Bush and Barack Obama, because Trump didn't like to roll into the office until around 11:00 a.m. When they discovered he wouldn't read an entire intelligence file, they boiled the PDB down to just three issues, one page each, preferably with charts. When he wouldn't even read that, they resorted to a short video or a quick, oral brief, which Trump often skips.
Upon leaving office, President Obama warned it would be a mistake to ignore daily updates from intelligence officials. "If you're not getting their perspective — their detailed perspective — then you are flying blind." On national security, and almost everything else, Donald Trump is flying blind.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Trump Must Go"
by .
Copyright © 2018 Bill Press.
Excerpted by permission of St. Martin's Press.
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