Monday, Aug. 8, 2016 | 2 a.m.
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This campaign season is revealing a lot about Donald Trump, who tapped, fed and then rode a wave of anger among many Republican voters to become his party’s nominee for the presidency.
This is when candidates put their best foot forward, showing their skills in executive governance, their command of thoughtful policies and their nuanced knowledge of world affairs.
But Trump is unfailingly demonstrating why he is unfit to lead the United States, in terms of both intelligence and integrity. The egomaniac’s reliance on bombastic rhetoric and incomplete thoughts compels a close examination of what he stands for and how it imperils our country’s future.
He claims wealth as evidence of his business acumen, but refuses to abide by tradition and release his tax returns for public review. His pretensions of being a successful developer are belied by the number of subcontractors and tradesmen he has stiffed and the bankruptcies that left his investors betrayed. His claimed expertise in construction is undermined by his ongoing promise to build a towering wall along the U.S.-Mexico border that experts say would be impossible to construct. His plan to deport 11 million people is absurd given the logistical inability of law enforcement and the judicial system to identify, gather and process them. And his promise to bring tax relief to the middle class? That’s also a deception; his plan would reward the richest — and cost the budget-stressed nation trillions more in liability.
All of this is nothing compared with Trump’s ignorance of international affairs, an arena in which a thin-skinned, temperamental president who easily rises to anger possesses the power to destroy entire nations, and risk taking the U.S. down with it.
Just the fact that he recently insisted on ABC that Russian President Vladimir Putin “is not going to go into Ukraine, all right?” — forgetting that he told Fox in 2014 that the invasion was “so smart” and “you have to give (Putin) a lot of credit” — should trigger all sorts of warning signs. That, coupled with his financial connections to Russia, his bizarre bromance with Putin, his sympathy toward Putin in annexing Crimea, and his threat to not come to the aid of a NATO country if that country is in arrears, paints a form of appeasement and obedience to Russian power that generations of Republicans once fought uncompromisingly.
Add to that the fact that Trump’s campaign manager, Paul Manafort, was a consultant to Putin ally and former Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych and maintains close ties with Russians, and that another of Trump’s advisers — who wants to invest in Russian energy — has gone to Russia to criticize U.S. foreign policy, and that the party’s platform has gone soft on Russian aggressions. The conclusion is stark: Under Trump, the party of Reagan has lost its compass.
In a commentary in The Washington Post, Robert Kagan of the Brookings Institution makes the case that Trump has a personality defect that should disqualify him for the White House because it would put the nation in harm’s way.
“It would determine how he dealt with other nations. It would determine how he dealt with critics at home,” Kagan wrote. “It would determine how he governed, how he executed the laws, how he instructed the law-enforcement and intelligence agencies under his command, how he dealt with the press, how he dealt with the opposition party and how he handled dissent within his own party. His personality defect would be the dominating factor in his presidency, just as it has been the dominating factor in his campaign. His ultimately self-destructive tendencies would play out on the biggest stage in the world, with consequences at home and abroad that one can barely begin to imagine. It would make him the closest thing the United States has ever had to a dictator, but a dictator with a dangerously unstable temperament that neither he nor anyone else can control.”
Voters can be angry, but they can’t afford to be reckless.
