People will look back on this era in our history to see what was known about Donald Trump while Americans were deciding whether to choose him as president. Here’s a running chronicle from James Fallows on the evidence available to voters as they make their choice, and of how Trump has broken the norms that applied to previous major-party candidates. (For a Fallows-led, ongoing reader discussion on Trump’s rise to the presidency, see “Trump Nation.”)
As a reminder, these dispatches are meant as a chronicle for time-capsule purposes, recorded at a time when no one can be sure that Donald Trump won’t become the 45th President of the United States. They are meant to note the traits that distinguish Trump from the first 44 presidents and from all previous major-party nominees. As more members of his party’s establishment accommodate themselves to Trump, this record is also meant as a reminder of the kind of person they are now deciding to find acceptable.
Daily Trump #5, May 26, 2016. What’s this ‘Gang of Eight’ I keep hearing about?
The most jarring part of Donald Trump’s announcement speech nearly one year ago was what he said about immigrants. You can see the whole thing, which even now is startlingly coarse, in the C-SPAN archives here. The part about Mexicans begins around time 9:00, and is cued in the clip above.
What’s the news? It’s in a great story out today in Bloomberg Businessweek by Joshua Green — longtime friend of mine, Atlantic and Washington Monthly alumnus — that is about Reince Priebus but includes an interview with Trump. In it Trump discloses that he had not actually thought about the immigration issue, or other issues, before diving in head first. From Green’s story, with added emphasis:
“I’m not sure I got there through deep analysis,” he said [speaking of another policy]. “My views are what everybody else’s views are. When I give speeches, sometimes I’ll sign autographs and I’ll get to talk to people and learn a lot about the party.”
He says he learned that voters were disgusted with Republican leaders and channeled their outrage. I asked, given how immigration drove his initial surge of popularity, whether he, like Sessions [Senator Jeff Sessions, of Alabama], had considered the RNC’s call for immigration reform to be a kick in the teeth. To my surprise, he candidly admitted that he hadn’t known about it or even followed the issue until recently. “When I made my [announcement] speech at Trump Tower, the June 16 speech,” he said, “I didn’t know about the Gang of Eight. … I just knew instinctively that our borders are a mess.”
Everything about the GOP struggle over immigration concerned whether the “Gang of Eight” was a step in the right or the wrong direction. The gang was an informal alliance of four Republican and four Democratic senators. On the Democratic side, senators Bennet, Durbin, Menendez, and Schumer; and on the Republican side, senators Flake, Graham, McCain, and crucially Marco Rubio. If you were a “reform”-minded Republican (and most any Democrat), you supported this effort to revamp immigration laws, including finding a “path to citizenship” for some already-present illegal/undocumented immigrants. If you were from the Tea Party, you blasted Marco Rubio for being involved at all.
But either way, you would have heard of it. Donald Trump, who has made “the wall” and the threat of uncontrolled immigration the emotional center of his campaign, did not know what the Gang of Eight was. He is the only person running for the nomination in either party of whom this could possibly be true. Even Ben Carson was informed enough to talk about the Gang of Eight back in 2014.
As a first approximation, it is fair to assume that Donald Trump does not know anything about public policy. Anything. Including about the issue that is the main point of his campaign. It is almost impossible to convey how far this is outside the range of even the least-brilliant or dutiful “normal” politicians. Instinct always matters, but going purely with the gut is the route to sorrow in public affairs.
For comparison, please check out this previous item on why Sarah Palin, the closest apparent comparison, actually was much better informed than Trump. We are entering the realm of “Chauncey Gardner,” the simple-minded gardener whose blurtings are treated as meaningful, in Being There. This is the person who would be making judgment calls as president, including about the use of force and nuclear weaponry. This is the person the Republican party is preparing itself to accept.
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As a reminder, here is what Trump said on immigration and border issues in his announcement speech. From the C-SPAN transcript:
When do we beat Mexico at the border? They are laughing at us, at our stupidity. And now they are beating us economically.
They are not our friend. Believe me, they are killing us economically. The U.S. has become a dumping ground for everyone else’s problems. It’s true. And these are not the best and the finest. When Mexico sends its people, they are not sending their best. They are not sending you [points]. They are not sending you [points again].
They are sending people that have lots of problems, and they are bringing those problems to us. They are bringing drugs. They are bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people…
We have no protection and we have no confidence. We don’t know what’s happening. It’s got to stop and it’s got to stop fast [APPLAUSE]
As a reminder, for time-capsule purposes this is an ongoing chronicle of the things Donald Trump says and does that no real president could, should, or would say or do.
Daily Trump #4: May 23, 2016, the Vince Foster case. Six months into Bill Clinton’s first term, his lifelong friend and deputy White House counsel, Vince Foster, died of a gunshot wound along the George Washington Parkway outside Washington. All available real-world evidence is that Foster, who was suffering from clinical depression, had killed himself. That was what a special counsel officially determined, in a report issued a year later.
Then and thereafter, conspiracy-theorist madmen have maintained that there must be more to the case. Maybe Foster, who had been working with Hillary Clinton at the Rose Law Firm in Little Rock, was having an affair with her? Maybe in some general way he Knew Too Much? Let me emphasize that in nearly 23 years no official or investigative body has found any evidence to this effect, at all. Very much like the controversy over Barack Obama’s place of birth, it’s a “controversy” in which all the facts are on one side.
When asked in an interview last week about the Foster case, Trump dealt with it as he has with many edgy topics — raising doubts about the official version of events even as he says he does not plan to talk about it on the campaign trail.
He called theories of possible foul play “very serious” and the circumstances of Foster’s death “very fishy.”
“He had intimate knowledge of what was going on,” Trump said, speaking of Foster’s relationship with the Clintons at the time. “He knew everything that was going on, and then all of a sudden he committed suicide.”
He added, “I don’t bring [Foster’s death] up because I don’t know enough to really discuss it. I will say there are people who continue to bring it up because they think it was absolutely a murder. I don’t do that because I don’t think it’s fair.”
That is: I don’t bring it up because that wouldn’t be “fair” — so let me bring it up. And, yes, the Post interviewer asked the question, but then Trump responded in the way he did.
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What’s wrong with this? It is a near-exact parallel to Trump’s relentless and bogus insistence early in Obama’s term that Obama was not a native-born citizen. Note the overlap between the way Trump talks about Vince Foster now with what he was saying on the “birther” front four years ago:
“A lot of people are questioning his birth certificate,” Trump said. “They’re questioning the authenticity of his birth certificate.
“I’ve been known as being a very smart guy for a long time. I don’t consider myself birther or not birther but there are some major questions here and the press doesn’t want to cover it,” he said.
Side question: Is there anyone you know who actually is very smart, who goes around saying “I’ve been known as being a very smart guy for a long time”? In my experience there is no surer marker of not, in fact, being smart than this kind of barroom brag. (Evidence: I’ve interviewed a significant number of people who have won the Nobel prize or various “genius” awards, been chess champions or precocious elite-college professors, started tech companies in their 20s, etc. None of them talks this way.) Similarly there is no one I know who is really good looking, who goes around saying “I’ve been known as being very good looking for a long time.” Hypothesis: We know that Trump is ill-informed on public issues. The evidence mounts that, while he is clever and cunning in performance skills, he is sort of dim intellectually.
The broader point is that Trump’s discussion of Vince Foster and Obama’s birth certificate is part of a pattern that is familiar in his own speech and thought — but virtually unknown among real presidents or real contenders for the job.
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Rumors and conspiracy theories are a perennial part of U.S. political culture. The play MacBird!, in the mid-1960s, was based on the premise that Lyndon Johnson was behind the assassination of JFK. You can easily find online the theories connecting both Presidents Bush, father and son, with Saudi figures tied up in the 9/11 attacks. In any era you choose, you will find the counterparts.
What you won’t find is major-party nominees dignifying fringe theories in their national campaigns:
— Richard Nixon was renowned for fighting dirty and tough, but he never said “Well, people are asking a lot of questions about MacBird,” or that LBJ’s becoming president was “very fishy.”
— Bob Dole was doing his best to unseat Bill Clinton in 1996, but he didn’t include Vince Foster in his list of Clinton’s failings.
— John McCain tried to stop Barack Obama from being elected in 2008, and Mitt Romney did his best to keep Obama from being re-elected four years later. But both of them went out of their way to reject birther and “alien” fantasies, Romney specifically distancing himself from Trump’s birth-certificate crusade in 2012.
All major-party candidates in modern times have avoided legitimizing conspiracy theories, until Donald Trump.
What Trump is saying about Foster is utter bullshit, on a par with his lunatic suggestion last month ago that Ted Cruz’s father might have been an ally of Lee Harvey Oswald. A person who could think or say things like these, and in fact repeatedly does say them, is not a person you want judging the complicated issues that come before a real-world president. This person is about to become a major-party nominee.
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Update Congrats to Jake Tapper and CNN for their anti-false-equivalence, “pro-truth” takedown of Trump’s bullshit on this topic.
People will wonder about America in our time. It can be engrossing to look back on dramatic, high-stakes periods in which people were not yet sure where things would lead, to see how they assessed the odds before knowing the outcome. The last few months of the 1968 presidential campaign: would it be Humphrey, Nixon, or conceivably even George Wallace? Or 1964: was there a chance that Goldwater might win? The impeachment countdown for Richard Nixon, in 1974? The Bush-Gore recount watch in 2000?
The Trump campaign this year will probably join that list. The odds are still against his becoming president, but no one can be sure what the next five-plus months will bring. Thus for time-capsule purposes, and not with the idea that this would change a single voter’s mind, I kick off what I intend as a regular feature. Its purpose is to catalogue some of the things Donald Trump says and does that no real president would do.
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Is this implicitly anti-Trump? No, it’s explicitly so. I’ll vote Democratic this fall, because I disagree with the current Republican party’s stance on tax policy, budget policy, health policy, climate and environmental policy, voting-rights policy, labor policy, educational policy, gun policy, infrastructure policy, foreign and military policy, and judicial appointments too. But if Donald Trump were the Democratic nominee, I would not vote for him.
I believe he should not become president mainly because of his temperament. Presidents make an astonishingly large number of hour-by-hour judgment calls. Nothing about Donald Trump’s judgment is reassuring from my point of view. His tweets are highly entertaining! But so is Tosh.0 Again, I’m not trying to persuade anyone. I am just laying out my logic.
And so, the chronicle begins: things Donald Trump has said or done that would be highly undesirable from an actual president. The running tally is meant to document his outlier status as he moves toward the general election.
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Daily Trump #1. May 20, 2016, the EgyptAir disaster. Trump, a few hours after the news of the missing plane: “What just happened? A plane got blown out of the sky. And if anybody thinks it wasn’t blown out of the sky, you’re 100% wrong, folks, OK? You’re 100% wrong.”
Why this deserves notice: Indications are that terrorism was probably to blame for this crash. But the gap between probability and certainty is what presidents must remain aware of. A president who leapt to conclusions like this would be an active danger. Good example: the care with which the Kennedy Administration dealt with the complications of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Bad example: the George W. Bush administration’s rush toward war with Iraq.
Daily Trump #2: May 20, 2016, No gun-free zones. Here is Trump’s appearance this year at the NRA convention. At time 1:30 he says that Hillary Clinton “wants to abolish the Second Amendment — we’re not talking about changing it, she wants to abolish it.” That is bullshit. She’s in favor of tighter background checks for purchasers, liability provisions for gun manufacturers and sellers, and other restrictions. You can disagree with her or argue, as the NRA does, that these are the first steps in a dangerous direction, but you can’t sanely say that this means abolishing the Second Amendment.
Through the speech Trump repeats a cleaned-up version of the claim he made earlier this year in Vermont: “I will get rid of gun-free zones on schools… My first day, it gets signed, O.K.? My first day. There’s no more gun-free zones.”
Stated that way, the claim is crazy. No president signs legislation on his first day. A president could sign an executive order on his first day, but gun-free zones, including those set up by cities or states, are not subject to simple executive order. Now he’s just saying “we’ll get rid of them” without specifying day one, which is not as provably false but is something that no one who understood government would say.
Temperament, temperament, temperament. Every politician feels this way, and you can imagine Nixon or LBJ fuming this way to their confidants. Bill Clinton too. But the judgment to vent this way directly to millions of followers? Again, it’s Tosh.0. No larger point for now, just recording some of the tally as it mounts up.
