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.”)
Donald Trump yesterday at the Rolling Thunder motorcycle rally in Washington (Jonathan Ernst / Reuters). Based on comparison with photos from other angles, the hair beneath Trump’s ear is part of his own dangling coif, rather than belonging to someone standing behind him.
Daily Trump #8, May 29, 2016, Illegal immigrants have it too easy
Yesterday at the Rolling Thunder mass motorcycle rally here in Washington — which I could hear while at The Atlantic’s offices half a mile away, but didn’t attend — Donald Trump said, “illegal immigrants are taken better care of than our veterans.”
This is not true, and no one who has thought about it for more than one second could imagine otherwise.
A wide range of preferences and programs are designed to favor military veterans, as an incentive to ongoing recruitment and as recognition of past service. For instance: nearly 30% of the total federal workforce, and as many as half of new federal employees, are veterans. By definition, the proportion of known illegal immigrants in the federal workforce would approach zero.
Well over a million veterans and their families have attended college with GI Bill-type benefits enacted since 9/11. For most scholarship or aid programs of any kind, proof of citizenship or legal residency is required.
The VA hospital system has had numerous, serious, well-publicized problems. On the other hand it exists (unlike some notional Illegal Immigrants Hospital System), and before the recent scandals it was often studied and cited as a model of progressive medical practices. Many millions of veterans receive medical care through the VA. Illegal immigrants are not eligible for Medicaid, Medicare, treatment under Obamacare exchanges, or most private insurance coverage and generally rely on emergency rooms or cash-up-front treatment centers.
Veterans can go to their congressional representatives or the press for redress of grievances. Illegal immigrants by definition have a very limited range of rights, and few ways to assert them.
I would go on, but it’s kind of an insult to public intelligence to treat this as a serious claim. (“Donald Trump said yesterday that two was a larger number than five. Let’s examine why this is not true….”)
It was a pure statement of grievance, fitting Trump’s skillful-but-dangerous pattern of expertly reading, and then pandering to, the audience in his immediate range and in position to cheer in response.
As always, the point of these updates is not to dissuade any current Trump supporters or to suggest that the accuracy of Trump’s claims is the basis of his appeal. Rather the purpose is time-capsule chronicling of what is known about this person, at a time when the Republican party is lining up behind him and he might become president.
For proper respect for veterans and casualties of war on Memorial Day, and for much greater care about creating veterans and casualties in the future, I offer my thoughts here and here.
Donald Trump at a rally in March, with a sign depicting his promised Wall. (Jonathan Drake / Reuters)
It’s increasingly evident that something is seriously wrong with Donald Trump. That would be his own business, and his own problem, except for the chance that he could become the next president and thus be in position to command major regulatory, investigative, and military powers. As a reminder, during this period when Trump could still become president, and when more and more of the Republican party is deciding to deem him acceptable, the items in this series are for-the-record notes of things he does and says that no real-world president would or should.
Daily Trump #7: May 27, 2016, the “Mexican” judge.
Reid Epstein of the WSJ has a riveting account of Trump’s speech yesterday in San Diego. Epstein’s account is the more powerful because he is so obviously trying to keep it deadpan, and let the facts and words of Trump’s statements speak for themselves.
The three crucial facts the story conveys are: 1) that Trump spent a full 12 minutes of his speech, an eternity in rally-time, in a personalized complaint about an ongoing fraud lawsuit against his Trump University; 2) that he did not argue the merits so much as dismiss the legitimacy of the suit and the judge hearing it, and in fact threatened retaliation against the judge; and 3) that among his complaints was that the federal judge was “Mexican.” That judge, Gonzalo Curiel, was born in Indiana, received his undergraduate and JD degrees from Indiana University, and has spent his entire life and career in the United States. That career includes working as an assistant U.S. Attorney in California and as a drug-offense prosecutor there.
Samples from the story:
“I have a judge who is a hater of Donald Trump, a hater. He’s a hater. His name is Gonzalo Curiel,” Mr. Trump said, as the crowd of several thousand booed….
To the San Diego crowd, Mr. Trump argued that Judge Curiel should be removed from the case because he is biased against him. The evidence Mr. Trump presented: Rulings against him and the fact that Judge Curial was appointed to the bench by President Barack Obama. The Senate confirmed Judge Curiel by a voice vote in September 2012 [that is, with no recorded opposition]….
Mr. Trump also told the audience, which had previously chanted the Republican standard-bearer’s signature “build that wall” mantra in reference to Mr. Trump’s proposed wall along the Mexican border, that Judge Curiel is “Mexican.”
“What happens is the judge, who happens to be, we believe, Mexican, which is great. I think that’s fine,” Mr. Trump said.
Judge Curiel was born in Indiana….
“I think Judge Curiel should be ashamed of himself,” Mr. Trump said. “I’m telling you, this court system, judges in this court system, federal court, they ought to look into Judge Curiel. Because what Judge Curiel is doing is a total disgrace, OK? But we’ll come back in November. Wouldn’t that be wild if I’m president and I come back to do a civil case? Where everybody likes it. OK. This is called life, folks.”
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What’s wrong here? Why is this something that would be considered out of bounds for real-world presidents or serious contenders? In ascending order of importance:
- The temperament question. Before a crowd of cheering thousands, with the GOP nomination all but assured, Trump still cannot resist taking the bait and rebutting any perceived slight. Can you imagine Dwight Eisenhower behaving this way? Lincoln? Reagan? FDR of course joked about criticism of “my little dog, Fala.” But he joked, to huge laughs and applause, in a wry little turn as opposed to a genuinely angry tirade. It is striking how rarely we hear actual humor of this sort from Donald Trump, as opposed to “comic” insults.
- “Mexican.” Trump was careful to say that there’s nothing “wrong” with being Mexican (when, again, he was referring to a person of completely American background). But in a rally where people are chanting “build the wall!” this was not a mere by-the-way comment.
Imagine a comparison: suppose this case went to the Supreme Court, and Trump got a ruling against him written by Ruth Bader Ginsburg. And suppose he then said, “she happens to be, we believe, a Jew, which is great, I think that’s fine. Actually, though people don’t like to talk about it, three of the Democrat appointees on the Court who voted against me are Jews. Nothing wrong with it, I’m just saying.”
Aspirants to lead a big, diverse nation cannot talk this way. Richard Nixon did in private, but that was considered a scandal when it came out on his White House tapes. Political campaigns have long used various degrees of racial coding and shading. But we have seen nothing comparable to Trump’s public crudeness from a presidential nominee since at least the time of George Wallace, who in 1968 carried the deep South and won a total of 46 electoral votes.
- Contempt for the system. Individual Americans can feel, and say, that “the system is rigged” — judicially, electorally, economically. Complaints about unfairness are very frequently the basis of political campaigns, as in different ways we see in the Sanders, Trump, and other movements this year.
But when the results of an established process turn against them, presidents and presidential aspirants must defend the process. That’s the difference between rule-of-law and rule-of-men. Richard Nixon disagreed with the Supreme Court’s rulings against him but did not question their legitimacy or say he would try to get back at the Justices. Al Gore had far better logical and jurisprudential grounds for questioning the ruling in Bush v. Gore, but while he made clear that he bitterly disagreed, he of course complied. He did not mention the ethnicity of the Justices or say that they should be “looked into.”
A president cannot suggest, as Trump is doing here, that his personal interests or vendettas come ahead of the systems of democratic government that a president is sworn to “preserve, protect, and defend.” I am not aware of any institution, tradition, or system that Trump has ever placed above his own interests or impulses. The speech in San Diego is the latest stark example.
This is outlier behavior and must not be “normalized.”
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This “Trumpcast” podcast, by Jacob Weisberg of Slate and Peter Sagal of Wait, Wait Don’t Tell Me (the podcast was produced by Andy Bowers’s Panoply Media), is very interesting on the challenge for journalists like Weisberg, and satirists/comedians like Sagal, of trying to treat candidates “evenly” when one of them, Trump, is simply different from anyone who has received a nomination before. Thanks to reader Karen W for the tip.
The intensifying California drought, via Wunderground.
Daily Trump #6: May 27, 2016. Drought? What drought?
The rains of the past El Nino season have slightly offset the disastrous multi-year drought in California, which is the worst in the state’s recorded history. Just in case you skipped through that previous sentence too quickly: for as far back as weather records have been kept, there has never before been as long or severe a shortage of rainfall as what California has endured since 2012. (Tree-ring records show prolonged droughts in much earlier eras, some lasting for centuries.) Some reservoirs in northern California have been partly refilled by the recent rains; most in the south are still very dry. The water supply is nowhere close to back to normal, and what the new “normal” might be no one can say.
Everything about life in California has been affected by the drought. Governor Jerry Brown has turned to it in all of his recent State of the State messages, both as an emergency to confront and as a parable for the state’s future. For instance, here is the way he spoke about it in this year’s address (emphasis added):
One of the bright spots in our contentious politics is the joining together of both parties and the people themselves to secure passage of Proposition 1, the Water Bond. That, together with our California Water Action Plan, establishes a solid program to deal with the drought and the longer-term challenge of using our water wisely.
Our goal must be to preserve California’s natural beauty and ensure a vibrant economy – on our farms, in our cities and for all the people who live here. There is no magic bullet but a series of actions must be taken. We have to recharge our aquifers, manage the groundwater, recycle, capture stormwater, build storage and reliable conveyance, improve efficiency everywhere, invest in new technologies – including desalination – and all the while recognize that there are some limits.
Achieving balance between all the conflicting interests is not easy but I pledge to you that I will listen and work patiently to achieve results that will stand the test of time. Water goes to the heart of what California is and what it has been over centuries. Pitting fish against farmer misses the point and grossly distorts reality. Every one of us and every creature that dwells here form a complex system which must be understood and respected.
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This is the way a leader sounds if he has invested the time to understand an issue; if he recognizes the stakes in dealing with it seriously; if he is willing to take on the complex work of finding areas of agreement, including among groups with deeply conflicting interests; and if he is willing to begin a process that cannot possibly be completed on his watch but which his state cannot afford to delay. You can agree or disagree with Jerry Brown’s water policies or other aspects of his leadership. (I’m generally an admirer.) Either way, no one can doubt that he is giving this his all.
Here, by contrast, is the way a shallow narcissist sounds if he knows nothing about the issue, doesn’t care to learn, and is just shooting off his mouth with the latest thing he heard:
As Jerry Brown pointed out in his speech, there is a tradeoff between environmental and immediate economic interests, when it comes to managing water or other natural resources. (To provide enough river flow for fish to survive, some water is sent straight to the sea, in streams and rivers, rather than being diverted for irrigation or residential/commercial use.) But as Brown also pointed out, the farmer-vs-fisherman tension isn’t the real problem — very much as immigration is not the real problem when we wrestle with the rich-vs-poor economy or the stagnation of median incomes.
That’s something a real leader has the intelligence and discipline to understand, and the backbone to try to explain. The way Trump has approached this issue is beneath contempt.
Again my purpose is to lay down a real-time record, at a point when none of us can be sure that the man capable of saying such things will not be president, of the kind of person he is. This is the man more and more of the Republican party is deciding they can accept — including, today, Senator “Little Marco” Rubio, who not long ago was promising to pay any price and bear any burden to keep what he called a “con man” away from the presidency.
You can never tell which of these lies, vulgarities, or oversimplifications will hit you particularly hard. I’m surprised by how much this “no drought!” claim infuriates me. That’s probably because I have known all my life the role water plays in the West, and have recently seen how hard people there, from Governor Brown on down, have been wrestling with these sere new realities. And then to have some showboat ignoramus blow in and say: No, the answer’s simple! Someone’s cheating you! … I won’t complete that thought but will just say: this is the man who could be the next president. And, to any future readers checking in after the world knows who’s won, this is how it looked in real time.
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.
