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.”)
In a press conference right now, Donald Trump says that he’d be happy to release his tax returns but can’t “while the audit is continuing.” So he can’t put them out before the election.
The IRS has maintained all along that the audit status has nothing to do with whether the returns can be released. As The Hill and many other outlets noted early this year:
“Nothing prevents individuals from sharing their own tax information,” the IRS said in a statement.
As a reminder:
It’s 103 days until the election;
Major party nominees in modern (post-Nixon) times have understood release of tax returns and believable medical reports to be part of the basic price-of-entry for the general election campaign. Trump has done neither. (If you’ve forgotten about his ludicrous “medical” report, check it out here.)
Four years ago, Trump was even scolding Mitt Romney for taking so long to release his returns:
This is entirely apart from any question of where Trump gets his money, what Russian operators are or are not doing, or anything else of the sort. Entirely apart from those issues, this is part of the basic bargain with the public of national-level campaigning. Candidates are asking the public to grant them control of the enormous powers of national government. In return the public properly asks to know as much as possible about the candidates.
So: the reason Trump is giving for not releasing his taxes is flat-out false, according to the authority most likely to know: the IRS. Neither the press nor the public should accede to his attempt to normalize this stance.
Donald Trump yesterday in North Carolina. (Carlo Allegri / Reuters)
When something goes wrong, I start with blunder, confusion, and miscalculation as the likely explanations. Planned-out wrongdoing is harder to pull off, more likely to backfire, and thus less probable.
But it is getting more difficult to dismiss the apparent Russian role in the DNC hack as blunder and confusion rather than plan.
“Real-world” authorities, from the former U.S. Ambassador to Russia to FBI sources to international security experts, say that the forensic evidence indicates the Russians. No independent authority strongly suggests otherwise. (Update the veteran reporters Shane Harris and Nancy Youssef cite evidence that the original hacker was “an agent of the Russian government.”)
The timing and precision of the leaks, on the day before the Democratic convention and on a topic intended to maximize divisions at that convention, is unlikely to be pure coincidence. If it were coincidence, why exactly now, with evidence drawn from hacks over previous months? Why mail only from the DNC, among all the organizations that have doubtless been hacked?
The foreign country most enthusiastic about Trump’s rise appears to be Russia, which would also be the foreign country most benefited by his policy changes, from his sowing doubts about NATO and the EU to his weakening of the RNC platform language about Ukraine.
None of this is proof. But it is a vivid manifestation of a long-building reality: the chaos that can be unleashed in the new era in which everything is known and anything can be leaked. Concern about these effects goes beyond party. The very conservative defense figure Edward Timperlake wrote about it recently. In Slate, Franklin Foer says the DNC episode is “Watergate, but much worse.” Paul Waldman of the WaPo writes to similar effect. Thomas Rid, a security expert at King’s College, London, says that because “all signs” indicate Russian involvement the U.S. should respond:
American inaction now risks establishing a de facto norm that all election campaigns in the future, everywhere, are fair game for sabotage—sabotage that could potentially affect the outcome and tarnish the winner’s legitimacy.
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These new developments underscore the importance of an old, familiar point: now, more than ever, Donald Trump must release his tax returns. To put it differently, the press should no longer “normalize” his stonewalling on this issue.
As another veteran figure in the defense world and political affairs wrote to me this morning:
In normal times, this [the Russian hacking] would be the lead on all network news. But these are not normal times.
I am having trouble getting through to some people that this is a real thing. The very people who always say “follow the money” with regard to the Pentagon [or other boondoggle bureaucracies] don’t see that (a) Trump has been kept afloat for about 15 years by Russian oligarchs; and (b) Russia has a powerful incentive to see a US president who will end economic sanctions.
So Donald Trump should release his tax returns because in modern times that is the basic price-of-entry in national politics. (Along with a plausible — rather than Pyongyang Daily News-style — medical report.) He should do it whether or not Vladimir Putin ever existed or there was any Russian hack. That would be true in any candidate’s case, but especially this one. George Will has come out and said that Trump should release his returns because of questions about his ties to “Russian oligarchs.”
With 100-plus days until the election, a nominee about whom there are graver-than-usual financial questions is saying that, unlike previous candidates, he won’t make his finances public.
Suspicions about foreign interference in U.S. politics have arisen before. In 1980, the Ayatollah’s Iranian government may have delayed the release of American hostages as a way of punishing Jimmy Carter in his race against Ronald Reagan. If you’d like a whole new field of inquiry, you can start digging into evidence on whether Richard Nixon’s campaign intentionally sabotaged the U.S.-Vietnam peace talks in 1968, thus prolonging the war and hurting (among others) Hubert Humphrey.
And of course the U.S. has both openly and covertly played a role in other countries’ politics for a very long time.
But (as is true so often this year) I don’t recall anything comparable to the current, open discussion about whether Vladimir Putin’s Russian government might be actively intervening to hurt Democrats and help elect Donald Trump. Josh Marshall of TPM makes this case today:
Trump seems really, really focused on a series of issues of great concern to Putin: the level of US involvement in Ukraine, the robustness of our security commitment to the Baltic NATO member states, the continued existence of the EU, the continued existence of NATO.
For me, the notorious New York Times interview was a key thing. It showed a presidential candidate not only threatening to blow up a highly successful security framework which has served the United States, Europe and actually the world extremely well over almost 70 years. He showed the kind of swaggering, confusion and uncertainty generating talk which is probably the most likely path to a true super power confrontation in Eastern Europe which probably wouldn't lead to a nuclear exchange ... but, well, might.
Whenever we are looking for undue influence or malign alliances, we are always trying to unearth the quid quo pro. Quids are a dime a dozen. You seldom find the quos. With Trump and Russia we're overflowing with quos and as Trump might say the best quos. We definitely do not know if they're connected. But what Trump is giving is exactly what Putin would want for his help. This is really indisputable.
We don’t know what this really means or what it adds up to. For looking-back-on-2016 purposes, I’m adding it to the record of what was known, believed, and said about Donald Trump as he continued his rise.
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Update This item in Yahoo News by Michael Isikoff broadens the story, with (apparent) details of a Russian hack of a Democratic researcher’s personal email account. The researcher was looking into the Ukrainian-politics background of Trump’s campaign manager Paul Manafort, while using an account separate from the DNC servers.
The editorial page of the Washington Post, though chronically hawkish in foreign policy, usually ends up endorsing the Democratic candidate for president. But it doesn’t usually end up doing something like what it did today. To the best of my knowledge, it has not previously run an editorial like this:
It didn’t say this about Richard Nixon in 1972, when the Post was beginning the Watergate investigations that would help lead to his resignation. As far as I can tell, it didn’t issue similar Red Alert warnings about Barry Goldwater in 1964.
But this year it has. Sample:
Donald J. Trump, until now a Republican problem, this week became a challenge the nation must confront and overcome. The real estate tycoon is uniquely unqualified to serve as president, in experience and temperament. He is mounting a campaign of snarl and sneer, not substance. To the extent he has views, they are wrong in their diagnosis of America’s problems and dangerous in their proposed solutions.
Mr. Trump’s politics of denigration and division could strain the bonds that have held a diverse nation together. His contempt for constitutional norms might reveal the nation’s two-century-old experiment in checks and balances to be more fragile than we knew.
Any one of these characteristics would be disqualifying; together, they make Mr. Trump a peril.
And this conclusion:
We have criticized the presumptive Democratic nominee, Hillary Clinton, in the past and will do so again when warranted. But we do not believe that she (or the Libertarian and Green party candidates, for that matter) represents a threat to the Constitution. Mr. Trump is a unique and present danger.
Good for the Post — and continued shame on the “responsible” Republicans who are acting as if this were a normal candidate in a normal year.
On the DNC hack front, I don’t know enough about the merits to say much right now. But precisely because this story by Patrick Tucker is in Defense One — a non-political publication (and part of the Atlantic family) that concentrates on defense and defense technology — it is worth particular attention. This is how it begins. The blue part is my highlighting; the yellow is in the original:
Update: David Sanger of the NYT, the rare writer whom Donald Trump has gone out of his way to praise (and also a friend of mine, a Venn-diagram overlap that might never happen again), provides more evidence of possible Russian involvement in a story here. Eg: “Researchers have concluded that the national committee was breached by two Russian intelligence agencies, which were the same attackers behind previous Russian cyberoperations at the White House, the State Department and the Joint Chiefs of Staff last year.”
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No one knows how the hacking story will play out, nor whether press endorsements like the Post’s make any difference in a cycle like this year’s. The point for the historical record, once again, is that these things are exceptional. Newspapers usually say they “prefer” one candidate to another — not that one of them is a “unique threat to democracy.” Foreign governments are sometimes assumed to have favorites in an election, but not to be intervening in them directly. (With the exception of the 1968 and 1980 elections, but those are separate stories for another day.)
And this is all on the record as Trump continues to edge closer in the polls.
When I saw this online video last night, I assumed it was a parody, perhaps a less fantastical version of the sublime “Trump World President 2016” Japanese-ad knock-off that Mike Dahlquist, aka Mike Diva, released last month.
If Donald Trump's stated aim had been increase doubts about his mental state and temperamental balance, he could hardly have done better than by putting this out. Especially by doing so a few hours after Tim Kaine’s debut as a normal-seeming person who was comfortable with himself.
Just to say it for the thousandth time: all this evidence about Donald Trump’s neediness and abnormality is in plain sight for everyone to see. And “responsible” Republican “leaders” are still trying to put him in command.
If you’d like to see a marvelous intentional-rather-than-inadvertent parody, please scroll down for “World President.”
Happy Warriors: The ticket, this afternoon in Florida. (Scott Audette / Reuters)
There’s a special “debut” category for vice-presidential selections who very suddenly find themselves in the world’s media glare.
VP picks who had mounted serious runs for president don’t quite fit this category. They already knew what it was like to handle big audiences and the press. For example: the elder George Bush became Ronald Reagan’s VP candidate in 1980, but only after running against Reagan in the primary campaign. The same was true of Joe Biden, who had run against Barack Obama (and Hillary Clinton) for the nomination in 2008 before becoming Obama’s running mate, and had run 20 years earlier too. In electoral politics, Dick Cheney had gotten only as far as Wyoming’s seat in Congress when George W. Bush picked him in 2000. But Cheney was already internationally known as Gerald Ford’s White House chief of staff and George H.W. Bush’s Secretary of Defense during the Gulf War.
Then there is the gray zone. Lloyd Bentsen, who ran with Michael Dukakis in 1988, was not well known outside Texas before his famous “You’re no Jack Kennedy!” encounter with Dan Quayle in the VP debate. But he had actually run for president in 1976. (I did my very first Atlantic article about that run.) Al Gore was a relatively fresh face when Bill Clinton chose him in 1992, but Gore had staged a precocious presidential effort four years earlier. Jack Kemp, who ran with Bob Dole against Clinton-Gore in 1996, had run briefly on his own in 1988, and had a national Republican-party and sports-star reputation to draw on. John Edwards had run against John Kerry in 2004 before becoming his (very unfortunate in retrospect) VP pick.
The list of modern-era true-surprise debuts includes:
Spiro Agnew, with Richard Nixon in 1968;
Thomas Eagleton, with George McGovern in 1972. (His replacement when he left the ticket, Sargent Shriver, was already relatively well known.)
Geraldine Ferraro, with Walter Mondale in 1984;
Dan Quayle, with George H.W. Bush in 1988;
Joe Lieberman, with Al Gore in 2000;
Sarah Palin, with John McCain in 2008;
Paul Ryan, with Mitt Romney in 2012; and now
Both Mike Pence and Tim Kaine in 2016.
As you look up and down this list, you can think of better and worse first appearances in the spotlight. Poor Senator Eagleton’s was the most unfortunate, as you can read about here. Agnew’s worked fine at the time; eventually he became on the only VP ever to resign because of criminal charges. Sarah Palin — well, you remember. Both Dan Quayle and Geraldine Ferraro had rough starts, for reasons I’ll let you go look up. Joe Lieberman let Dick Cheney roll right over him in their VP debate.
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Tim Kaine’s debut was the best of these I’m aware of, or can remember. (Barack Obama’s 2004 convention speech obviously put him on the map, but that was a one-time standalone performance rather than the extended attention that comes with running day after day on a national ticket.) You’ll get the idea about Kaine if you watch the first few minutes below. Points about why I thought it worked, after the jump
The two running mates obviously like and are at ease with each other. Compare this with any scene from the Trump-Pence rollout.
The nominee gave an introductory speech that was actually about her running mate, and then she let him talk. Compare this with the narcissistic spectacle of the “Back to Mike Pence” Trump event just one week ago.
Tim Kaine came across as comfortable with himself, comfortable with Hillary Clinton, comfortable his party’s position and agenda, and happy. Watch even two or three minutes to see how Kaine carries himself as “Happy Warrior.”
Like Pence (and HRC), Kaine was raised in the Midwest. Unlike Pence (or the public HRC), Kaine conveyed a sense of having fun—and with a little twinkle.
He deftly touched every policy and signaling theme the Democratic National Convention might have wanted after the Wagnerian tone of the Republican National Convention. His Marine Corps son is heading off to defend NATO allies—the same allies Donald Trump has said need to pony up if they want protection. He told the members of his hometown Catholic church that he would see them tomorrow morning at 9 a.m., and he talked about the duty of service he had learned from his Jesuit teachers.
And of course the Espanol. When Jon Huntsman was throwing Mandarin into his speeches four years ago, it always seemed like showing off. Neither John Kerry nor Mitt Romney, Francophones both, felt comfortable using that language in front of mainstream U.S. audiences. George W. Bush and (my one-time employer) Jimmy Carter both sort-of spoke Spanish. But Kaine is obviously comfortable with it.
I asked my friend Jorge Guajardo, former Mexican ambassador to China, how Kaine would sound to native-speakers’ ears. He answered (via Twitter):
See Michael Tomasky, who also thought that Kaine did well. Or as his headline put it, “Holy Crap, Tim Kaine Just Killed It in His First Speech With Clinton.”
The election is a long way away. But this was the best day the Democrats have had in a very long while and the first based on actual good news for their side, as opposed to potential bad news on the other—of the variety chronicled in the rest of this thread.
Donald Trump sent out the second tweet, saying people should never be mocked for their heritage, thirteen minutes after the first, in which he called Elizabeth Warren “Pocahontas.”
Think of the degree of self-knowledge required to be able to do these back to back. Or impulse control. Or ability to deal with complexity.
Last night Stephen Hayes, of the Weekly Standard, wrote about that morning’s press conference, in which Trump revived the idea that Ted Cruz’s father was involved with Lee Harvey Oswald:
The Republican nominee for president made comments Friday that one might expect from a patient in a mental institution, the kind of stuff you might read on blog with really small print and pictures of UFOs. And yet his remarks barely register as news. There are no condemnations from fellow Republicans. His supporters shrug them off as Trump being Trump.
What we are hearing from a major party’s nominee is not the behavior of a mature, stable, lucid, fully functioning person. All the evidence is on the table, as Trump for now continues his rise in the polls.
Because I have learned to spell out all allusions, I am obviously not calling Trump either a hobgoblin or a “little mind.” I am referring, sarcastically, to the maxim from TheAtlantic’s own Ralph Waldo Emerson on this theme.
And while I’m at it, a little later that morning Trump tweeted this about Tim Kaine:
What’s wrong with this? Exactly the same is true of Mike Pence. It’s not disqualifying for either Kaine or Pence — adjustment to the presidential-nominee’s views is part of running as vice president — but for anyone but Trump it would seem inexplicable to make a point so glaringly vulnerable to a “what about you?” response.
Richard Nixon (shown resigning from the presidency) didn’t release his tax returns until after the 1972 election. Since then nearly all major-party nominees have recognized an obligation to make their returns public before an election. Donald Trump begs to differ. (STR News / Reuters)
For three days now, Donald Trump has been the official nominee of the Republican party.
For many decades now, almost all major party nominees have released their federal income tax returns, as part of the implied bargain of running for president. The bargain is this: candidates are asking the public to grant them the enormous discretionary powers of the presidency. (Yes, presidents get frustrated by what they can’t do. What they can do is still vast.) In exchange, the public asks to know as much as it can about the person assuming this role.
So major-party nominees in modern times have released some version of their medical records, and their federal tax returns. You can see the returns for presidents going back to FDR here. (FDR’s records, which were released after his death, start in 1913 — which was when the Sixteenth Amendment first authorized the income tax!). Nominees began routinely releasing records before the elections in the 1970s. You can see the history of modern-era Republican returns here.
Donald Trump has flat-out refused to accept this obligation. “Flat-out” in the sense of telling George Stephanopoulos in May that the returns were “none of your business,” your meaning the press’s and public’s; and less directly in saying that the ongoing-audit status of the returns means he can’t disclose them. (No actual tax expert agrees.)
Is there something embarrassing or explosive in Trump’s tax returns? Who knows. Geoff Colvin, of Fortune, suggests that there might be. Many people have speculated that the real embarrassment might be evidence that Trump is nowhere near as rich as he has claimed. Another hypothesis is that returns would show that he has given very little to charities, or has managed to pay no taxes at all. The real point is that all of these remain hypotheses, as long as Trump shirks an obligation that modern-era candidates have recognized. As Colvin says:
Until he releases his returns or offers a plausible reason not to, voters must speculate on why he’s withholding them. None of the potential reasons will be good. Hillary Clinton is in a strong position to pound him on the issue, since she and her husband have routinely released their returns for years (though she may not want to remind voters of her speaking fees from Goldman
Now that he is officially the nominee, the press, his opponents, and for that matter his supporters as well should ramp up insistence that he do what nominees over the past half century have done.
While we’re talking transparency, disclosure, and bargains with the public, it’s worth remembering how revealingly preposterous Trump’s “medical” statement last year was. In case you’ve forgotten, here it is, in full:
This is the way Trump thinks he can handle disclosure. It also shows his taste in “only the best people!” professional assistance. (More about his doctor here.)
Seriously: imagine for one second putting out such a letter about yourself. “Healthiest individual ever elected to the presidency”? Well maybe, if you exclude mental health.
***
I realize that cavils of this sort have been pre-dismissed by Trump’s supporters. But if norms as seemingly unchallenged as the release of tax returns, and of medical reports that don’t seem to be written like infomercial copy, can be brushed aside, that is just a taste of what a Trump administration might bring. Three and a half months before the election, he is showing us who he is.
Bonus: it’s word noting for the historical record the unusual editorial that the Washington Post has just put out, with the headline “Donald Trump Is a Unique Threat to American Democracy.” And just now a lifetime Republican official from Pennsylvania Illinois has put out a resignation statement, saying “A party willing to lend its collective capital to Donald Trump has entered a compromise beyond any credible threshold of legitimacy. There is no redemption in being one of the ‘good Nazis.’”
No one will ever be able to say, looking back, that Donald Trump was concealing the kind of leader he wanted to be.
His convention speech last night, as discussed in a range of Atlantic coverage, was especially notable for the trait Yoni Appelbaum identifies here: what would be called in any other system a cult-of-the-personality Messianic tone. As Yoni says at the end of his piece:
The most striking aspect of his speech wasn’t his delivery, even though his tone often strayed over the line, from emphatic to strident. It wasn’t the specific policies he outlined, long fixtures of his stump speech. It was the extraordinary spectacle of a man standing on a podium, elevated above the surrounding crowd, telling the millions of Americans who were watching that he, alone, could solve their problems.
And the crowd cheered.
How different is this? Let’s choose two examples from presidents who otherwise usually stand as complete contrasts.
When George W. Bush accepted the Republican nomination in 2000, he observed that the Clinton-Gore 1990s had been economically strong, but he warned that the country was “coasting through prosperity.” (Knowing what we do about what lay ahead for Bush and the world, this speech has an amazing time-capsule quality of its own.) He said that his era’s prosperity and security were due to the sacrifices of his father’s generation, which won a war and came back to build a nation. Then:
Now the question comes to the sons and daughters of this achievement.
What is asked of us?
This is a remarkable moment in the life of our nation. Never has the promise of prosperity been so vivid. But times of plenty, like times of crisis, are tests of American character.
Prosperity can be a tool in our hands -- used to build and better our country. Or it can be a drug in our system -- dulling our sense of urgency, of empathy, of duty.
Our opportunities are too great, our lives too short, to waste this moment.
So tonight we vow to our nation.
We will seize this moment of American promise.
Barack Obama’s 2008 convention speech was not one of his best. But its theme too was our ability, as a country, to solve our problems, rather than my ability, as leader, to solve yours. In many of his speeches after becoming president, Obama has more clearly developed the idea of America continually becoming a more perfect union, a work that is the shared responsibility of all its citizens through all its generations. But even in this speech he emphasized the obligations of each to all.
For instance:
Our government should work for us, not against us. It should help us, not hurt us. It should ensure opportunity not just for those with the most money and influence, but for every American who's willing to work.
That's the promise of America, the idea that we are responsible for ourselves, but that we also rise or fall as one nation, the fundamental belief that I am my brother's keeper, I am my sister's keeper.
That’s the promise we need to keep. That's the change we need right now.
Bush: “What is asked of us?”
Obama: “That’s the promise we need to keep.”
Trump: “I am your voice. So to every parent who dreams for their child, and every child who dreams for their future, I say these words to you tonight: I'm with you, and I will fight for you, and I will win for you.”
The word “responsibility” does not appear in Trump’s speech. Nor “Congress” or “Cabinet” or “legislation” or other countries’ names, except to complain about them.
***
More clearly than ever before in this campaign, Trump has told us exactly who he is and how he sees his role. What happens next will reveal something about him but much more about us.
No one looking back can be in the slightest doubt that the Americans of 2016 had the evidence before them, of where this choice could lead.
The running mates, last night on stage. (Mike Segar / Reuters)
Months ago I published a note from a reader whose work, in the TV industry, involved exposure to virtually all of Donald Trump’s recorded interviews of the past few years. The reader said that the experience left a deep impression. Sample:
I have now been through dozens of interviews with Trump with a variety of interviewers, and I have never once—not once—heard him discuss anything, any subject of any kind, with any evidence of knowledge, never mind thought. None. Zero. He’s like a skipping stone over a pond. He doesn’t even come close to the level of dilettante.
You’d think at some point, something, anything would have engaged his interest enough to read up on it and think about it, but as far as I can tell, nothing has. Much more so even than George W., he appears to lack anything resembling intellectual curiosity. Maybe he’s faking it, but while understanding can sometimes be faked, you can’t fake ignorance convincingly.
I suggest bearing that assessment in mind as you read the bombshell interview Trump has (inexplicably, by any normal logic) given to David Sanger and Maggie Haberman of the NYT. This is the interview in which he:
says he’d make a judgment call on whether it was economically worthwhile for the U.S. to fulfill its treaty obligations to other NATO countries, if Russia were to invade. These treaty guarantees, by the way, have been the bedrock of security in Europe since the end of World War II.
describes the majority of U.S. alliances and relationships as if they were real-estate negotiations, in which “you always have to be prepared to walk.”
when pressed for details on how he would resolve any complex issue, falls back on variations of “we’d make terrific deals” and then treads water when asked to elaborate.
I’m tempted to quote the whole, long, transcript, but here are two illustrations of significant recurring leitmotifs. The first is Trump’s “Yes, but what about ...” problem. He is prepared with a first-round talking point on a range of topics, like “we never win any more” or “we’ll make terrific deals.” But when asked “But what about,” he’s in trouble. For instance:
TRUMP: Well, I thought the approach of fighting Assad and ISIS simultaneously was madness, and idiocy. They’re fighting each other and yet we’re fighting both of them. You know, we were fighting both of them. I think that our far bigger problem than Assad is ISIS, I’ve always felt that. Assad is, you know I’m not saying Assad is a good man, ’cause he’s not, but our far greater problem is not Assad, it’s ISIS.
SANGER: I think President Obama would agree with that. [Translation: Duh!]
TRUMP: O.K., well, that’s good. But at the same time – yeah, he would agree with that, I think to an extent. But I think, you can’t be fighting two people that are fighting each other, and fighting them together. You have to pick one or the other. And you have to go at –
SANGER: So how would your strategy differ from what he’s doing right now? [“But what about …?”]
TRUMP: Well I can only tell you – I can’t tell you, because his strategy, it’s open and it would seem to be fighting ISIS but he’s fighting it in such a limited capacity. I’ve been saying, take the oil. I’ve been saying it for years. Take the oil. They still haven’t taken the oil. They still haven’t taken it. And they hardly hit the oil. They hardly make a dent in the oil.
The other recurring motif is demonstration of what the previously quoted reader observed months ago. Namely, the absence of more-than-slogan-deep knowledge of anything. Read this exchange and tell me why “a lot of knowledge” is any better than Sarah Palin’s “I read all the papers!”
HABERMAN: You had meetings in the last couple months with James Baker and Henry Kissinger. Did they in any way change your views?
TRUMP: No.
HABERMAN: And what did you come away with from those meetings?
TRUMP: No. I came away with a lot of knowledge. I respect both men.
In Sanger and Haberman’s previous interview, Trump was even closer to an “all the papers” answer:
SANGER: One question we had for you is, first of all, since you enjoyed reading about it, is there any particular book or set of articles that you found influential in developing your own foreign policy views?
TRUMP: More than anything else would be various newspapers including your own, you really get a vast array and, you know a big menu of different people and different ideas. You know you get a very big array of things from reading the media, from seeing the media, the papers, including yours.
And it’s something that I’ve always found interesting and I think I’ve adapted to it pretty well. I will tell you my whole stance on NATO, David, has been — I just got back and I’m watching television and that’s all they’re talking about. And you know when I first said it, they sort of were scoffing. And now they’re really saying, well wait, do you know it’s really right? And maybe NATO — you know, it doesn’t talk about terror. Terror is a big thing right now. That wasn’t the big thing when it originated and people are starting to talk about the cost.
Again, please read the whole thing. Congratulations to the two journalists.
***
On why Trump would have given this interview, effectively blowing up a firecracker in his own hands on the very day he will make his big acceptance speech:
David Sanger is a long-time friend of mine, whose reporting on a wide range of topics I’ve admired over the decades. I don’t know Haberman but also respect her work. For reasons that are probably different from mine — but who knows! — Donald Trump has clearly decided that David Sanger is someone he also respects and whose approval he apparently seeks. In the same press conferences in which he’s called other reporters “You sleaze,” Trump has gone out of his way to compliment David’s work.
By extension Trump would seem to crave respect from Sanger and Haberman and the paper they work for. Why else would he give these two long interviews, for what he must have imagined would be displays of his Metternich-like overview of world affairs? In reality they have backfired, especially this latest one.
While the campaign is going on, its slogan has of course been “Make America Great Again.” In retrospect a more apt one might be: The Dunning-Kruger Effect Is Real.
The first convention I remember watching, on television at home as a kid, was the 1964 Republican convention, featuring Barry Goldwater’s fiery “extremism in defense of liberty is no vice” speech.
Four years later, in 1968, the Democrats were tearing themselves apart at their Chicago convention, as the country was self-rending as well.
The 1980 Democratic convention was a nightmare, with Teddy Kennedy barely deigning to greet incumbent president Jimmy Carter on the platform after Kennedy’s unsuccessful (but gravely wounding to Carter) campaign against him.
But even 1968 was no match for the personal rancor of this evening in Cleveland, with Ted Cruz’s cold dissing of Donald Trump in front of the delegates who had just chosen Trump.
Again the theme of recent posts has been: conventions and national campaigns don’t “matter” in any profound sense (although they can make a difference in whether you get elected). But if you can’t manage a four-day convention, let alone a four-month national campaign, you’re facing steep odds in managing a very complex national government for four or eight years.
And — except for the effective Mike Pence speech, which began near the end of the 10pm-11pm EDT prime time bloc — this was another chaotically managed convention night. The Skyped-in-looking 90-second video by Marco Rubio was the minor indication. The cold, outright subversion by Ted Cruz — the man whose wife’s looks Trump had mocked, the man whose father Trump had accused of involvement in the JFK killing — was unlike anything on a national campaign stage in modern times. You can read about it in the papers tomorrow. To put it Donald Trump’s terms, the great deal-maker was publicly snookered and humiliated by his beaten opponent, “Lyin’ Ted.”
In normal times this would itself by headline news, but on this day it’s just one more disorderly note. Here’s the bonus: according to the NYT, Trump either does not understand how NATO works, or does not care. Why? Because he says that if he were president, the U.S. might not fulfill its NATO treaty obligation to defend European nations from attack by Russia (whose leader, Vladimir Putin, is the foreign official with whom Trump has seemed most simpatico):
He even called into question whether, as president, he would automatically extend the security guarantees that give the 28 members of NATO the assurance that the full force of the United States military has their back.
For example, asked about Russia’s threatening activities that have unnerved the small Baltic States that are the most recent entrants into NATO, Mr. Trump said that if Russia attacked them, he would decide whether to come to their aid only after reviewing whether those nations “have fulfilled their obligations to us.”
This is a genuinely big deal. Under Article V of the NATO treaty, all member states are legally bound in a compact of “collective defense” to come to one another’s aid and support. As many European countries did for the U.S. after the 9/11 attacks.
Out of careful calculation, or out of blind ignorance, Donald Trump has essentially overturned a tenet that has underlain U.S. foreign policy through all of my lifetime, and I am not a young guy.
Either Donald Trump has carefully thought this out, or he has absolutely no idea of how the world works or about the job he aspires to hold. This is what we know about the man, three months before the country decides whether to make him commander-in-chief.
Tonight’s entry in the cavalcade of Trump family speakers: Eric Trump, doing a run-through at the podium this afternoon. There has never before been a convention in which so many relatives spoke about a candidate. On the other hand, there’s never before been a convention at which the nominee appeared and spoke every single night. (Aaron Bernstein / Reuters)
On the morning after Donald Trump officially became the Republican party’s nominee, we learned these two things about his approach to the doing that goes with the presidency, as opposed to the being of ultimate-winner status.
I’m not claiming that signs like these will dissuade Trump’s supporters or necessarily change any votes. But they further raise the stakes, and the warning signs, about what to expect if he actually took office.
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1) Division of labor. According to Robert Draper’s inside-look piece in the NYT Magazine, which has so far gone unchallenged by the ace Trump communications team, Donald Trump Jr. made the following offer to Gov. John Kasich before Trump Sr. settled on Gov. Mike Pence as the VP pick:
But according to the Kasich adviser (who spoke only under the condition that he not be named), Donald Jr. wanted to make him an offer nonetheless: Did he have any interest in being the most powerful vice president in history?
When Kasich’s adviser asked how this would be the case, Donald Jr. explained that his father’s vice president would be in charge of domestic and foreign policy.
Then what, the adviser asked, would Trump be in charge of?
“Making America great again” was the casual reply.
Perhaps I speak for many in saying that I’d be more comfortable with an administration in which John Kasich was in charge of “domestic and foreign policy” that one in which Donald Trump had any role in either. But this is yet another reminder that a major party has chosen a nominee who views the presidency essentially as a beauty pageant or an Oscar contest, which matters only as a prize to win.
Of course every successful politician thinks this way to some degree. But most of them think about other things as well. Illustration: think of a president whose policies you generally disagree with. For me, it might be George W. Bush. For someone else, it might be my one-time employer Jimmy Carter, or perhaps the current president. But whoever you choose and however much you disagree, you will still recognize that the person had policies, and cared about them, and took the job seriously.
Three and a half months before election day, here is another piece of for-the-record data that a person who might become president doesn’t have policies and doesn’t really care about the job.
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2) You’re not fired. A Trump aide has taken the fall for the plagiarism in Melania Trump’s speech on Monday night, as discussed in installments #44, #45, and #46. Rather, she has taken the fall without taking a fall. Here is the heart of the statement from Meredeith McIver, an “in-house staff writer for the Trump organization,” which you can read in full here:
Meredith McIver’s statement today, on Trump corporation letterhead
Bonus points:
That passage in Melania Trump’s speech obviously does not matter at all in any real-world sense. What matters, as argued here, is the rapidly mounting accumulation of clownishly incompetent rookie errors, by a man whose campaign is premised on “bringing in all the best people” but who in practice apparently relies on a little circle of political-novice cronies and immediate-family members.
To reinforce the why-this-matters point, the presidency is almost-infinitely harder to manage than a presidential campaign. If Trump and his team are having this much trouble in what should be a triumphal convention week, God save us during a world financial or military crisis.
Even with John Kasich’s help.
I’ve written several times that Melania Trump should be spared the blame in this case. But bear in mind that (a) her insistence that she’d written the speech on her own, which seems not quite true; and (b) she herself would have known perfectly well where those sentences came from, since she had personally selected them and read them to the speechwriter in the first place. So on Monday she stood before a live audience of tens of millions, and read parts of a speech that she knew better than anyone else had been lifted from Michelle Obama.
The path not taken: Would have been so great to imagine the reaction if she’d actually said in the speech, “As one woman I admire, Michelle Obama, once said...”
Barring any “repurposed material” surprises from Eric Trump in his speech tonight or Ivanka in hers tomorrow, here endeth the Trump-family-speeches chronicles.
Bonus points:
