Retired General: Trump’s Judgment is Fundamentally Flawed

Trump and Emperor Nero - two of a kind?

Some likely think my comparisons of Donald Trump to mentally deranged Roman emperors of the past are off target, but this past week and stories coming out of the White House suggest that the comparisons are all to appropriate.  Worse yet, they suggest that dangerous actions could come from an emotionally and - in my view and that of others - mentally ill occupant of the White House.  A piece in the Washington Post based on interviews with 22 White House officials, friends and advisers to the president and other administration allies suggests that thinking Americans - which excludes Fox News viewers and evangelical Christians - should be very worried if not truly frightened.  Here are story excerpts:

Inside the White House, aides over the past week have described an air of anxiety and volatility — with an uncontrollable commander in chief at its center. . . . As one official put it: “We haven’t bottomed out.”

Trump is now a president in transition, at times angry and increasingly isolated. He fumes in private that just about every time he looks up at a television screen, the cable news headlines are trumpeting yet another scandal. He voices frustration that son-in-law Jared Kushner has few on-air defenders. He revives old grudges. 

Still, Trump’s friends are increasingly concerned about his well-being, worried that the president’s obsession with cable commentary and perceived slights is taking a toll on the 71-year-old. “Pure madness,” lamented one exasperated ally.

Retired four-star Army general Barry McCaffrey said the American people — and Congress especially — should be alarmed.

“I think the president is starting to wobble in his emotional stability and this is not going to end well,” McCaffrey said. “Trump’s judgment is fundamentally flawed, and the more pressure put on him and the more isolated he becomes, I think, his ability to do harm is going to increase.”

This portrait of Trump at a moment of crisis just over a year after taking office is based on interviews with 22 White House officials, friends and advisers to the president and other administration allies, most of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to candidly discuss Trump’s state of mind.

The tumult comes as special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s investigation of Russia’s 2016 election interference and the president’s possible obstruction of justice has intensified. Meanwhile, Kushner, a White House senior adviser, was stripped last week of his access to the nation’s top secrets amid increasing public scrutiny of his foreign contacts and of his mixing of business and government work.
 Trump seethed with anger last Wednesday night over cable news coverage of a photo, obtained by Axios, showing Sessions at dinner with Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein, who oversees the Russia investigation, and another top Justice Department prosecutor. The outing was described in news reports as amounting to an act of solidarity after Trump had attacked Sessions in a tweet that morning.

The next morning, Trump was still raging about the photo, venting to friends and allies about a dinner he viewed as an intentional show of disloyalty.

“Trump’s fundamentally distorted personality — which at its core is chaotic, volatile and transgressive — when combined with the powers of the presidency had to end poorly,” said Peter Wehner, a veteran of the three previous Republican administrations and a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. “What we’re now seeing is the radiating effects of that, and it’s enveloped him, his White House, his family and his friends.”
 Trump is testing the patience of his own staff, some of whom think he is not listening to their advice. White House counsel Donald McGahn and national economic council director Gary Cohn have been especially frustrated, according to other advisers.
 “Morale is the worst it’s ever been,” said a Republican strategist in frequent contact with White House staff. “Nobody knows what to expect.”

 I definitely do not sleep well know that we have in essence a mad man in the White House.

Chaos and Corruption Define the Trump White House

I have been a political junkie for the most part since the Watergate days when, like many others, I watched the televised hearings whenever possible.  Since then, I follow politics pretty much daily and have been politically active on education issues, as a Republican activist, and now as a die in the wool opponent to Republicans and most wrongheaded Republican policies.  Never in all these years did we have a spectacle such as the one that surrounds the Trump White House.  Chaos, incompetence and corruption define the place and too few Americans seem to understand the damage being done both domestically and internationally. A column in the Washington Post looks at the endless display flowing from Trump and his minions.  Here are highlights:

The ceaseless barrage of news — both real and fake — from the Trump administration can be numbing, so it’s important to step back every once in a while and look at the big picture: Never have we seen such utter chaos and blatant corruption.

None of what’s happening is normal, and none of it should be acceptable. Life is imitating art: What we have is less a presidency than a cheesy reality show, set in a great stately house, with made-for-television histrionics, constant back­stabbing and major characters periodic­ally getting booted out.

Hope Hicks, the White House communications director, decided Wednesday to self-eject. Was it because she had spent the previous day testifying on Capitol Hill and was forced to admit having told “white lies” for President Trump? Was it because the man she had been dating, Rob Porter, lost his important White House position when the Daily Mail revealed he faced multiple allegations of wife-beating? Or was Hicks simply exhausted?

 

Among those now with limited [security clearance] access is Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, whose heavily indebted real estate empire and grudging disclosure of his many foreign contacts worried FBI investigators. Kushner is a senior adviser to the president whose many assignments include forging peace in the Middle East — but who now is not cleared for documents or meetings that discuss what’s really happening in the Middle East or anywhere else. So why is he still there?

 

Why was he there in the first place? Because of Trump’s appalling nepotism.

Trump also brought his daughter Ivanka into the White House as an adviser. What does she do? What qualifies her to do it? In a real administration, conservative or liberal, Kushner’s office and Ivanka Trump’s office would be occupied by experienced professionals who actually know something about diplomacy or administration or some government function.

Never before have we had a president openly at war with his own attorney general. The Post reported Wednesday that special counsel Robert S. Mueller III is investigating whether Trump’s attempts to force Attorney General Jeff Sessions out of his job last summer were part of a pattern of attempted obstruction of justice.

 

Sessions was photographed at a posh Washington restaurant dining with Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein — who oversees the Mueller investigation — and Solicitor General Noel Francisco. If it wasn’t a deliberate display of unity at the Justice Department, it sure looked like one.

 

Any other president who displayed such cavalier disregard for previous policy positions and total ignorance of basic facts would have provoked an uproar. Trump barely gets a shrug. Nobody expects him to be consistent. Nobody expects him to know anything about anything. He is defining the presidency down in a way that we must not tolerate.

I spent years as a foreign correspondent in Latin America. To say we are being governed like a banana republic is an insult to banana republics. It’s that bad, and no one should pretend otherwise.

The Dangerous Russification of America

Der Trumpenführer has made his admiration of Vladimir Putin well known.  Whether the admiration stems from his desire to rule America as an authoritarian dictatorship or because he wants to keep Putin happy because of information Putin is holding over his head is unclear and a question that no one knows how to answer for certain at the moment.  Nonetheless, Trump and Putin both lie incessantly and with Trump's launch of an anti-gay jihad to please his Christofascist supporters certainly mirrors Putin's war on Russian gays in order to win the support of the Russian Orthodox Church which has a centuries old history of supporting autocrats at the expense of the populace. With America in chaos - one of Putin's objectives -  the larger question is what happens to the West now that America seemingly is no longer its leader.  A column in the New York Times looks at the unsettling situation.  Here are excerpts: 

MUNICH — This Munich Security Conference was different. A Frenchman defended NATO against the American president. The Russian foreign minister was here but the phantom American secretary of state was not. An ex-Swedish prime minister had to respond to the “last-night-in-Sweden affair” — an ominous incident in a placid Scandinavian state dreamed up in his refugee delirium by Donald Trump.

Surreal hardly begins to describe the proceedings at this annual gathering, the Davos of foreign policy. This is what happens when the United States is all over the place. Allies get nervous; they don’t know what to believe. “Trump’s uncontrolled communication is unsettling the world,” John Kasich, the Republican governor of Ohio, told me. That is an understatement. The Trump doctrine is chaos.

Vice President Mike Pence came, communicated and exited without taking questions. He said the United States would be “unwavering” in its commitment to NATO, whose glories he extolled. (He never mentioned the European Union, whose fragmentation Trump encourages.)

[G]etting used to an American president who responds through Twitter to the last guy in the room or what he’s just seen on TV, has no notion of or interest in European history, and has turned America’s word into junk, is not easy. Europeans are reeling.

Wolfgang Ischinger, the chairman of the Munich conference, told Deutsche Welle that if Trump continues to advocate against the European Union it would amount to a “nonmilitary declaration of war.” Those are extraordinary words from a distinguished former German ambassador about the American president.

[T]he most troubling thing was finding myself unsure who was more credible — Pence or Sergei Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister. The Russification of America under Trump has proceeded apace. Vladimir Putin’s macho authoritarianism, disdain for the press, and mockery of the truth has installed itself on the Potomac.

The Russian system under Putin is a false democracy based on a Potemkin village of props — political parties, media, judiciary — that are the fig leaf covering repression or elimination of opponents. Russia runs on lies. It’s alternative-fact central (you know, there are no Russian troops in Ukraine). But what happens when the United States begins to be infected with Russian disease?

Pence’s speech may not have been precisely a barefaced whopping lie, but it certainly showed barefaced whopping disdain for the intelligence of the audience (you know, nothing has changed with Trump, ha-ha.) By comparison, Lavrov was blunt. He announced the dawn of the “post-West world order.”

I wonder what that means — perhaps a world of lies, repression, unreason and violence. It advances as America offers only incoherence. To counter the drift, what is needed? A functioning American State Department would be a start.

America today has no foreign policy. It’s veering between empty reaffirmations of old bonds (Pence) and the scattershot anti-Muslim, Sweden-syndrome, anti-trade, bellicose, what’s-in-it-for-me mercantilism of Trump.

The European Union needs to step into the moral void by standing unequivocally for the values that must define the West: truth, facts, reason, science, tolerance, freedom, democracy and the rule of law. For now it’s unclear if the Trump administration is friend or foe in that fight.

Carl Bildt, the former Swedish prime minister, joked to me that the most terrifying aspect of Trump’s “incident” in Sweden was “the suppression of it by all the major Swedish newspapers, and even Swedish citizens.” We laughed. The unfunny moment will come when Trump lashes out based on nothing but fervid imaginings and the “post-West” order stumbles from confusion into conflagration.

Trump is a clear and present danger to both America and the world at large.  Congressional Republicans need to stop pretending otherwise.  It's as if we have our own Emperor Nero in the White House. #NotMyPresident.  

Reality Collides with Trump's Promises

To any sane observer it ought to be increasingly obvious that Der Trumpenführer lives in a fantasy world with himself at the center of the universe.  If facts do not support the fantasy, deny them and call anyone reporting the truth a liar guilty of peddling "fake news."  The problem is that reality has a way of catching up with the most frenetic making of would be myths and sooner or later all but the most ignorant and or gullible will realize that the reality TV image is untrue.  A piece in Politico looks at the harsh reality that is colliding with Trump's fantasy view of himself and his regime.  To me, the wonder is that anyone sane could have expected anything but the failure we are already seeing after only one month.  Here are excerpts:

President Donald Trump touts “incredible progress” in his first month in office. But the frenetic period that opened with an inaugural address about “American carnage” and ended with a raucous campaign rally has brought a spotty record that falls short of his promises.

Despite dizzying sound and fury, the president failed to halt immigration from Muslim countries, to label China a currency manipulator, to deliver a serious plan for funding his border wall or to repeal Obamacare—all among his many promises during last year’s campaign.

The Muslim travel ban, Trump’s most consequential and controversial executive order, one of 23 signed so far, lies dead in the courts. He has achieved no noticeable progress on tax reform. The White House is already facing multiple investigations by a Republican-controlled Congress while the intelligence community investigates possible collusion last year between Trump’s campaign and Russia. Trump has appointed just three of the 15 required deputy secretary Cabinet positions; fewer than 40 of the 700 key administration jobs requiring Senate confirmation have been filled.

There's no precedent in the modern history of the presidency for what we've seen over “the last month,” said Republican operative Steve Schmidt. “If you combine the dishonesty, the sloppiness and incompetence, the result is deep concern and anxiety across allied capitals, glee in the capitals of foreign enemies, and an American public that regard him one month in with the lowest levels of support in the modern era. We’ve just never seen an American administration collapse from a credibility perspective as quickly as this one has.”

According to Gallup, Trump’s 40 percent approval rating after one month is 21 points below the historical average rating for new presidents in mid-February and 11 points below the lowest mid-February rating for any other new president.

“He’s beginning to understand where his power truly lies. Washington is not a safe space for Trump,” said Bruce Haynes, a GOP consultant.

If the scoreboard, aside from a healthy stock market, does not seem to reflect much winning just yet, Trump has an easy explanation — that he “inherited a mess,” a notable shift from his promise last July that “I alone can fix it.”

Trump blames the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for striking down his travel ban, which was hastily signed without thorough vetting by legal experts and the agencies directed to implement it. He blames the intelligence community for leaking damaging information about Flynn and other investigations rather than the former adviser, who admitted to misleading Vice President Mike Pence about the nature of his conversations with the Russian ambassador. He blames nameless staffers for giving him false information and, more than anything, the media for its reporting stories he has taken to dismissing as “fake news.”

Despite those attacks on the media, Trump’s own credibility has been weakened by a torrent of falsehoods coming from top surrogates, his Twitter feed and his mouth: unsupported or easily disproved assertions about the inauguration crowd size, crime statistics, claims of fraudulent voting even though he won the election, the size of his Electoral College victory and, on Saturday, a passing statement about a recent terror attack in Sweden. (There wasn’t one.)

Doubts are growing, for instance, among national security experts in both parties about the new administration’s preparedness for its first serious geopolitical test.

Congressional Republicans, meanwhile, were far more optimistic a month ago about realizing the potential of a governing moment in which they control both houses of Congress and the White House than they are now.

Again, to me the surprise is that anyone expected anything different - especially those Republicans that sold their souls to a morally bankrupt narcissist . 

Trump's First, Alarming week as President Elect

I may hurt the feelings of some, but I don't know how any sane and rational person could think that Donald Trump is fit to occupy the White House.  His first week as president elect is already confirming the idiocy of anyone who voted for the man.   His transition team is marked by chaos, cronyism, and settling for the least qualified since so many reputable individuals fear staining their reputations and perhaps selling their souls should they join a Trump administration.  The head of an alt-right, racist, misogynistic "news" outlet is senior counselor to the president and an open contempt for the free press has been again revealed.   As has been consistently the case, New York based media where Trump is best known has led the way in excoriating the man's dangerous failings and narcissistic egomania.  A piece in the New Yorker looks at Trump's first week of incompetent misrule before he has even taken the oath of office.  Here are excerpts: 

It’s been one week since an unusually subdued Donald Trump gave his victory speech in Manhattan. “For those who have chosen not to support me in the past—of which there were a few people,” Trump said, eliciting laughter from the crowd of ecstatic supporters wearing red Make America Great Again hats, “I’m reaching out to you for your guidance and your help so that we can work together and unify our great country.” After running a campaign defined more by whom and what he opposed, Trump’s remarks were out of character and welcome.

A week later, those words seem hollow. The first sign that our easily distracted President-elect remained unchanged from the campaign came on Thursday. For twenty-four hours, Trump had shown some restraint. His victory speech raised hopes that, despite the evidence of his behavior on the campaign trail, he might be capable of magnanimity.

Just after 9 P.M., back in Trump Tower, the President-elect tweeted about his frustrations with protesters and the news media: “Just had a very open and successful presidential election. Now professional protesters, incited by the media, are protesting. Very unfair!”

Some saw the tweet as self-pitying and pathetic. Others saw it as a frightening attack on the First Amendment by the man who will soon swear to defend the Constitution. Either way, as his first substantive public comment since his election, it was widely rebuked.

On Friday, the purge began, when Chris Christie, the governor of New Jersey, was fired as chairman of the transition and Mike Pence was installed in his place. During the campaign, Christie, perhaps the most unpopular governor in America and Trump’s most embarrassingly sycophantic supporter, was appointed to head the transition. . . . Then the Trump campaign team, led by Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, began a takeover of the team run by Christie, who, when he was a U.S. Attorney, sent Kushner’s father, Charles, to jail for tax evasion and witness tampering.

Christie became a vice-chair of the transition, along with a group of top Trump advisers who seemed to be in line for Cabinet positions: Ben Carson, whose spokesman said he actually did not want to serve in the Trump Administration because Carson believed himself to be unqualified, even though he had run for President; the former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, who is seventy-three years old and resigned from Congress in late 1998; Lieutenant General Michael Flynn, who was “forced out” of the Pentagon in 2014, and, when he’s not dining with Vladimir Putin in Moscow, spends some of his time as an analyst on RT, a TV channel funded by the Russian government; the former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani, who is seventy-two and, since leaving the mayoralty, has spent his time as a foreign lobbyist

The rest of the transition team was stacked with Trump loyalists, donors, and family members. Four of the sixteen spots were filled by three of Trump’s adult children—Eric, Donald, and Ivanka—and Kushner, his son-in-law. These are the same people Trump promised would be running his business empire, which has interests around the world and could benefit enormously by influencing government policy and staff appointments.

The [Wall Street] Journal led with the fact that Trump wanted to retain two of the most popular parts of the Affordable Care Act: the regulations on insurance companies that require them to allow children to remain on their parents’ plans until the age of twenty-six, and a provision that requires insurers to accept new customers without regard to preëxisting medical conditions. This is classic Trump: he is for any policy that is popular, and he made no effort to explain how he would retain these regulations without maintaining the individual mandate, which was the insurance industry’s price for accepting the new regulations when the legislation was negotiated.

In the same interview, Trump articulated a new Syria policy . . . . A careful reading of the logic behind this policy is that President-elect Trump accepts that American foreign policy should be guided by Russia.

That same day, Trump announced his top two White House advisers. I’ve written about the disturbing background of his new chief strategist and senior counselor, Steve Bannon, who ran a Web site, Breitbart, that helped mainstream the neo-white-nationalist movement known as the alt-right. Reince Priebus was named the incoming chief of staff; his lack of an association with a racist movement made him seem palatable by comparison.

On Sunday, Trump woke up and attacked the press: . . . . All three of these tweets were false. The Times said that subscriptions were up by four times more than normal since the election. There was no letter “apologizing” to subscribers. The paper sent an e-mail noting, “After such an erratic and unpredictable election there are inevitable questions: Did Donald Trump’s sheer unconventionality lead us and other news outlets to underestimate his support among American voters?” Finally, the Times had written that Trump “suggested” more countries, specifically South Korea and Japan, should acquire nuclear weapons if the United States withdrew from protecting them—and he did say that.

Later that evening, Trump’s interview with “60 Minutes,” recorded on Friday, aired, . . . . There was no appeal to the rule of law. Instead, Trump talked the way an autocrat talks and suggested that the Justice Department was simply a tool to be used against opponents, unless he felt like sparing them based on his mood and if he believes his potential targets are “good people.” This is terrifying.

On Tuesday, the purge of the Christie-ites from the transition team was completed with Rogers’s ouster, and Trump reportedly asked that Kushner, a thirty-five-year-old with no national-security or government experience, be allowed to have a security clearance giving him access to classified information.

As of Wednesday morning, Trump has given two interviews—the ones to the Journal and “60 Minutes”—and has spoken in public twice, at his victory speech, early Wednesday morning, and at his Oval Office meeting with Obama, on Thursday. His transition office has issued half a dozen press releases, and he has made several important personnel and policy decisions. He has tweeted twenty-three times. Seven days may not be enough time to fully assess any new leader, especially in the case of Trump, whose first week was marked by seeming chaos in his efforts to put together an Administration. But what we’ve learned so far about the least-experienced President-elect in history is as troubling and ominous as his critics have feared. The Greeks have a word for the emerging Trump Administration: kakistocracy. The American Heritage Dictionary defines it as a “government by the least qualified or most unprincipled citizens.” Webster’s is simpler: “government by the worst people.”

As anyone sane who wasn't duped by demagoguery should have know, things likely will not turn out well for America.  Most upsetting is the fact that the injury was self-inflicted and hinged upon the votes of Christofascists and low information, bigoted voters - the last people to be guiding the fate of America.

Obama to Supreme Court: You Don't Dare Kill Obamacare

With the Supreme Court yet to rule on the challenge to Obamacare - and same sex marriage - much uncertainty and speculation continues as to what the Court will do.  Striking down the exchanges would cause millions to lose healthcare coverage and create chaos in states that have sat back and allowed the federal exchanges to do the job Republicans have refused to do.  As a column in the Washington Post notes, Barack Obama has kept the political pressure on the conservative justices on the Court some of whom likely cannot help but feel the pressure and contemplate the repercussions of an anti-Obamacare ruling.  The Neanderthals on the Court, notably Thomas and Scalia, may not care, but Roberts and Kennedy might take pause.  Here are column highlights:

President Obama uttered more than 3,600 words on the stage of Washington’s Marriott Wardman Park ballroom on Tuesday, but his message could be summed up in three: You wouldn’t dare. 

He was speaking not to the hundreds of hospital administrators assembled for the Catholic Health Association’s conference but to five men not in the room: the conservative justices of the Supreme Court, who in the next 21 days will declare whether they are invalidating the most far-reaching legislation in at least a generation because of one vague clause tucked in its 2,000 pages.

Obama’s appeal to the justices, devotees of judicial modesty all: Do they really wish to cause the massive societal upheaval that would come from killing a law that is now a routine part of American life?

“Five years in, what we are talking about is no longer just a law. It’s no longer just a theory. It isn’t even just about the Affordable Care Act or Obamacare,” he said. “This is now part of the fabric of how we care for one another. This is health care in America.”

Without mentioning the looming decision, Obama warned of its devastating potential. “Once you see millions of people having health care, once you see that all the bad things that were predicted didn’t happen, you’d think that it’d be time to move on,” he said. “It seems so cynical to want to take coverage away from millions of people, to take care away from the people who need it the most, to punish millions with higher costs of care and unravel what’s now been woven into the fabric of America.”

The conservative justices, like conservative critics of the law generally, are unlikely to be persuaded by Obama’s recitation of the merits of the law, which he repeated at length Tuesday. But they may well be reluctant to upend a law that now has broad acceptance in American society. 

[T]he recent improvement in the law’s standing comes even though most Americans aren’t aware that the law has cost the government less than forecast.

With such broad acceptance of (if not fondness for) the new health-care status quo, it’s difficult to imagine the Supreme Court justices taking away health coverage for 6 million or 7 million Americans, causing costs to skyrocket for millions of others, and likely plunging the entire American health-care system into chaos. That’s not just judicial activism — it would be a judicially induced cataclysm.

Such a cataclysm has no place in the catechism of Sister Carol Keehan, head of the Catholic Health Association and a key early supporter of Obamacare who broke with the Catholic bishops to support the law. 

Again, it is ironic that it is Republicans who claim to be the party of Christian values that wants the Affordable Health Care Act killed even if that means millions would lose coverage.  In today's GOP, once one ceases to be a fetus, they simply do not give a damn.  The GOP is the antithesis of being "pro-life."