Michael Morell writes: During a 33-year career at the Central Intelligence Agency, I served presidents of both parties — three Republicans and three Democrats. I was at President George W. Bush’s side when we were attacked on Sept. 11; as deputy director of the agency, I was with President Obama when we killed Osama bin Laden in 2011.
I am neither a registered Democrat nor a registered Republican. In my 40 years of voting, I have pulled the lever for candidates of both parties. As a government official, I have always been silent about my preference for president.
No longer. On Nov. 8, I will vote for Hillary Clinton. Between now and then, I will do everything I can to ensure that she is elected as our 45th president.
Two strongly held beliefs have brought me to this decision. First, Mrs. Clinton is highly qualified to be commander in chief. I trust she will deliver on the most important duty of a president — keeping our nation safe. Second, Donald J. Trump is not only unqualified for the job, but he may well pose a threat to our national security.
I spent four years working with Mrs. Clinton when she was secretary of state, most often in the White House Situation Room. In these critically important meetings, I found her to be prepared, detail-oriented, thoughtful, inquisitive and willing to change her mind if presented with a compelling argument. [Continue reading…]
Shane Harris writes:Stealing and leaking emails from the Democratic National Committee could be just the start. Hacking the presidential election itself could be next, a bipartisan group of former intelligence and security officials recently warned. Whoever was behind the DNC hack also could target voting machines and the systems for tabulating votes, which are dangerously insecure.
“Election officials at every level of government should take this lesson to heart: our electoral process could be a target for reckless foreign governments and terrorist groups,” wrote 31 members of the Aspen Institute Homeland Security Group, which includes a former director of the Central Intelligence Agency and a former secretary of Homeland Security.
That echoes warnings computer security experts have been sounding for more than a decade: that the system for casting and counting votes in this country is also ripe for mischief. [Continue reading…]
Charles Blow writes: [Donald Trump] appeals to a regressive, patriarchal American whiteness in which white men prospered, in part because racial and ethnic minorities, to say nothing of women as a whole, were undervalued and underpaid, if not excluded altogether.
White men reigned supreme in the idealized history, and all was good with the world. (It is curious that Trump never specifies a period when America was great in his view. Did it overlap with the women’s rights, civil rights or gay rights movements? For whom was it great?)
Trump’s wall is not practical, but it is metaphor. Trump’s Muslim ban is not feasible, but it is metaphor. Trump’s huge deportation plan isn’t workable, but it is metaphor.
There is a portion of the population that feels threatened by unrelenting change — immigration, globalization, terrorism, multiculturalism — and those people want someone to, metaphorically at least, build a wall around their cultural heritage, which they conflate in equal measure with American heritage.
In their minds, whether explicitly or implicitly, America is white, Christian, straight and male-dominated. If you support Trump, you are on some level supporting his bigotry and racism. [Continue reading…]
Politico reports: Amid reports suggesting that he and other staffers are beginning to “phone it in,” [Trump campaign manager, Paul] Manafort subtly shifted blame to his candidate. He admitted that Trump’s comments in response to Khizr and Ghazala Khan were “not smart.” And he made it clear that it’s Trump, not any adviser or ally bending his ear, who is responsible.
“Well, first of all, the candidate is in control of his campaign. That’s No. 1,” Manafort said in a TV interview. “And I’m in control of doing the things that he wants me to do in the campaign.”
He attempted to dismiss the “turmoil” as “another Clinton narrative that’s being put out there.” But sources close to the campaign tell a different story of dysfunction and dismay inside Trump Tower.
“There’s just not much communication going on. It’s really sad, to be honest with you. They really just aren’t working as a team. Everyone’s just doing their own little thing,” said one former Trump adviser, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “I just wish he’d stop answering the questions. People don’t want a politician and they got someone who’s not a politician, so he’s going to make these kind of mistakes.”
This adviser said Trump “literally can’t help himself” in responding to perceived slights or taunts — and that his team and closest allies are demoralized and frustrated, especially over the apparent disconnect between Trump and the RNC.
The adviser said Trump had easily bounced back from other controversies, but this latest round borders on a point of no return. “It feels like we’re close to it.” The only silver lining? “Republicans’ intense hatred for Clinton. You remind yourself who the opposition is.”
Clinton, however, has largely skated past her own unforced errors — she wrongly asserted in an interview Sunday that FBI director James Comey had praised her truthfulness during the investigation into her use of a private email server — because Trump’s behavior since the Democratic National Convention has been all-consuming.
All week, in fact, the GOP nominee has been stomping on what might have been another opportune news cycle. The Democratic National Committee is going through a public purge as its CEO, communications director and chief financial officer all left on Tuesday, days after Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz resigned under pressure. Meanwhile, The Wall Street Journal reported on a “secretly organized” airlift of $400 million to Iran that coincided with the release of four Americans in January.
In the past 48 hours, however, Republicans criticizing Trump and, in some cases, leaving the party altogether and declaring their support for Clinton, have dominated the news cycle. Following reports that Sally Bradshaw and Maria Comella — former staffers to Jeb Bush and Chris Christie, respectively — were backing Clinton, former GOP California gubernatorial candidate and Hewlett-Packard CEO Meg Whitman announced Tuesday that she was not only following suit but planning to make a significant financial contribution to the Democrat’s campaign.
Christie and Gingrich, two of Trump’s closest allies and runners-up to serve as his running mate, have also blasted the nominee’s response to a Muslim family whose son was killed in Iraq, while also criticizing Trump’s especially undisciplined, unfocused performance over the past week. [Continue reading…]
Of late, expressions such as “unfit for high office” or “unfit to serve” have frequently been applied to Trump.
The problem with a vague concept like unfit is that it can too easily be reconstructed and taken to mean, “does not meet the approval of the establishment.”
To Trump’s supporters, this is likely to sound like Trump is yet again being condemned for the very reason they like him.
The issue is not simply that Trump is unfit to become president, but more specifically, the aspects of his personality that render him unfit.
The perennial question posed to every presidential candidate is, how will she or he handle a national security crisis?
Trump is famously unpredictable. He might see that as an asset — that it gives him an advantage over adversaries who can’t get one step ahead of him. Moreover, the fact that he’s unpredictable doesn’t explain why he’s unpredictable.
What is blindingly evident right now, however, is that Donald Trump is a man who is unpredictable because he possesses no self-control.
Faced with a crisis, no one knows — including the candidate himself — what Trump would do. This is what makes him unfit for office.
To elect Trump would be to turn the presidency into a game of Russian roulette.
Given that danger, to characterize this election as yet another contest to determine who is the lesser of two evils is to apply a crude equivalence between the candidates as though they differ merely in the degree to which each is objectionable.
But each American voter has a greater responsibility than to simply give voice to their personal likes and dislikes.
At this juncture in history, in spite of America’s ebbing power, the U.S. presidency is still the most powerful political office in the world. This isn’t a game show.
The fact that Trump has become the Republican nominee is an indication of a deep malaise in American politics and American culture in which serious issues perpetually become trivialized.
As voters, however, we aren’t mere spectators who can sit back and observe how this show plays out. We determine the outcome.
Patt Morrison: Software analysts say Russian intelligence or Russian intelligence-related somebodies hacked Democratic emails. What’s going on?
Masha Gessen: Russia is a disruptive force on the world stage, and that’s actually what it aims to be. And I think this is where a very important distinction comes in that people tend to miss:
There is no doubt that various Russian intelligence services, and in this particular case we’re talking about two different intelligence services that apparently weren’t aware of each other while they were hacking the Democratic National Committee’s emails.
Russian intelligence services hack what they can and aim to create as much havoc, both in Western Europe and in the United States, especially around election time.
That’s quite different from saying, as some people have said, “Oh, they’re trying to throw the election to [Donald] Trump.” I don’t think that’s what’s going on.
It actually doesn’t work out chronologically either. But they are trying to cause trouble.
Would this hacking be meant to be directed at just destabilizing, just causing trouble, or is there a goal, an outcome that they might have in mind?
That’s the really important question. I don’t think there’s a goal that they have in mind. And there are several things that point in that direction. One is that Russia doesn’t usually have a goal in mind. It’s that the Putin government and Putin himself are not known for creating strategy. What they are known for is creating havoc.
The other thing is that talk of the chronology: Both of these actual hacking attacks by the two different agencies occurred in 2015, long before — one occurred earlier — long before it was even clear that Trump had a shot at the nomination. I think the goal was very much just to create trouble, which is what Russia is known for.
The other thing is, of course, that Putin hates Hillary Clinton. This is very personal for him. He has accused Hillary Clinton personally of having inspired and funded the protests in Russia in 2011, 2012. So imagining that Putin wants to do anything possible to prevent the election of Hillary Clinton, that is easy to imagine. [Continue reading…]
Peter Beinart writes: What has happened in the days since [Khizr] Khan’s speech has been inspiring and disturbing too. Trump has attacked Khan, and been roundly repudiated for doing so. But most of the outrage, from both politicians and pundits, has centered on Trump’s criticism of a Gold Star family. That misses the point. There’s nothing inherently wrong with openly disagreeing with someone who has lost a child in battle. If a Gold Star father became a prominent crusader against gay marriage, those of us who support gay marriage would have every right to publicly challenge him, the magnitude of his personal loss notwithstanding.
What made Trump’s attack odious was not that he criticized a father and mother who have lost a son in war. It’s that by suggesting that Ghazala Khan was not “allowed” to speak, he recapitulated the anti-Muslim bigotry that made her convention appearance necessary in the first place. The reason politicians and pundits should embrace the Khans and repudiate Trump is not because they are Gold Star parents and he is not. It’s because they are defending religious liberty while he is menacing it.
Celebrating Khizr Khan as a Gold Star father is easy because it’s apolitical. Every American politician and pundit, no matter their ideological bent, pays homage to military families. Celebrating Khizr Khan as a champion of Muslim rights, by contrast, is harder. After all, some of the same conservatives who salute the Khans for their wartime sacrifice simultaneously demand a ban on Muslim refugees and warn about the imposition of Sharia law in the United States. [Continue reading…]
The Associated Press reports: The $400 million payment [to Iran reported by the Wall Street Journal on Wednesday] — plus $1.3 billion in interest to be paid later — is a separate issue from the Iran nuclear deal that Clinton initiated. The process that resulted in the payout started decades before she became secretary of state.
In the late 1970s the Iranian government, under the U.S.-backed shah, paid the United States $400 million for military equipment. The equipment was never delivered because in 1979, his government was overthrown, revolutionaries took American hostages at the U.S. Embassy in Tehran, and diplomatic relations between the United States and Iran were severed.
In 1981, the United States and Iran agreed to set up a commission at The Hague that would rule on claims by each country for property and assets held by the other. Iran’s claim for return of the equipment payment was among many that had been tied up in litigation before the Iran-U.S. Claims Tribunal, and interest the U.S. owed for holding the money for so long was growing.
Litigation over these claims has continued intermittently for 35 years, with some being settled and others going to the tribunal for judgment. All private U.S. claims before the tribunal have been resolved, with Iran paying more than $2.5 billion to American people and businesses. Some claims remain unresolved.
As secretary of state, Clinton did initiate secret talks with Iran over its nuclear program. After John Kerry succeeded her on Feb. 1, 2013, those secret contacts grew into 18 months of formal negotiations that culminated in the July 2015 nuclear deal.
U.S. officials had expected a ruling on the Iranian claim from the tribunal any time, and feared a ruling that would have made the interest payments much higher. As the nuclear talks progressed, the separate, intermittent talks on the military-equipment claim continued.
On Jan. 17, a day after the nuclear deal was implemented, the United States and Iran announced they had settled the claim, with the U.S. agreeing to pay the $400 million principal along with $1.3 billion in interest. Administration statements at the time made clear that the principal and the interest would be paid separately, but did not specify how the money would be delivered.
Trump is correct that the $400 million was paid in cash and flown to Tehran on a cargo plane. But litigation on the Iranian claim preceded Clinton’s tenure as secretary of state by decades and heated up only after she left the job. [Continue reading…]
CNBC News reports: Donald Trump asked a foreign policy expert advising him why the U.S. can’t use nuclear weapons, MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough said on the air Wednesday, citing an unnamed source who claimed he had spoken with the GOP presidential nominee.
“Several months ago, a foreign policy expert on the international level went to advise Donald Trump. And three times [Trump] asked about the use of nuclear weapons. Three times he asked at one point if we had them why can’t we use them,” Scarborough said on his “Morning Joe” program.
Scarborough made the Trump comments 52 seconds into an interview with former Director of Central Intelligence and ex-National Security Agency Director Michael Hayden. [Continue reading…]
Watch: What are some major concerns about Trump's handling of national security? Hayden and #morningjoe weigh in. https://t.co/FyFoSmJlJI
NBC News reports: Key Republicans close to Donald Trump’s orbit are plotting an intervention with the candidate after a disastrous 48 hours led some influential voices in the party to question whether Trump can stay at the top of the Republican ticket without catastrophic consequences for his campaign and the GOP at large.
Republican National Committee head Reince Priebus, former Republican New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich are among the Trump endorsers hoping to talk the real estate mogul into a dramatic reset of his campaign in the coming days, sources tell NBC News.
The group of GOP heavyweights hopes to enlist the help of Trump’s children – who comprise much of his innermost circle of influential advisers – to aid in the attempt to rescue his candidacy. Trump’s family is considered to have by far the most influence over the candidate’s thinking at what could be a make-or-break moment for his campaign. [Continue reading…]
Jamelle Bouie writes: Trump has no use for norms. He violates them at will, from relatively trivial transgressions such as his personal attacks on other presidential candidates (“Little Marco,” “low-energy” Jeb), to the worrying ones such as his habit of spreading conspiracy theories (e.g., the charge that Ted Cruz’s father helped assassinate John F. Kennedy), to the serious ones such as his calls for religious tests, his tolerance of white supremacists, and his exploitation (and occasional use) of explicit racism.
Trump’s contempt for norms has only gotten worse in the past few days, as he reacts to the Democratic National Convention — and his subsequent collapse in the polls — with rage and anger. And on Monday, he crossed one of the brightest lines in American politics, the one that deals directly with our tradition of peaceful transfer of power.
“I’m afraid the election is going to be rigged, I have to be honest,” he said to a crowd in Columbus, Ohio. He followed up on this in an interview with Fox News’ Sean Hannity. “I’m telling you, November 8th, we’d better be careful because that election is going to be rigged. And I hope the Republicans are watching closely, or it’s going to be taken away from us.”
This was in line with comments from Roger Stone, a longtime adviser to Trump. In a recent interview with Breitbart’s Milo Yiannopoulos, Stone said that Trump should start talking “constantly” about the chance of voter fraud and a rigged election. “He needs to say for example, today would be a perfect example: ‘I am leading in Florida. The polls all show it. If I lose Florida, we will know that there’s voter fraud.’ ” Stone continued in this vein. “ ‘If there’s voter fraud, this election will be illegitimate, the election of the winner will be illegitimate, we will have a constitutional crisis, widespread civil disobedience, and the government will no longer be the government.’ ”
From here, Stone’s language gets ominous. “If you can’t have an honest election, nothing else counts,” he said. “The government will be shut down if they attempt to steal this and swear Hillary in. No, we will not stand for it. We will not stand for it,” Stone said, promising a “bloodbath” of “civil disobedience.” [Continue reading…]
Ted Gup writes: On the evening of Dec. 1, 1969, I was sitting on the floor of a crowded Brandeis University dorm room while on the TV the birth dates of men across the nation, contained in small blue capsules, were drawn out of a container. This lottery would largely determine who among some 850,000 of the draft-eligible would go to Vietnam and who would be left to carry on with their careers, free from the threat of enemy fire.
That evening came back to me on Tuesday as I read about Donald Trump’s multiple student deferments and the bone spurs he said exempted him from service. I am no fan of Mr. Trump’s, but on this issue, I am in no position to stand in judgment. I had the dubious honor of being picked first in that 1969 lottery, along with all the eligible men who shared my birthday, Sept. 14. But I did not go into service. Just before I graduated, I instead availed myself of a psychiatrist who, for a fee, swore that I suffered from delusions of grandeur because I wanted to be a writer and travel the world. Funny how the truth can be twisted into something so dishonorable.
Mr. Trump and I were among those favored sons who could find a relatively easy exit from the draft. But Mr. Trump still stands out. Reading of his comments questioning Senator John McCain’s status as a hero, his equating the risks of contracting sexual diseases with the perils of combat, his attack on the family of a fallen Muslim officer, and his claim of sacrifice in pursuit of wealth and self-aggrandizement, I realized just how isolated and self-absorbed he was during that turbulent period, and how completely out of sync he is with most of his generation, veterans and evaders alike. He seems to have escaped the turmoil of the 1960s and ’70s not merely unscathed, but untouched by humanity. [Continue reading…]
David Remnick writes: Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin and Donald J. Trump are locked in a humid political embrace, which seems, at first glance, unlikely. Putin grew up in postwar Leningrad. In the dismal courtyard of his building on Baskov Lane, a hangout for local thugs and drunks, he and his childhood friends pursued their favorite pastime: chasing rats with sticks. His father, a wounded veteran, beat him with a belt. Putin’s way up, his dream, was to volunteer for the K.G.B. Donald Trump encountered few rats on his lawn in Jamaica Estates. Soft, surly, and academically uninterested, Donald was disruptive in class — so much so that his father, a real-estate tycoon of the outer boroughs, shipped him off to military school when he was thirteen. He did not set out to serve his country; he set out to multiply his father’s fortune. “When I look at myself in the first grade and I look at myself now, I’m basically the same,” Trump has said. “The temperament is not that different.”
Decades later, Trump has praised Putin as a forceful leader, a “better leader” than Barack Obama; Putin hardly conceals his hope that Trump will win election to the White House. What would be more advantageous for Putin than to see the United States elect an incompetent leader who just so happens to be content to leave the Russian regime to its own devices, particularly in Europe? Even as non-Democrats have variously described their own nominee as a “con,” a “bully,” and a “borderline” 9/11 conspiracy theorist, Putin has acted as a surrogate from afar, dropping clear hints at his preference, slyly declaring Trump “bright” and “talented without doubt.”
The Times has reported that hackers who broke into the Democratic National Committee’s e-mail trove — a cyber version of the Watergate burglary — were likely agents of the Russian Federation. We shall see if that suspicion holds up. But what’s undisputed is that the gathering of kompromat — compromising material — is a familiar tactic in Putin’s arsenal. For years, the Russian intelligence services have filmed political enemies in stages of sexual and/or narcotic indulgence, and have distributed the grainy images online. Last April, state TV broadcast a black-and-white film of Mikhail Kasyanov, Putin’s former Prime Minister but now a potential opposition leader, exchanging carnal favors and playing “Name That Tune” with his political assistant, Natalya.
Even if the Russian government is not responsible for the hack on the D.N.C., Putin’s affinity for Trump is clear. Some part of it may be a matter of kindred temperament. Just as Trump talks ominously about Mexican “rapists” and tens of thousands of “illegal immigrants … roaming free” in the land, Putin won early popularity by vowing to dispense with terrorists from the Caucasus: “We will ice them in their shithouses.” Trump is, after all, a kind of parody of Putin: the bluster, the palaces. As the historian Timothy Snyder puts it, “Putin is the real world version of the person Trump pretends to be on television.” [Continue reading…]
Reuters reports: The FBI did not tell the Democratic National Committee that U.S officials suspected it was the target of a Russian government-backed cyber attack when agents first contacted the party last fall, three people with knowledge of the discussions told Reuters.
And in months of follow-up conversations about the DNC’s network security, the FBI did not warn party officials that the attack was being investigated as Russian espionage, the sources said.
The lack of full disclosure by the FBI prevented DNC staffers from taking steps that could have reduced the number of confidential emails and documents stolen, one of the sources said. Instead, Russian hackers whom security experts believe are affiliated with the Russian government continued to have access to Democratic Party computers for months during a crucial phase in the U.S. presidential campaign, the source said.
As late as June, hackers had access to DNC systems and the network used by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, a group that raises money for Democratic candidates and shares an office with the DNC in Washington, people with knowledge of the cases have said. [Continue reading…]
In spite of Donald Trump’s proclivity for making statements that aren’t meant to be taken literally — be that through sarcasm, hyperbole, or outright lying — it seems reasonable that in the Trump lexicon the phrase “it’s true” shouldn’t require much interpretation. That is to say, in Trump talk, “it’s true” should at least mean that Trump thinks it’s true — whether it’s actually true is a completely different question.
So, when Trump calls Hillary Clinton “the devil” and adds “it’s true,” as he did yesterday in Pennsylvania, this might prompt a number of questions:
Does Trump believe in the literal existence of the devil and see Clinton as a human incarnation of Satan?
Or, is Trump using “the devil” as a metaphor — the most provocative way of saying Hillary would make a really, really bad president?
Or, was Trump just grabbing the nastiest expression that came to mind at that moment?
What’s actually more telling than the phrase “the devil,” however, is the phrase “it’s true.”
Trump is using a stock phrase from stand-up comedy and late-night talk shows — the bit that comes with a straight face after the punch line.
The sad truth that Trump employs to some effect is that we live in a world where people are more receptive to words coming from the mouths of comedians than they are to those coming from candidates for high office. Trump is a showman posing as a politician acting like a comic, with considerable success.
But here’s the thing — and the media knows it and should stop feigning shock with each new utterance: Trump’s a garbage truck. Each time he opens his mouth, out comes a new pile of garbage.
Is there a compelling reason to sift through the putrid items each time he dumps — oh, Trump just coughed up a dead cat; is that horse shit or cow shit that’s now dripping from his lips?
No. Trump’s a trash-talker and each new piece of trash doesn’t need to fill the airwaves — it should go straight to the landfill.
Trump craves endless and free media attention and he has long operated as the media’s ringmaster as he hangs out one piece of bait after another. Every single time, the media obediently bites.
By so doing, the media is evading it’s real responsibility which is to seriously vet a man who could become president and to do this without him dictating the terms of that vetting process.
Given that no one actually knows what Trump believes or whether he believes anything at all, it’s time to focus much less on what comes out his mouth — the gap between his words and thoughts is inherently unbridgeable.
Instead of fruitlessly attempting to attend to what Trump thinks, we should focus more on how he thinks.
To observe how Trump thinks, no one needs access to Trump’s mind — the train of Trump’s thought is physically manifest.
By the account of those who have spent time with him and through the evidence of his rambling style of speech-making and in his responses to interview questions, we know that the train of Trump’s thought is extremely short and subject to frequently getting derailed.
Tony Schwartz, who as Trump’s ghostwriter was the author of The Art of the Deal, tells Jane Mayer that one of the real estate developer’s most essential characteristics is that, “he has no attention span.”
At the time the author embarked on research for the book that through its phenomenal success would expand Trump’s renown far beyond his home town:
Schwartz recalls, Trump was generally affable with reporters, offering short, amusingly immodest quotes on demand. Trump had been forthcoming with him during the New York interview, but it hadn’t required much time or deep reflection. For the book, though, Trump needed to provide him with sustained, thoughtful recollections. He asked Trump to describe his childhood in detail. After sitting for only a few minutes in his suit and tie, Trump became impatient and irritable. He looked fidgety, Schwartz recalls, “like a kindergartner who can’t sit still in a classroom.” Even when Schwartz pressed him, Trump seemed to remember almost nothing of his youth, and made it clear that he was bored. Far more quickly than Schwartz had expected, Trump ended the meeting.
Week after week, the pattern repeated itself. Schwartz tried to limit the sessions to smaller increments of time, but Trump’s contributions remained oddly truncated and superficial.
“Trump has been written about a thousand ways from Sunday, but this fundamental aspect of who he is doesn’t seem to be fully understood,” Schwartz told me. “It’s implicit in a lot of what people write, but it’s never explicit — or, at least, I haven’t seen it. And that is that it’s impossible to keep him focussed on any topic, other than his own self-aggrandizement, for more than a few minutes, and even then . . . ” Schwartz trailed off, shaking his head in amazement. He regards Trump’s inability to concentrate as alarming in a Presidential candidate. “If he had to be briefed on a crisis in the Situation Room, it’s impossible to imagine him paying attention over a long period of time,” he said.
In a recent phone interview, Trump told me that, to the contrary, he has the skill that matters most in a crisis: the ability to forge compromises. The reason he touted “The Art of the Deal” in his announcement [as a presidential candidate], he explained, was that he believes that recent Presidents have lacked his toughness and finesse: “Look at the trade deficit with China. Look at the Iran deal. I’ve made a fortune by making deals. I do that. I do that well. That’s what I do.”
But Schwartz believes that Trump’s short attention span has left him with “a stunning level of superficial knowledge and plain ignorance.” He said, “That’s why he so prefers TV as his first news source — information comes in easily digestible sound bites.” He added, “I seriously doubt that Trump has ever read a book straight through in his adult life.”
Maybe that’s true. But be that as it may, Trump’s ability to fulfill the responsibilities of a president doesn’t hinge as much on how well read he may or may not be, as it does simply on his capacity to digest information.
An American president is much less the king of deal-making than he or she is one of the world’s preeminent decision-makers.
Decision-making that is of national and often global consequence is not a responsibility that should be handed to an impulsive, egotistical, narcissistic, vindictive, bullying, xenophobic, misogynistic man who on top of that is a complete scatterbrain.
McKay Coppins reports: On July 17, 2015, Donald Trump received a caps lock–heavy campaign memo from one of his advisers containing instructions on how to communicate with a voter species that was especially exotic to the candidate at the time.
“The audience is CHRISTIAN SOCIAL CONSERVATIVES,” the Trump adviser wrote on the eve of the the 2015 Family Leadership Summit in Iowa. “They are open to your candidacy but NEED TO KNOW that their issues are IMPORTANT TO YOU.”
The document — along with several other internal Trump camp memos recently obtained by BuzzFeed News — illustrates just how tenuous the New York billionaire’s connection was to his party’s religious base at the outset of this election cycle. Throughout 2014 and 2015, Trump’s small political team coached him on how to make himself more palatable to conservative Christians.
On the issue of abortion, one memo urged, “Unless you are specifically asked, it is not beneficial to state that you support the exceptions of life of the mother, rape, and incest.” Another suggested that Trump “DEFLECT” any debate questions about school prayer by saying, “I employ thousands of individuals and make sure my employees have the freedom to express their faith however they see fit.” If asked whether he believed in “creationism or evolution,” an adviser suggested the candidate respond, “I believe in both” — and then added in a parenthetical, “(Mr. Trump — we may want to follow up on this.)”
For all his advisers’ best efforts, of course, Trump never did master the language of the religious right — but it has hardly held him back. Not only has Trump succeeded in capturing the Republican nomination, but according to a recent Pew survey, he is also currently polling better among white evangelicals than any GOP nominee on record. This success has dismayed many of Trump’s Christian critics, who have spent much of this year fretting that a biblically illiterate adulterer was fleecing their fellow believers.
But in fact, some devout detractors argue, the real threat Trump poses to the conservative Christian movement may be in just how many of his god-fearing supporters know exactly what they’re getting. Never before has the Republican Party nominated a standard-bearer so nakedly illiterate on religious matters — and so unwilling to even pretend. [Continue reading…]
Kirsten Powers writes: Donald Trump thinks it’s “very sad” that women at Fox News are “complaining” about being sexually harassed by former Fox chief Roger Ailes.
As allegations against his old friend piled up, Trump told NBC’s Chuck Todd on July 24 that, “Some of the women that are complaining, I know how much he’s helped them…And when they write books….and say wonderful things about him….[N]ow, all of a sudden, they’re saying these horrible things about him.”
Without passing judgment about the specific allegations, which are currently under investigation by 21st Century Fox, one should be able to accept that a woman could both have been promoted by a boss and harassed by him. Women are often forced to maintain good relations with men who abuse them precisely because those men have power.
When I mentioned this to Trump in a phone interview last Tuesday, he doubled down on his retrograde take. “There was quite a bit of fabulous things said [about Ailes by Gretchen Carlson],” he told me. “It would be easier for me and more politically correct for me to say you are right. But you would think she wouldn’t say those things.”
I pointed out that it wasn’t just Carlson who had made allegations. “I didn’t know it was more than just her,” Trump told me, even though his comments to Chuck Todd referred to women, plural.
What if someone had treated Ivanka in the way Ailes allegedly behaved?
His reply was startling, even by Trumpian standards. “I would like to think she would find another career or find another company if that was the case,” he said. [Continue reading…]
The New York Times reports: In his strongest denunciation of Donald J. Trump so far, President Obama on Tuesday said Mr. Trump was “unfit to serve as president” and urged the leaders of the Republican Party to withdraw their backing for his candidacy.
Mr. Obama said the Republican criticisms of Mr. Trump “ring hollow” if the party’s leaders continue to support his bid for the presidency this fall, particularly in light of Republican criticisms of Mr. Trump for his attacks on the Muslim parents of an American soldier, Humayun Khan, who died in Iraq.
“The question they have to ask themselves is: If you are repeatedly having to say in very strong terms that what he has said is unacceptable, why are you still endorsing him?” Mr. Obama said at a news conference at the White House. [Continue reading…]
New York Republican Congressman, Richard Hanna, writes: Our country is desperate for a functioning two-party system. A system that understands that compromise is the sweet spot of peace in a pluralistic society that values tolerance and inclusiveness. Not these endless attempts to run the table in two- and four-year cycles that produce few results and parties that seem to regard gridlock as an accomplishment.
Government has become unable to address big problems. Talking points are presented as if they were solutions. Critical issues like tax reform, infrastructure, immigration, the environment and any future investments in people and assets are relegated to the opinions of the extremes of both parties. Electing Donald Trump will only make this worse, much worse.
Months ago I publicly said I could never support Trump. My reasons were simple and personal. I found him profoundly offensive and narcissistic but as much as anything, a world-class panderer, anything but a leader. Little more than a changing mirror of those he speaks to. I never expect to agree with whoever is president, but at a minimum the president needs to consistently display those qualities I have preached to my two children: kindness, honesty, dignity, compassion and respect.
I do not expect perfection, but I do require more than the embodiment of at least a short list of the seven deadly sins. [Continue reading…]
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