Donald Trump inconsistency: "more stable direction from a weather vane" opinions

Donald Trump the UN-stable genius is emotionally unbalanced.

To the Editor of the New York Times: “Trump Is Turning America Into a Psychotic State,” by Jonathan Rauch and Peter Wehner. (Opinion guest essay, April 12), is disconcerting on many levels. 

To date, the other two branches of our government - judiciary and legislative- have failed to hold Donald Trump in check. 

Perhaps he feels that the Supreme Court decision that granted him sweeping immunity allows him to rule without restraint. Congress seems unwilling to hold Trump accountable when he clearly acts beyond the legal limits. These factors, combined with a president who can be emotionally unbalanced and whose circle of advisers seldom pushes back, place the country in an extremely precarious position. From Amy M. Ferguson Dunmore, Pennsylvania

To the Editor: Jonathan Rauch and Peter Wehner are ultimately making an argument about process, not just personality. Strip away the rhetoric, and what remains is a concern that the machinery of government — deliberation, consistency, institutional memory — is no longer reliably engaged. When that discipline weakens, policy begins to look less like strategy and more like improvisation.

The United States has weathered strong presidencies, weak presidencies and moments of real turmoil. What is different here is the suggestion of sustained unpredictability at the institutional level. That is not a governing philosophy. It is the absence of one.

I’ve seen more stable direction from a weather vane — and at least it knows which way the wind is blowing. At this point, the only consistent policy is inconsistency, and even that seems subject to revision.  From Douglas Shields in Pittsburgh, PA

Jonathan Rauch and Peter Wehner lay out in depressing detail Donald Trump’s lethal combination of qualities: evil, ignorance, out-of-control anger and disorganization. And he has freed up and nurtured the parts of our society and culture that share those qualities.

The results have plunged the rest of us into a state of dread💢😨

But, like the rest of Americans, I was mesmerized watching the return of the Artemis II astronauts and the ground team that pulled off this mission, I felt a bracing shot of optimism.

We were treated to an awesome display of the qualities of the other part of our culture: thirst for knowledge, intelligence, drive, planning, attention to detail and cooperation. And diversity — among both the crew members and the entire mission team. These qualities remain alive and well❗ From Natasha Lisman in New York

Donald Trump and maga Republicans failed. They communicate with disorderly incoherence

It has been clear for a long time that Donald Trump is a person with a disorganized mind and a disordered personality. 

In the conflict with Iran, the most potent antagonist has been the Trump administration’s own incoherence.

Echo opinion published in the New York Times by Jonathan Rauch and Peter Wehner

What the past few months, especially the past few weeks, have brought into focus is how Trump's pathologies have cascaded downward and outward through his corrupt administration. They have become institutionalized. The reason the administration so often does not act coherently is that it cannot. The world faces something new and baffling and frightening in Donald Trump’s second term: a tragically psychotic state.

This probably does not mean that every individual in the government is emotionally or psychologically unstable. Nor is it a clinical diagnosis of the president. The issue is that the administration as a whole lacks a consistent attachment to reality and the ability to organize its thinking coherently. Mr. Trump’s grandiosity, impulsivity, inconsistency and outright breaks with reality have become state policy.

In that respect, Donald Trump’s second term is different from his first. In 2020, he could confabulate about the election result or babble about treating Covid with injections of disinfectant. But, he could not translate his fantasies into reality — at least not usually. In the second chaotic term, by contrast, institutional psychosis has been on display since his Day 1.

It is the Iran war that has most vividly demonstrated the scope of the problem. In this conflict, the most potent antagonist has been the administration’s own incoherence.

Unbelievably, the dangerous Trump administration chose to wage a war without deciding on its aims, mapping out a strategy, planning for contingencies or even being able to explain itself. The goal was regime change — until it wasn’t. The demand was unconditional surrender — until it wasn’t. Deadlines were issued and then erased. Threats of total destruction were made and then pulled back. Iran’s nuclear program was a casus belli in February, despite the fact that we were told by Mr. Trump that it was “obliterated” last June. The president called for an international coalition to open the Strait of Hormuz, then said the United States could go it alone, then said the waterway would somehow “open itself.” He claimed that the United States had already won the war, that the war would end soon and that the war would end “when I feel it, feel it in my bones.” As a headline in The Times put it, Donald Trump's erratic position on Iran “can change by the sentence.”

Even as the bombs fell, the administration, concerned about gasoline prices, waived sanctions on some Iranian oil, “giving Iran’s war effort against the U.S. a boost,” as The Washington Post reported. Area experts were shocked when the administration proved unprepared for Iran’s partial closing of the Strait of Hormuz, a tactic experts had anticipated for decades. The administration might have been readier had it not chopped back the State Department’s Middle East desk, gotten rid of its oil and gas experts and eliminated its dedicated Iran office. The administration handicapped its own National Security Council by firing staff members, some at the behest of a conspiracy-minded internet personality, and undercutting its independence — not a good idea before starting a war. Trump’s social media posts seemed self-contradictory and borderline demented.

Incoherence is not incidental in this administration; it is the administration’s modus operandi. The so-called Department of Government Efficiency caused chaos in federal agencies by sacking, then sometimes rehiring employees without any evident rationale — and without making a serious dent in government spending. Mr. Trump flipped from “no more wars” to waging war (in Iran) and using and threatening military force (Venezuela, Greenland, Cuba), seemingly every other month. The policy toward Ukraine was simultaneously supportive and not. Tariffs went up and down and on and off, reflecting the president’s whims. In February he bragged that gas prices were low, then in March that they were high.

This is far from normal.

Normal administrations set up policy processes that assemble evidence from varied sources, collate viewpoints and priorities across multiple agencies and ensure rational deliberation before options reach the president. One of us served in three Republican administrations and participated as interagency reviews took place in a cabinet department, in an executive agency and in the White House itself. A single line in a presidential foreign policy statement might require the input of 20 or more people from the Defense Department, the State Department, (Central Intelligence Agency) aka, C.I.A., the Department of the Treasury and more.

A policy review process can be tortuous and sometimes mistaken. It can’t substitute for wise presidential judgment. But, nevertheless, it is vital❗ Hard questions are asked to assess the competing arguments. It ensures expert input in specific domains, anticipates how policies may ramify (or not) and prepares for contingencies.

In all those ways, the systematic review of policy amounts to an institutional mind: a cognitive process that organizes the government’s deliberations to keep them rational and anchored in reality. You might think of it as the government’s equivalent of the prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain responsible for high-level executive functions such as impulse control and long-term planning. In Mr. Trump’s second term, those functions still exist, but they can be disrupted, circumvented or just plain abandoned at any moment on the say-so of the president and his senior officials. In that respect, the Trump administration is mindless.

Policy judgments should be made by the president, not by subordinate agencies and experts. But irrational processes produce inexplicable outcomes, and that is what we have seen, again and again. The only rhyme or reason is the principle that Mr. Trump proclaimed when explaining his policy toward Cuba: “I think I can do anything I want with it.” That is the principle by which his administration governs.

When an agency goes haywire, the administration might rush to stabilize it — for example, at the Department of Homeland Security, where chaos and brutality led to the killing of two American citizens right on the street in Minneapolis. But until a coherent policy process is restored under a chief executive who understands the need for it, we should expect geysers of mindlessness to keep erupting in unforeseeable ways and places.

Understandably, scholars, journalists and politicians have attempted to fit Trump 2.0 into any number of at least somewhat rational frameworks: populism, isolationism, unilateralism, nationalism, transactionalism, the madman theory, spheres of influence, imperialism and more. Some of those frameworks can help illuminate the president and the people around him. As one of us has argued, he is a patrimonialist — a leader who believes the state is his personal property. And both of us have said that his administration displays hallmarks of fascism. Ultimately, however, institutional psychosis defies rational categories. Predicting this administration’s behavior is impossible under any framework. And if Mr. Trump becomes more desperate as he grows more unpopular, the danger only increases.
Which leaves everyone wondering: ❓What are ❓the implications if the administration of the world’s most powerful country is chaotic in its thinking, unpredictable in its actions and not reliably in touch with reality❓ It’s impossible to know. America and its allies have dealt with a lot of presidential imperfections and failings, but there is no precedent or even category for the institutional psychosis displayed by the second Trump administration. Precisely because the psychotic state is so unpredictable, setting up systems to manage it will not work.

This puts our nation and allies in the precarious, but not hopeless, position of over relying on the rational guardrails that we need and remain. Some of these guardrails are within the executive branch: in the federal bureaucracies and the military services, where nodes of ordinary practice and process carry on as best they can. Still more important are guardrails in the other branches of government. The courts have remained independent and tethered to reality. Congress has quietly nixed some of Mr. Trump’s wildest nominees and overruled some of the administration’s destructive impulses, such as its attack on the science budget. State governments, especially in blue states, have been using the courts and their own policies to resist Mr. Trump’s agenda and demand accountable behavior from Washington.

Perhaps most important, the public supports effective and responsive government, not the wild swings of a fugue state — and it is making its feelings known.

Institutional psychosis is ultimately self-defeating and unsustainable. Reality checks will return because reality always reasserts itself. But severe damage will have been done, damage that may take a generation or more to repair.

As the Trump cult era (hopefully) winds down, the country may relearn something that never should have been forgotten. Institutions need to be reformed, but not destroyed; governing well requires skill and careful attention to detail rather than leaders acting on impulse and ignorance; and character and mental stability matter perhaps most of all.

New Hampshire Chris Sununu visibly lost his political way and needs a moral compass

ABC News’s George Stephanopoulos conducted a skillful and revealing interview with New Hampshire Governor Chris Sununu. Over nine damning minutes, Sununu illustrated how deep into the Republican Party the rot has gone.

The context for the interview is important. Former New Hampshire Governor Sununu is hardly a MAGA enthusiast. During the 2024, GOP primary, he supported Nikki Haley, and over the past several years, he’s been a harsh critic of Donald Trump. Sununu has referred to him as a “loser,” an “asshole,” and “not a real Republican.” He has said the nation needs to move past the “nonsense and drama” from the former president and that he expects “some kind of guiltyverdict” against Trump. “This is serious,” Sununu said last June. “If even half of this stuff is true, he’s in real trouble.”

Christopher Thomas Sununu is an American politician and engineer who has served since 2017, as the 82nd governor of New Hampshire.

Most significant, as Stephanopoulos pointed out, five days after January 6, Sununu said, “It is clear that President Trump’s rhetoric and actions contributed to the insurrection at the United States Capitol Building.”

During the interview, Sununu didn’t distance himself from any of his previous comments; in fact, he doubled down on them. He reaffirmed that Trump “absolutely contributed” to the insurrection. “I hate the election denialism of 2020,” Sununu said. 

And he also admitted that he’d be very uncomfortable supporting Trump if he were convicted of a felony. But no matter, Sununu reiterated to Stephanopoulos that he’ll vote for Trump anyway.

“Look, nobody should be shocked that the Republican governor is supporting the Republican president,” Sununu said.

It’s worth examining the reasons Sununu cited to justify his supportfor Trump. The main one, according to the New Hampshire governor, is “how bad Biden has become as president.” 

Sununu cited two issues specifically: inflation, which is “crushing people,” and the chaos at the southern border.

Let’s take those issues in reverse order. Any fair-minded assessment would conclude that Joe Biden has been a failure (not!🚫😦) on border security—crossings at the southern border are higher than ever—and that the president is rightfully paying a political price for it. His record in this respect is worse than Trump’s.

But, Trump’s record is hardly impressive. In fact, Trump never got close to building the wall he promised, (Mexico never agreed to pay for it!) and fewer people who were illegally in America were deported during the Trump presidency than during the Obama presidency. Illegal border crossings, as measured by apprehensions at the southwest border, were nearly 15 percent higher in Trump’s final year in office than in the last full year of Barack Obama’s term—when Trump called the border “broken.” Illegal immigration has bedeviled every modern American president.

More incriminating is that earlier this year, Republicans, at the urging of Trump, sabotaged what would arguably have been the strongest border-security bill ever, legislation supported by Biden. 

So why did Republicans, who have lacerated Biden for his lax enforcement policies, oppose a bill that included so much of what they demanded❓ Because they wanted chaos to continue at the southern border, in order to increase Trump’s chances of winning the election. That tells you what the Republican priority is.

As for inflation: During the Biden presidency, it soared to more than 9 percent—inflation was a global crisis, not specific to the United States—but has cooled to about 3.5 percent. (When Trump left office, inflation was less than 2 percent.) America’s inflation rate is now among the lowest in the world. More important, wages are rising faster than prices for ordinary workers, and low-wage workers have experienced dramatic real-wage growth over the past four years and for the first time in decades.

More broadly, the American economy is the best in the world❗❗ 😃The United States recovered from the coronavirus pandemic better than any other nation. Interest rates are the highest in decades, but America’s GDP significantly outpaced those of other developed countries in 2023. The economy grew by more than 3 percent in the fourth quarter of 2023, which is higher than the average for the five years preceding the pandemic. Monthly job growth under Biden, even if you exclude “catch up” growth figures in the aftermath of the pandemic, has been record-setting. Trump’s record, pre-pandemic, isn’t close.

In 2023, we saw the highest share of working-age Americans employed in more than two decades, while the Biden administration has overseen more than two years of unemployment below 4 percent, the longest such streak since the late 1960s. At the end of last year, retailers experienced a record-setting holiday season. The stock market recently posted an all-time high; so did domestic oil production. The number of Americans without health insurance has fallen to record lows under Biden. Trump claims that crime “is rampant and out of control like never, ever before.” In fact, violent crime—after surging in the last year of the Trump presidency (largely because of the pandemic)—is declining dramatically. 

As for abortions, during the Trump presidency, they increased by 8 percent after 30 years of near-constant decline.

Even if Republicans want to insist that Biden’s policies had nothing to do with any of this, even if these positive trends are happening in spite of Biden rather than because of him, America during the Biden presidency is hardly the hellscape that MAGA world says it is and at times seems to be rooting for it to be. 

On Biden’s watch, for whatever constellation of reasons, a good deal has gone right. And deep down, Trump supporters must know it, even as they wrestle with reality in order to deny it.

So the underlying premise that Sununu and MAGA world rely on to justify their support for Donald Trump—that if Biden wins, “our country is going to be destroyed,” as Trump said during a rally on Saturday—is false. Which raises the question: What is the reason Sununu has rallied to Trump?

It’s impossible to fully know the motivations of others, but it’s reasonable to assume that Sununu wants to maintain his political viability within the Republican Party. He’s undoubtedly aware that to break with Trump would derail his political ambitions. 

But for Sununu, like so many other Republicans, that partisan loyalty comes at the cost of his integrity.

Chris Sununu is not a true believer, like some in MAGA world. He’s not psychologically unwell, like others. He knows who Trump is, and what the right thing to do is—to declare, as Liz Cheney has done, that she will not vote for Donald Trump under any circumstances.

“I certainly have policy differences with the Biden administration,” she has said. “I know the nation can survive bad policy. 

We can’t survive a president who is willing to torch the Constitution.” Donald Trump has shown he’s willing to do that and more. Sununu is pledging fealty to a man who, among other things, attempted to overturn an election, summoned and assembled a violent mob and directed it to march on the Capitol, and encouraged the mob to hang his vice president. He sexually assaulted and defamed a woman, paid hush money to a porn star, and allegedly falsified records to cover up the affair. Trump controlled two entities that were found guilty of 17 counts of criminal tax fraud and falsifying business records. He invited a hostile foreign power (Russia) to interfere in one American election and attempted to extort an allied nation (Ukraine) to interfere in another four years later. He has threatened prosecutors, judges, and the families of judges. 

And he has been indicted in four separate criminal cases, one of which finally began in Manhattan. 

Trump has championed crazed and racist conspiracy theories, dined with avowed anti-Semites, and mocked war heroes, people with handicaps, and the dead. He has swooned over the most brutal dictators in the world, sided with Russian intelligence over American intelligence, abused his pardon power, and said we should terminate the Constitution. He obsessively told his staff to use the FBI and the IRS to go after his critics.

Donald Trump makes Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton look like Boy Scouts.

It’s not all that uncommon for politicians to put party above country, to bend and to break when pressure is applied. 

Courage is a rare virtue, and tribal loyalties can be extremely powerful. But this is not any other time, and Trump is not any other politician. Rather (and obviously), Trump is a man of kaleidoscopic corruption. There is virtually nothing he won’t do in order to gain and maintain power. And he telegraphs his intentions at all hours of the day and night.

Given all Trump has done, and given all we know, the claim that Joe Biden—whatever his failures, whatever his limitations, whatever his age—poses a greater threat to the republic than Donald Trump is delusional.

In his new book Finish What We Started: The MAGA Movement’s Ground War to End Democracy, Isaac Arnsdorf reminds us of something that Steve Bannon 😠😧, who served as a close adviser to Trump and is one of the most influential figures in the MAGA movement, once said: “Lenin wanted to destroy the state, and that’s my goal too. I want to bring everything crashing down, and destroy all of today’s establishment.”

Chris Sununu has now enlisted in that war. What is so discouraging, and so sickening, is how many others in his party have done so as well. They are Trump’s willing accomplices. 

MAGA maniacs like Steve Bannon are the evil equivilent of the release of the flying monkeys in The Wizard of Oz

Peter Wehner is a contributing writer at The Atlantic and a senior fellow at the Trinity Forum.

Trump is preoccupied with he, himself and I: Unqualified for elected office

Donald Trump did not — and does not — recognize any distinction between himself and the office of the presidency. He is it, and it is him. How Is It Possible That We Are Still Talking About This Man?OMG! Donald Trump declared that he is running for president yet again.  (In my Maine Writer opinion, Donald Trump is a delusional old man!)

Echo opinion published in The New York Times by Jamelle Bouie.

Trump's delusional view is as close a fundamental rejection of American constitutionalism as you can imagine — and it helps explain much of the former president’s behavior in and out of office. It is why he could not abide any opposition to anything he tried to pursue, why he raged against the “deep state,” why he strained against every limit on his authority, why he rejected the very idea that he could lose the 2020 presidential election and why he decided he could simply take classified documents to his home in Florida.

For Trump, he is the president. He is the government. The documents, in his mind, belonged to him.

What this means in practical terms is that as Trump runs for president, he has promised to bring key parts of the federal government under his control as soon as he takes office. 

Trump wants to clear out as much of the executive branch as possible and swap professionals for true believers — a new crop of officials whose chief loyalty is to the power and authority of Donald Trump, rather than their office or the letter of the law. And in particular, Trump wants to clear house at the Department of Justice, which is investigating him for mishandling those documents.

Trump cannot tolerate the existence of an independent Justice Department, and so, if made president again, he’ll simply put it under his thumb.

Obviously, if it is a preoccupation for Trump, it is a preoccupation for the Republican Party. And in addition to covering for the former president in the face of federal charges, the other Republicans vying for the nomination have adopted his view that the independence of federal law enforcement violates his (and potentially their) authority as president.

Ron DeSantis — whose tight grip on the operations of government has been a hallmark of his tenure as governor of Florida — made his distaste for an independent law enforcement apparatus clear in a set of recent comments. “I think presidents have bought into this canard that they’re independent, and that’s one of the reasons why they’ve accumulated so much power over the years,” he said of the Justice Department. “We will use the lawful authority that we have.”

Former Vice President Mike Pence has promised to “clean house at the highest levels of the Justice Department” if elected president. “Lady Justice is blind,” Pence said in an interview on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” “And there are tens of millions of Americans who have reason to believe that the blinders have been taken off and that we haven’t seen equal treatment under the law.”

Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina has said, similarly, that if elected president, he will “clean out the political appointments in the Department of Justice to restore confidence and integrity in the D.O.J.”

As to what ends?

It is not hard to imagine a world where a second-term  President Trump orders a newly purged and reconstituted Justice Department to investigate any groups or individuals that happen to be a target of MAGA rage, whether they broke the law or not.

Trump has upended nearly half a century of tradition with his contempt for the idea that law enforcement ought to remain separate and independent of the White House. 

But, also, Trump's actions grow naturally from an increasingly vocal faction within the conservative movement, as well as reflects a key change in the nature and composition of the Republican coalition.

The GOP's American psychosis didn't start with Donald Trump. It won't end with him, either. A line runs from the 1964 Republican National Convention to Trump’s Jan. 6 riot. It has zigged and zagged over the years. Opinion published in Think Opinion Analysis Essays.

• With regard to the former, the vocal faction, there is the recent enthusiasm among so-called nationalist or populist conservatives for using the state to enforce a particular social order. 

• And with regard to the latter, a change in the Republican coalition, there is the way that, influenced by Trump, the Republican Party has begun to take on the values and attitudes of the small-time capitalist and the family firm.

Of course, business owners have always been a critical part of state and local Republican politics. The nation’s state legislatures and county boards of supervisors are full of the proprietors of family-owned car dealerships, fast food franchises, construction companies, landscaping businesses and regional distribution firms. 

And in fact, many of the most visible and important families in conservative politics have their own family firms, albeit supersized ones: the Kochs, the DeVoses, the Crows and the Trumps.

Among the elements that distinguish this closely held model of ownership from that of, say, a multinational corporation is the degree to which the business is understood to be an extension of the business owner, who appears to exercise total authority over the place of production, except in cases where the employees have a union (one of the many reasons members of this class are often intensely and exceptionally anti-labor).

If the nature of our work shapes our values — if the habits of mind we cultivate on the job extend to our lives beyond it — then someone in a position of total control over a closely held business like, say, the Trump empire might bring those attitudes, those habits and pathologies, to political office.

Donald Trump's pathological narcissism is now a wreckless public health failure

Maine Writer - Narcissism in a crisis: "Donald Trump's misinformation and mendacity about the coronavirus are head-snapping. Trump claimed that coronavirus was contained in America, when it was actually spreading."

The Trump Presidency Is Over echo opinion published in The Atlantic by Peter Wehner

Narcissism is the pursuit of gratification from vanity or egotistic admiration of one's idealised self image and attributes. This includes self-flattery, perfectionism, and arrogance.

It has taken a good deal longer than it should have, but Americans have now seen the con man behind the curtain.

When, in January 2016, I wrote that, despite being a lifelong Republican who worked in the previous three GOP administrations, I would never vote for Donald Trump, even though his administration would align much more with my policy views than a Hillary Clinton presidency would, a lot of my Republican friends were befuddled. How could I not vote for a person who checked far more of my policy boxes than his opponent?

What I explained then, and what I have said many times since, is that Trump is fundamentally unfit—intellectually, morally, temperamentally, and psychologically—for office. For me, that is the paramount consideration in electing a president, in part because at some point it’s reasonable to expect that a president will face an unexpected crisis—and at that point, the president’s judgment and discernment, his character and leadership ability, will really matter.

“Mr. Trump has no desire to acquaint himself with most issues, let alone master them” is how I put it four years ago. “No major presidential candidate has ever been quite as disdainful of knowledge, as indifferent to facts, as untroubled by his benightedness.” I added this:

Mr. Trump’s virulent combination of ignorance, emotional instability, demagogy, solipsism and vindictiveness would do more than result in a failed presidency; it could very well lead to national catastrophe. The prospect of Donald Trump as commander in chief should send a chill down the spine of every American.

It took until the second half of Trump’s first term, but the crisis has arrived in the form of the coronavirus pandemic, and it’s hard to name a president who has been as overwhelmed by a crisis as the coronavirus has overwhelmed Donald Trump.

To be sure, the president isn’t responsible for either the coronavirus or the disease it causes, COVID-19, and he couldn’t have stopped it from hitting our shores even if he had done everything right. Nor is it the case that the president hasn’t done anything right; in fact, his decision to implement a travel ban on China was prudent. And any narrative that attempts to pin all of the blame on Trump for the coronavirus is simply unfair. The temptation among the president’s critics to use the pandemic to get back at Trump for every bad thing he’s done should be resisted, and schadenfreude is never a good look.

That said, Donald Trump and his failed administration are responsible for grave, costly errors, most especially the epic manufacturing failures in diagnostic testing, the decision to test too few people, the delay in expanding testing to labs outside the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and problems in the supply chain. These mistakes have left us blind and badly behind the curve, and, for a few crucial weeks, they created a false sense of security. What we now know is that the coronavirus silently spread for several weeks, without us being aware of it and while we were doing nothing to stop it. Containment and mitigation efforts could have significantly slowed its spread at an early, critical point, but we frittered away that opportunity.

“They’ve simply lost time they can’t make up. You can’t get back six weeks of blindness,” Jeremy Konyndyk, who helped oversee the international response to Ebola during the Obama administration and is a senior policy fellow at the Center for Global Development, told The Washington Post. “To the extent that there’s someone to blame here, the blame is on poor, chaotic management from the White House and failure to acknowledge the big picture.”

Anthony Fauci, the widely respected director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases whose reputation for honesty and integrity has been only enhanced during this crisis, admitted in congressional testimony that the United States is still not providing adequate testing for the coronavirus. “It is failing. Let’s admit it.” He added, “The idea of anybody getting [testing] easily, the way people in other countries are doing it, we’re not set up for that. I think it should be, but we’re not."

We also know the World Health Organization had working tests that the United States refused, and researchers at a project in Seattle tried to conduct early tests for the coronavirus but were prevented from doing so by federal officials. (Doctors at the research project eventually decided to perform coronavirus tests without federal approval.)

But that’s not all. The president reportedly ignored early warnings of the severity of the virus and grew angry at a CDC official who in February warned that an outbreak was inevitable. The Trump administration dismantled the National Security Council’s global-health office, whose purpose was to address global pandemics; we’re now paying the price for that. “We worked very well with that office,” Fauci told Congress. “It would be nice if the office was still there.” We may face a shortage of ventilators and medical supplies, and hospitals may soon be overwhelmed, certainly if the number of coronavirus cases increases at a rate anything like that in countries such as Italy. (This would cause not only needless coronavirus-related deaths, but deaths from those suffering from other ailments who won’t have ready access to hospital care.)

Some of these mistakes are less serious and more understandable than others. One has to take into account that in government, when people are forced to make important decisions based on incomplete information in a compressed period of time, things go wrong.

Yet in some respects, the avalanche of false information from the president has been most alarming of all. It’s been one rock slide after another, the likes of which we have never seen. Day after day after day he brazenly denied reality, in an effort to blunt the economic and political harm he faced. But Trump is in the process of discovering that he can’t spin or tweet his way out of a pandemic. There is no one who can do to the coronavirus what Attorney General William Barr did to the Mueller report: lie about it and get away with it.

Donald Trump's misinformation and mendacity about the coronavirus are head-snapping. Trump claimed that it was contained in America when it was actually spreading.

He claimed that we had “shut it down” when we had not. He claimed that testing was available when it wasn’t. He claimed that the coronavirus will one day disappear “like a miracle”; it won’t. He claimed that a vaccine would be available in months; Fauci says it will not be available for a year or more.

Trump falsely blamed the Obama administration for impeding coronavirus testing. He stated that the coronavirus first hit the United States later than it actually did. (He said that it was three weeks prior to the point at which he spoke; the actual figure was twice that.) The president claimed that the number of cases in Italy was getting “much better” when it was getting much worse. And in one of the more stunning statements an American president has ever made, Trump admitted that his preference was to keep a cruise ship off the California coast rather than allowing it to dock, because he wanted to keep the number of reported cases of the coronavirus artificially low.

Donald Trump - should be behind bars

“I like the numbers,” Trump said. “I would rather have the numbers stay where they are. But if they want to take them off, they’ll take them off. But if that happens, all of a sudden your 240 [cases] is obviously going to be a much higher number, and probably the 11 [deaths] will be a higher number too.” (Cooler heads prevailed, and over the president’s objections, the Grand Princess was allowed to dock at the Port of Oakland.)

On and on it goes. 

To make matters worse, Donald Trump delivered a (failed!) Oval Office address that was meant to reassure the nation and the markets, but instead shook both. The president’s delivery was awkward and stilted; worse, at several points, the president, who decided to ad-lib the teleprompter speech, misstated his administration’s own policies, which the administration had to correct. Stock futures plunged even as the president was still delivering his speech. In his address, the president called for Americans to “unify together as one nation and one family,” despite having referred to Washington Governor Jay Inslee as a “snake” days before the speech and attacking Democrats the morning after it. As The Washington Post’s Dan Balz put it, “Almost everything that could have gone wrong with the speech did go wrong.”

Taken together, this is a massive failure in leadership that stems from a massive defect in character. Trump is such a habitual liar that he is incapable of being honest, even when being honest would serve his interests. He is so impulsive, shortsighted, and undisciplined that he is unable to plan or even think beyond the moment. He is such a divisive and polarizing figure that he long ago lost the ability to unite the nation under any circumstances and for any cause. And he is so narcissistic and unreflective that he is completely incapable of learning from his mistakes. The president’s disordered personality makes him as ill-equipped to deal with a crisis as any president has ever been. With few exceptions, what Trump has said is not just useless; it is downright injurious.

The nation is recognizing this, treating him as a bystander “as school superintendents, sports commissioners, college presidents, governors and business owners across the country take it upon themselves to shut down much of American life without clear guidance from the president,” in the words of Peter Baker and Maggie Haberman of The New York Times.

Donald Trump is shrinking before our eyes.

The coronavirus is quite likely to be the Trump presidency’s inflection point, when everything changed, when the bluster and ignorance and shallowness of America’s 45th president became undeniable, an empirical reality, as indisputable as the laws of science or a mathematical equation.

It has taken a good deal longer than it should have, but Americans have now seen the con man behind the curtain. The president, enraged for having been unmasked, will become more desperate, more embittered, more unhinged. He knows nothing will be the same. His administration may stagger on, but it will be only a hollow shell. The Trump presidency is over.

Unfortunately T-Party didn't push John Boehner out

A New York Times op-ed article by conservative writer Peter Wehner seems to breath a political sigh of relief, because the right wing T-Party failed in their "furious" attempt to depose House Speaker John Boehner, "even though he helped 'his party gain its largest majority since the Truman administration'."

Frankly, I'm disappointed in the T-Party (or "Tea Party, whatever name you prefer to use, it's still the proverbial "duck" right wing extremism).  In failing to depose Boehner, the T-Party has likely pulled the Speaker even further to the right than he was inclined to be, otherwise.  Perhaps, if the right wing had succeeded in their efforts, the political "coup" would've released Boehner to be a more compromising statesman.

Wehner doesn't consider this alternative potential outcome in his article.  Although he presents a reasonable (albeit, a somewhat hoity-toity intellectual- marked by an air of assumed importance) argument for why Boehner should remain as the Republican Speaker of the House, his argument doesn't allow for any other option.  Since Wehner longs for the reasonable days "back when" Ronald Reagan was the "sunny optimism" of Republicans, he doesn't see how those were the progressive days of conservative politics. Unless the right wing are brutally up ended, we're doomed to have more of them, like snakes multiplying in a cave, absent "sunny optimism".  By today's political polarizing measures, Ronald Reagan would likely qualify as being a Blue Dog Democrat.

I say, "you go T-Party right wing extremists"....a few months of you people in the political seat could turn Boehner into another Ronald Reagan! Maybe, his conversion would be akin to Paul on the road to Damascus.

This is what Wehner wrote on January 16, 2015 in The New York Times:

WASHINGTON — We live in an era of unusual political polarization, but the polarization isn’t simply between the two parties; there are also splits within them.

Last week the Republican Party’s divisions were on display, when Speaker of the House John A. Boehner — who helped his party gain its largest majority since the Truman administration — faced an uprising. The revolt was led by conservatives against a man whose voting record is unquestionably conservative. It was another indication that the tension on the right these days is not about policy or ideology but tone and temperament.

Mr. Boehner is hardly a perfect leader, but what got him into trouble was less a failure to lead than a failure to fight. The Republican Party is more uniformly conservative than ever. What some on the right are insisting on from Republican leaders, but not getting, is greater confrontation, more strident rhetoric and legislative brinkmanship. Hence the unhappiness.  (Julie's note....where's the "Democracy" in this thinking???)

What informs these demands is an apocalyptic view of American life during the Obama era. America is “very much like Nazi Germany,” in the words of Ben Carson, a Tea Party favorite. Senator Ted Cruz of Texas said we had a couple of years to turn this country around or “we go off the cliff to oblivion.” Mark Levin, a popular radio talk show host, warned that Republicans were “endorsing tyranny” if they didn’t support shutting down the government in 2013.

Those of us who are conservative and deeply concerned about the damage inflicted on the country by the president but don’t share this doom-laden view are labeled by some on the right as cowardly and unprincipled. Which raises a significant political and philosophical issue: Is there a conservative disposition? The answer, I think, is that there is, and what I’ve just described is not it.

What often masquerades as conservatism these days is really populism. There is room for populism within conservatism, but it should not define conservatism. In fact, it is often in conflict with it.

Conservatism, for starters, is rooted in human experience. It appreciates the complexity of human society. It believes in a givenness to human nature and in enduring principles, yet it has the capacity to apply those principles to changing circumstances. And because it isn’t a rigid ideology, it leaves itself open to self-examination and self-correction. Authentic conservatism has a high regard for things empirical, for facts that can lead us to better apprehend the truth.

Conservatism is famously anti-utopian, understanding life’s imperfections and the limitations of politics. Knowing this, those on the right shouldn’t become enraged or forlorn when the world itself doesn’t fully conform to their hopes. Conservatism considers one of the cardinal virtues to be prudence. And no conservative — certainly no one familiar with the magnificent history of the Constitution — should be opposed to compromise per se. Whether or not accommodation is wise depends on whether an agreement nudges things in the right direction.

This doesn’t mean that conservatives shouldn’t fight passionately for liberty and justice. Today’s Republicans, for example, should advance a policy agenda that systematically transforms welfare-state programs into a market-friendly safety net. (Julie's note:  did "Scrooge" say this with more honesty?)

Nor does it mean that conservatism is merely a disposition, unconnected to a political theory. It simply means that conservatives should make their case with an urgency balanced by practical wisdom, equanimity and a sense of proportion. Their passion should also be balanced by gratitude.

(Julie's note- I'm certainly not thankful for Boehner's leadership by opposition and obstruction.  He didn't personally bring about a Republican victory. Rather, it was the Democrats who didn't vote 2016, who allowed this leadership debacle to happen.)

Ronald Reagan and the Democratic House Leader Tip O'Neill were friends......both Rest in Peace, along with their effective leadership.