The most revealing answer from Donald Trump’s interview with Fox News Channel’s Chris Wallace came in response not to the toughest question posed by Wallace, but to the easiest.
At the conclusion of the interview, Wallace asked Trump how he will regard his years as president.
“I think I was very unfairly treated,” Trump responded. “From before I even won, I was under investigation by a bunch of thieves, crooks. It was an illegal investigation.”
Peter Wehner: The president is unraveling
When Wallace interrupted, trying to get Trump to focus on the positive achievements of his presidency—“What about the good parts, sir?”—Trump brushed the question aside, responding, “Russia, Russia, Russia.” The president then complained about the Flynn investigation, the “Russia hoax,” the “Mueller scam,” and the recusal by his then–attorney general, Jeff Sessions. (“Now I feel good because he lost overwhelmingly in the great state of Alabama,” Trump said about the first senator to endorse him in the 2016 Republican primary.)
Donald Trump is a psychologically broken, embittered, and deeply unhappy man. He is so gripped by his grievances, such a prisoner of his resentments, that even the most benevolent question from an interviewer—what good parts of your presidency would you like to be remembered for?—triggered a gusher of discontent.
But the president still wasn’t done. “Here’s the bottom line,” he said. “I’ve been very unfairly treated, and I don’t say that as paranoid. I’ve been very—everybody says it. It’s going to be interesting to see what happens. But there was tremendous evidence right now as to how unfairly treated I was. President Obama and Biden spied on my campaign. It’s never happened in history. If it were the other way around, the people would be in jail for 50 years right now.”
David Frum: This is Trump’s plague now
Just in case his bitterness wasn’t coming through clearly enough, the president added this: “That would be Comey, that would be Brennan, that would be all of this—the two lovers, Strzok and Page, they would be in jail now for many, many years. They would be in jail; it would’ve started two years ago, and they’d be there for 50 years. The fact is, they illegally spied on my campaign. Let’s see what happens. Despite that, I did more than any president in history in the first three and a half years.”
With that, the interview ended.
Such a disposition in almost anyone else—a teacher, a tax accountant, a CEO, a cab driver, a reality-television star—would be unfortunate enough. After all, people who obsess about being wronged are just plain unpleasant to be around: perpetually ungrateful, short-tempered, self-absorbed, never at peace, never at rest.
But Donald Trump isn’t a teacher, a tax accountant, or (any longer) a reality-television star; he is, by virtue of the office he holds, in possession of unmatched power. The fact that he is devoid of any moral sensibilities or admirable human qualities—self-discipline, compassion, empathy, responsibility, courage, honesty, loyalty, prudence, temperance, a desire for justice—means he has no internal moral check; the question Is this the right thing to do? never enters his mind. As a result, he not only nurses his grievances; he acts on them. He lives to exact revenge, to watch his opponents suffer, to inflict pain on those who don’t bend before him. Even former war heroes who have died can’t escape his wrath.
Read: Trump’s America is slipping away
So Donald Trump is a vindictive man who also happens to be commander in chief and head of the executive branch, which includes the Justice Department, and there is no one around the president who will stand up to him. He has surrounded himself with lapdogs.
But the problem doesn’t end there. In a single term, Trump has reshaped the Republican Party through and through, and his dispositional imprint on the GOP is as great as any in modern history, including Ronald Reagan’s.
I say that as a person who was deeply shaped by Reagan and his presidency. My first job in government was working for the Reagan administration, when I was in my 20s. The conservative movement in the 1980s, although hardly flawless, was intellectually serious and politically optimistic. And Reagan himself was a man of personal decency, grace, and class. While often the target of nasty attacks, he maintained a remarkably charitable view of his political adversaries. “Remember, we have no enemies, only opponents,” the former Indiana governor Mitch Daniels, who worked for Reagan, quotes him as admonishing his staff.
In his farewell address to the nation, Reagan offered an evocative description of America. “I’ve spoken of the shining city all my political life, but I don’t know if I ever quite communicated what I saw when I said it,” he said. “But in my mind it was a tall, proud city built on rocks stronger than oceans, wind-swept, God-blessed, and teeming with people of all kinds living in harmony and peace; a city with free ports that hummed with commerce and creativity. And if there had to be city walls, the walls had doors and the doors were open to anyone with the will and the heart to get here. That’s how I saw it, and see it still.”
A city tall and proud, its people living in harmony and peace, surrounded by walls with open doors; that was Ronald Reagan’s image of America, and Ronald Reagan’s Republican Party.
When Reagan died in 2004, the conservative columnist George Will wrote a moving tribute to his friend, saying of America’s 40th president, “He traveled far, had a grand time all the way, and his cheerfulness was contagious.” Reagan had a “talent for happiness,” according to Will. And he added this: “Reagan in his presidential role made vivid the values, particularly hopefulness and friendliness, that give cohesion and dynamism to this continental nation.”
There were certainly ugly elements on the American right during the Reagan presidency, and Reagan himself was not without flaws. But as president, he set the tone, and the tone was optimism, courtliness and elegance, joie de vivre.
He has since been replaced by the crudest and cruelest man ever to be president. But not just that. One senses in Donald Trump no joy, no delight, no laughter. All the emotions that drive him are negative. There is something repugnant about Trump, yes, but there is also something quite sad about the man. He is a damaged soul.
Adam Serwer: The cruelty is the point
In another time, in a different circumstance, there would perhaps be room to pity such a person. But for now, it is best for the pity to wait. There are other things to which to attend. The American public faces one great and morally urgent task above all others between now and November: to do everything in its power to remove from the presidency a self-pitying man who is shattering the nation and doesn’t even care.
The Ticket: Politics from The Atlantic
Crazy/Genius
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And:
"Democracy Dies in Darkness
The Plum Line
Opinion
If Biden wins, the post-Trump corruption purge will have to be epic
(Source: Bloomberg/Bloomberg)
(Source: Bloomberg/Bloomberg)
Image without a caption
Opinion by Greg Sargent
Columnist
August 5, 2020 at 4:45 PM EDT
It’s widely understood that if Joe Biden wins the White House, he’ll face monumental tasks in digging us out of our spiraling public health crisis and the economic catastrophe it has unleashed, which could get far worse if Congress’ next rescue package falls short, as it likely will.
But an incoming Biden administration will also face another mission: undertaking a full accounting of the Trump administration’s corruption and the damage it has done to our government and institutions.
That is, if the new administration chooses to accept that mission.
A new report from the Democratic-allied Center for American Progress both lays out an argument for why Biden should indeed take on that mission and offers a suggested road map on how to do that.
The core argument for acting ambitiously to fumigate the Trump administration’s corruption is a straightforward moral hazard one:
A constant of the Trump administration has been escalation in the absence of accountability. If a free pass is provided to those that broke the law and subverted democracy, it will embolden them and any illiberal politicians or administrations in the future to show even greater disregard for the rule of law.
One question that will be tough to answer is: Where to start?
The CAP report suggests beginning with the Justice Department, with a full review of special treatment accorded to Trump allies, such as Roger Stone and former national security adviser Michael Flynn, both of whom Trump championed.
Also worth examining might be the attorney general’s efforts to discredit his own agency’s conclusions about a massive foreign attack on our democracy, as Trump implicitly but relentlessly demanded.
But, crucially, CAP suggests that such a review must not involve the White House at all. It would instead involve career Justice Department officials or the inspector general, and Congress (if it’s controlled by Democrats) would potentially have a major role.
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Which immediately highlights an interesting conundrum: to what degree members of a Biden administration could undertake such an internal examination without involving Biden in any way, since that would risk straying into the sort of politicization that is the problem under Trump.
Another area for such fumigation might be the president’s constant attacks on inspectors general and whistleblowers. This is one of the clearest areas in which Trump has sought to wreck one of the most important anti-corruption and pro-accountability innovations of the post-Watergate era.
One answer to this, suggested by CAP, would be to try to reinvigorate the role of IGs. This could of course be done through the act of respecting their independence but also explicitly and actively reaffirming that independence.
CAP also suggests that major agencies should conduct their own internal reviews of corruption that took place under Trump — the Environmental Protection Agency is an obvious candidate — which could theoretically involve inspectors general, revitalizing their role in that way.
Yet another area — not discussed in the CAP report — would entail new legislative safeguards against the sort of relentless financial self-dealing that Trump engaged in. A model is Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s (D-Mass.) blueprint requiring the IRS to release presidential candidates’ tax returns.
Such an effort would be led out of Congress. But Biden would surely be pressed to bless (and then sign) it.
This is of course a very partial list of what might need to be done. But the very fact that a mainstream outfit such as CAP is already pushing Biden in this way suggests he — and/or members of his administration — may feel great pressure to act along these lines.
Many other stakeholders in Washington who have been glaring at Trump’s contempt for the rule of law from the sidelines for so long will also surely offer their own blueprints, adding to the chatter around what will be a huge national debate, should Biden win.
And yet, having campaigned on a vow of post-Trump reconciliation — and facing the daunting task of unifying a battered country around national solutions to the coronavirus pandemic and a potential economic depression — Biden might feel disinclined from sinking too much political capital into an effort along these lines, which might feel akin to diving right back into Trump’s black hole.
The CAP report tries to address this, arguing that ultimately, it’s more divisive and risky to allow all this corruption to slide, and that in the end, reaffirming the rule of law should itself constitute a unifying act.
Of course, Trump himself will make this as hard as possible. As the report notes, Richard Nixon “resigned from office in disgrace, providing some measure of accountability for his actions.”
By contrast, Trump will steadily rage about any such efforts at an accounting from private life, his Twitter thumbs as active as ever. And GOP opportunists in the Senate who see advocating for the Lost Cause of Trumpism as their path to glory in 2024 will add to the bellowing.
All of which is a reminder of the vast scale of the garbage field we’ll all be digging out from under, should Biden win. And that’s if we’re lucky."
