I recently saw Trump’s cabinet meeting on television and was appalled. I put together what I knew about the state of the State Department, the difficulties faced daily by the Chief of Staff and the Press Secretary and watched them lie through their teeth at the behest of their leader.
The Donald is NOT a competent leader. If this were in doubt, this televised cabinet session clearly demonstrated his incompetence. Rather than listening, he was talking. Even when he was “listening,” he still wasn’t, because there was no room for valid information to issue forth from the mouths of his minions. Instead, what he heard was a room full of blatant lies about his excellent leadership and how grateful they were to be working for him.
Mr. Trump’s skin is drastically thin. He cannot take any criticism without lashing out with rude and childish disrespect, particularly if the critic is a woman. This, alone, makes the Press Secretary’s job difficult. The fact that Trump lies, changes his mind frequently, and is ready to fire anyone renders this job impossible to do well.
President Trump has neither formulated nor articulated a coherent foreign policy, and the parts that have been formulated are modified on the fly, so the Secretary of State cannot get the State Department staffed. Few qualified candidates will work for him under these conditions.
Meanwhile, Trump is pressing for complicated health care legislation while having no opinions about its content that can’t fit into a sound bite. The goals he has laid out aren’t even remotely realistic. What he has managed to get written but not passed is a tax cut for the wealthiest Americans, a monster health insurance sewer still draining billions out of health care, and diminishing support for sick low- and middle-income Americans.
Our President has doubled down on calling the city in which he works as the top executive a “swamp,” yet his contribution is slinging mud, muddying the waters, and bringing in people who have consistently ignored high-level white-collar crime. He’s disinterested in foreign interference in our election and, rather than ask questions about it, tried to limit the investigation and then fired the principal investigator.
Trump said he’d work for the American worker. Why they believed this when his bankruptcies screwed American workers, his products were made overseas, and his inner circle is composed of anti-labor bigwigs, is beyond me, but they did. It is clear he isn’t a champion of the American worker or the American voter. What he consistently champions to the exclusion of every other cause or issue is The Donald, a construct composed of blatant lies, sleazy business practices, and flashy name recognition combined with show business and the tag line, “You’re fired!”
Since electing this man as our President, Washington, D.C., has become stagnant and is starting to rot. Politics is no longer about even pretending to work for the people of this country but about appeasing a demagogue who demands deference he hasn’t earned in a role he isn’t equipped to handle.
Trump contradicts himself and/or his staff almost daily. He lambastes reporters and commentators for making him look bad, but it is obvious to even the casual observer that Trump isn’t fully connected to reality, that he has hidden who he is and what he does.
The reality of Trump’s dishonesty is gradually surfacing. These disclosures include greed, manipulation, dishonesty, and corruption that cannot be cleaned up or washed away. Future investigation may also uncover money laundering for the Russian mob, huge loans from questionable Russian sources and, God help us, collusion with Russia in hacking the election.
America elected this man in desperation, having bought into the idea that the alternate choice was a crook and a liar. They wanted a change, but they seem to have gotten a crook and a liar and, if their capital city wasn’t a swamp before, it most certainly is now.
©David N. Dodson, July 2017
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