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Donald Trump and J.D. Vance at the RNC (Roll Call)
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Donald Trump is scheduled to address delegates tonight at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee. The speech comes five days after the editorial board of the nation's foremost newspaper published an editorial saying Trump is "Unfit to Lead." Will trump address issues raised by the editorial board of The New York Times (NYT)? My guess is that he will say little about it. But The Times op-ed piece remains a compelling piece of explanatory journalism. In blunt, unvarnished language, it traces the numerous missteps Trump committed during his first term in office -- and addresses the weaknesses in governing and leadership styles that will be on display if American voters send him back to the White House for a second term.
NYT articles tend to be behind a hard paywall, so it's likely many would-be voters have not had access to this op-ed. But Americans need to know what they likely are in for if Trump re-takes the reins at the White House in January 2025. In stark, but readable, language, The Times' editorial board does an expert job of tracing his rise to power, his actions and inactions in a chaotic first term, and his radical plans for a second term -- if he gets one.
In our view, every American of voting age should read this op-ed between now and election day on Nov. 5, 2024. You will be much more likely to make an informed choice about our nation's future direction. The 2024 election is unusual in our history because it comes down to one question: Do you prefer democracy, which has guided our country for roughly 250 years or do you prefer an extreme overhaul -- one that is designed to lead to some form of authoritarian rule, perhaps even a dictatorship. President Joe Biden prefers the former and Donald Trump -- who has proven over and over that he knows very little about American government (see here and here) -- prefers the latter
Regardless of your political leanings, I encourage you to read the NYT piece. Whether you are pro-Trump or anti-Trump, you will learn a lot about our country, the issues we face, and the way our government works -- or sometimes, doesn't work. I soaked up every word of it, and I hope you will do the same. The op-ed is so well written that you don't realize it is fairly long until you are done. I know of at least three ways to read the full article or to read about it: (1) Here at our Legal Schnauzer (LS) blog, where the article begins below: (2) at this link to an article at Yahoo!News about the op-ed; and (3) at this link directly to The New York Times.
Here at LS, let's dive right in, starting with the full headline and an introductory sub-hed, ending with the op-ed's concluding statement:
" He Is Dangerous In Word, Deed, And Action . . . He Puts Self Over Country . . . He Loathes The Laws We Live By . . . DONALD TRUMP IS UNFIT TO LEAD"
Here is the sub-hed:
For the third time in eight years,
Donald Trump will be nominated as the Republican Party’s candidate for
president of the United States. A once great political party now serves
the interests of one man, a man as demonstrably unsuited for the office
of president as any to run in the long history of the Republic, a man
whose values, temperament, ideas and language are directly opposed to so
much of what has made this country great.
It is a chilling choice against this national moment. For more than two decades, large majorities of Americans have said they are dissatisfied
with the direction of the country, and the post-Covid era of stubborn
inflation, high interest rates, social division and political stagnation
has left many voters even more frustrated and despondent.
Here is the full text of the op-ed
The Republican Party once pursued
electoral power in service to solutions for such problems, to building
“the shining city on a hill,” as Ronald Reagan liked to say. Its vision
of the United States — embodied in principled public servants like
George H.W. Bush, John McCain and Mitt Romney — was rooted in the values
of freedom, sacrifice, individual responsibility and the common good.
The party’s conception of those values was reflected in its longstanding
conservative policy agenda, and today many Republicans set aside their
concerns about Mr. Trump because of his positions on immigration, trade
and taxes. But the stakes of this election are not fundamentally about
policy disagreements. The stakes are more foundational: what qualities
matter most in America’s president and commander in chief.
Mr.
Trump has shown a character unworthy of the responsibilities of the
presidency. He has demonstrated an utter lack of respect for the
Constitution, the rule of law and the American people. Instead of a
cogent vision for the country’s future, Mr. Trump is animated by a
thirst for political power: to use the levers of government to advance
his interests, satisfy his impulses and exact retribution against those he thinks have wronged him.
He is, quite simply, unfit to lead.
The
Democrats are rightly engaged in their own debate about whether
President Biden is the right person to carry the party’s nomination into
the election, given widespread concerns among voters about his
age-related fitness. This debate is so intense because of legitimate
concerns that Mr. Trump may present a danger to the country, its
strength, security and national character — and that a compelling
Democratic alternative is the only thing that would prevent his return
to power. It is a national tragedy that the Republicans have failed to
have a similar debate about the manifest moral and temperamental
unfitness of their standard-bearer, instead setting aside their
longstanding values, closing ranks and choosing to overlook what those
who worked most closely with the former president have described as his
systematic dishonesty, corruption, cruelty and incompetence.
That
task now falls to the American people. We urge voters to see the
dangers of a second Trump term clearly and to reject it. The stakes and
significance of the presidency demand a person who has essential
qualities and values to earn our trust, and on each one, Donald Trump
fails.
I. Moral Fitness Matters
Presidents
are confronted daily with challenges that require not just strength and
conviction but also honesty, humility, selflessness, fortitude and the
perspective that comes from sound moral judgment.
If Mr. Trump has these qualities, Americans have never seen them in action on behalf of the nation’s interests.
His words and actions demonstrate a disregard for basic right and wrong
and a clear lack of moral fitness for the responsibilities of the
presidency.He lies blatantly and maliciously, embraces racists, abuses women
and has a schoolyard bully’s instinct to target society’s most
vulnerable. He has delighted in coarsening and polarizing the town
square with ever more divisive and incendiary language. Mr. Trump is a
man who craves validation and vindication, so much that he would prefer a hostile leader’s lies to his own intelligence agencies’ truths and would shake down a vulnerable ally for short-term political advantage.
His handling of everything from routine affairs to major crises was
undermined by his blundering combination of impulsiveness, insecurity
and unstudied certainty.
This
record shows what can happen to a country led by such a person:
America’s image, credibility and cohesion were relentlessly undermined
by Mr. Trump during his term.
None
of his wrongful actions are so obviously discrediting as his determined
and systematic attempts to undermine the integrity of elections — the
most basic element of any democracy — an effort that culminated in an
insurrection at the Capitol to obstruct the peaceful transfer of power.
On
Jan. 6, 2021, Mr. Trump incited a mob to violence with hateful lies,
then stood by for hours as hundreds of his supporters took his word and
stormed the Capitol with the aim of terrorizing members of Congress into
keeping him in office. He praised these insurrectionists
and called them patriots; today he gives them a starring role at
campaign rallies, playing a rendition of the national anthem sung by
inmates involved with Jan. 6, and he has promised to consider pardoning
the rioters if re-elected. He continues to wrong the country and its
voters by lying about the 2020 election, branding it stolen, despite the
courts, the Justice Department and Republican state officials disputing
him. No man fit for the presidency would flog such pernicious and
destructive lies about democratic norms and values, but the Trumpian
hunger for vindication and retribution has no moral center.
To
vest such a person with the vast powers of the presidency is to
endanger American interests and security at home as well as abroad. The
nation’s commander in chief must uphold the oath to “preserve, protect
and defend the Constitution.” It is the closest thing that this secular
nation has to a sacred trust. The president has several duties and
powers that are his alone: He has the sole authority to launch a nuclear
weapon. He has the authority to send American troops into harm’s way
and to authorize the use of lethal force against individuals and other
nations. Americans who serve in the military also take an oath to defend
the Constitution, and they rely on their commander in chief to take
that oath as seriously as they do.
Mr.
Trump has shown, repeatedly, that he does not. On numerous occasions,
he asked his defense secretary and commanders in the American armed
forces to violate that oath. On other occasions, he demanded that
members of the military violate norms that preserve the dignity of the
armed services and protect the military from being used for political
purposes. They largely refused these illegal and immoral orders, as the
oath requires.
The
lack of moral grounding undermines Mr. Trump even in areas where voters
view him as stronger and trust him more than Mr. Biden, like
immigration and crime. Veering into a kind of brutal excess that is, at
best, immoral and, at worst, unconstitutional, he has said that
undocumented immigrants were “poisoning the blood of our country,” and his advisers say he would aim to round them up in mass detention camps and end birthright citizenship.
He has indicated that, if faced with episodes of rioting or crime
surges, he would unilaterally send troops into American cities. He has
asked aides if the United States could shoot migrants below the waist to slow them down, and he has said that he would use the Insurrection Act to deploy the military against protesters.
During
his time in office, none of those things happened because there were
enough people in military leadership with the moral fitness to say “no”
to such illegal orders. But there are good reasons to worry about
whether that would happen again, as Mr. Trump works harder to surround
himself with people who enable rather than check his most insidious
impulses.
The Supreme Court, with its ruling on July 1 granting presidents “absolute immunity” for official acts, has removed an obstacle to Mr.Trump’s
worst impulses: the threat of legal consequences. What remains is his
own sense of right and wrong. Our country’s future is too precious to
rely on such a broken moral compass.
II.
Principled
Leadership
Matters
Republican
presidents and presidential candidates have used their leadership at
critical moments to set a tone for society to live up to. Mr. Reagan
faced down totalitarianism in the 1980s, appointed the first woman to
the Supreme Court and worked with Democrats on bipartisan tax and
immigration reforms. George H.W. Bush signed the Americans With
Disabilities Act and decisively defended an ally, Kuwait, against Iraqi
aggression. George W. Bush, for all his failures after Sept. 11, did not
stoke hate against or demonize Muslims or Islam.
As
a candidate during the 2008 race, Mr. McCain spoke out when his fellow
conservatives spread lies about his opponent, Barack Obama. Mr. Romney
was willing to sacrifice his standing and influence in the party he once
represented as a presidential nominee, by boldly calling out Mr.
Trump’s failings and voting for his removal from office.
These acts of leadership are what it means to put country first, to think beyond oneself.
Mr.
Trump has demonstrated contempt for these American ideals. He admires
autocrats, from Viktor Orban to Vladimir Putin to Kim Jong-un. He
believes in the strongman model of power — a leader who makes things
happen by demanding it, compelling agreement through force of will or
personality. In reality, a strongman rules through fear and the
unprincipled use of political might for self-serving ends, imposing
poorly conceived policies that smother innovation, entrepreneurship,
ideas and hope.
During
his four years in office, Mr. Trump tried to govern the United States
as a strongman would, issuing orders or making decrees on Twitter. He
announced sudden changes in policy — on who can serve in the military, on trade policy, on how the United States deals with North Korea or Russia
— without consulting experts on his staff about how these changes would
affect America. Indeed, nowhere did he put his political or personal
interests above the national interest more tragically than during the pandemic, when he faked his way through a crisis
by touting conspiracy theories and pseudoscience while ignoring the
advice of his own experts and resisting basic safety measures that would
have saved lives.
He
took a similar approach to America’s strategic relationships abroad.
Mr. Trump lost the trust of America’s longstanding allies, especially in
NATO, leaving Europe less secure and emboldening the far right and
authoritarian leaders in Europe, Latin America and Asia. He pulled out
of the Iran nuclear deal, leaving that country, already a threat to the
world, more dangerous, thanks to a revived program that has achieved
near-weapons-grade uranium.
In
a second term, his willingness to appease Mr. Putin would leave
Ukraine’s future as a democratic and independent country in doubt. Mr.
Trump implies that he could single-handedly end the catastrophic war in
Gaza but has no real plan. He has suggested that in a second term he’d
increase tariffs on Chinese goods to 60 percent or higher
and that he would put a 10 percent tariff on all imported goods, moves
that would raise prices for American consumers and reduce innovation by
allowing U.S. industries to rely on protectionism instead.
The
worst of the Trump administration’s policies were often blocked by
Congress, by court challenges and by the objections of honorable public
servants who stepped in to thwart his demands when they were
irresponsible or did not follow the law. When Mr. Trump wanted an end to
Obamacare, a single Republican senator, Mr. McCain, saved it,
preserving health care for millions of Americans. Mr. Trump demanded
that James Comey, his F.B.I. director, pledge loyalty to him and end an
investigation into a political ally; Mr. Comey refused. Scientists and
public health officials called out and corrected his misinformation
about climate science and Covid. The Supreme Court sided against the Trump administration more times than any other president since at least Franklin D. Roosevelt.
A
second Trump administration would be different. He intends to fill his
administration with sycophants, those who have shown themselves willing
to obey Mr. Trump’s demands or those who lack the strength to stand up
to him. He wants to remove those who would be obstacles to his agenda, by enacting an order to make it easier to fire civil servants and replace them with those more loyal to him.
This
means not only that Americans would lose the benefit of their expertise
but also that America would be governed in a climate of fear, in which
government employees must serve the interests of the president rather
than the public. All cabinet secretaries follow a president’s lead, but
Mr. Trump envisions a nation in which public service as Americans
understand it would cease to exist — where individual civil servants and
departments could no longer make independent decisions and where research
by scientists and public health experts and investigations by the
Justice Department and others in federal law enforcement would be more
malleable to the demands of the White House.
Another
term under Mr. Trump’s leadership would risk doing permanent damage to
our government. As Mr. Comey, a longtime Republican, wrote in a 2019 guest essay
for Times Opinion, “Accomplished people lacking inner strength can’t
resist the compromises necessary to survive Mr. Trump and that adds up
to something they will never recover from.” Very few who serve under him
can avoid this fate “because Mr. Trump eats your soul in small bites,”
Mr. Comey wrote. “Of course, to stay, you must be seen as on his team,
so you make further compromises. You use his language, praise his
leadership, tout his commitment to values. And then you are lost. He has
eaten your soul.” America will get nowhere with a strongman. It needs a
strong leader.
III.
Character
Matters
Character is the quality that gives a leader credibility, authority and
influence. During the 2016 campaign, Mr. Trump’s petty attacks on his
opponents and their families led many Republicans to conclude that he
lacked such character. Other Republicans, including those who supported
the former president’s policies in office, say they can no longer in
good conscience back him for the presidency. “It’s a job that requires
the kind of character he just doesn’t have,” Paul Ryan, a former
Republican House speaker, said of Mr. Trump in May.
Those who know Mr. Trump’s character best
— the people he appointed to serve in the most important positions of
his White House — have expressed grave doubts about his fitness for
office.
His former chief of staff John Kelly, a retired four-star Marine Corps general, described
Mr. Trump as “a person who admires autocrats and murderous dictators. A
person that has nothing but contempt for our democratic institutions,
our Constitution and the rule of law.” Bill Barr, whom Mr. Trump
appointed as attorney general, said of him,
“He will always put his own interest and gratifying his own ego ahead
of everything else, including the country’s interest.” James Mattis, a
retired four-star Marine general who served as defense secretary, said,
“Donald Trump is the first president in my lifetime who does not try to
unite the American people — does not even pretend to try.”
Mike
Pence, Mr. Trump’s vice president, has disavowed him. No other vice
president in modern American history has done this. “I believe that
anyone who puts themselves over the Constitution should never be
president of the United States,” Mr. Pence has said. “And anyone who asked someone else to put them over the Constitution should never be president of the United States again.”
These
are hardly exceptions. In any other American administration, a single
cabinet-level defection is rare. But an unprecedented number of Mr.
Trump’s appointees
have publicly criticized his leadership, opposed his 2024 presidential
candidacy or ducked questions about his fitness for a second term. More
than a dozen of his most senior appointees — those he chose to work
alongside him and who saw his performance most closely — have spoken out against him, serving as witnesses about the kind of leader he is.
There
are many ways to judge leaders’ character; one is to see whether they
accept responsibility for their actions. As a general rule, Mr. Trump
abhors accountability. If he loses, the election is rigged. If he is
convicted, it’s because the judges are out to get him. If he doesn’t get
his way in a deal, as happened multiple times with Congress in his
term, he shuts down the government or threatens to.
Americans
do not expect their presidents to be perfect; many of them have
exhibited hubris, self-regard, arrogance and other character flaws. But
the American system of government is more than just the president: It is
a system of checks and balances, and it relies on everyone in
government to intervene when a president’s personal failings might
threaten the common good.
Mr.
Trump tested those limits as president, and little has changed about
him in the four years since he lost re-election. He tries to intimidate
anyone with the temerity to testify as a witness against him. He attacks the
integrity of judges who are doing their duty to hold him accountable to
the law. He mocks those he dislikes and lies about those who oppose him
and targets Republicans for defeat if they fail to bend the knee.
It
may be tempting for Americans to believe that a second Trump presidency
would be much like the first, with the rest of government steeled to
protect the country and resist his worst impulses. But the strongman
needs others to be weak, and Mr. Trump is surrounding himself with yes
men.
The American public has a right to demand more from their president and those who would serve under him.
IV.
A President’s
Words Matter
What a president says reflects on the United States and the kind of society we aspire to be.
In 2022 this board raised an urgent alarm
about the rising threat of political violence in the United States and
what Americans could do to stop it. At the time, Mr. Trump was preparing
to declare his intention to run for president again, and the Republican
Party was in the middle of a fight for control, between Trumpists and
those who were ready to move on from his destructive leadership. This
struggle within the party has consequences for all Americans. “A healthy
democracy requires both political parties to be fully committed to the
rule of law and not to entertain or even tacitly encourage violence or
violent speech,” we wrote.
A
large faction of one party in our country fails that test, and that
faction, Mr. Trump’s MAGA extremists, now controls the party and its
levers of power. There are many reasons his conquest of the Republican
Party is bad for American democracy, but one of the most significant is
that those extremists have often embraced violent speech or the belief
in using violence to achieve their political goals. This belief led to
the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, and it has resulted in a rising number
of threats against judges, elected officials and prosecutors.
This
threat cannot be separated from Mr. Trump’s use of language to
encourage violence, to dehumanize groups of people and to spread lies. A
study by researchers at the University of California, Davis, released
in October 2022, came to the conclusion that MAGA Republicans (as
opposed to those who identified themselves as traditional Republicans)
“are more likely to hold extreme and racist beliefs, to endorse
political violence, to see such violence as likely to occur and to
predict that they will be armed under circumstances in which they
consider political violence to be justified.”
The
Republican Party had an opportunity to renounce Trumpism; it has
submitted to it. Republican leaders have had many opportunities to
repudiate his violent discourse and make clear that it should have no
place in political life; they failed to. Sizable numbers of voters in
Republican primaries abandoned Mr. Trump for other candidates, and
independent and undecided voters have said that Mr. Trump’s language has
alienated them from his candidacy.
But
with his nomination by his party all but assured, Mr. Trump has become
even more reckless in employing extreme and violent speech, such as his
references to executing generals who raise questions about his actions.
He has argued, before the Supreme Court, that he should have the right
to assassinate a political rival and face no consequences.
V.
The Rule of Law Matters
The
danger from these foundational failings — of morals and character, of
principled leadership and rhetorical excess — is never clearer than in
Mr. Trump’s disregard for rule of law, his willingness to do long-term
damage to the integrity of America’s systems for short-term personal
gain.
As
we’ve noted, Mr. Trump’s disregard for democracy was most evident in his
attempts to overturn the results of the 2020 election and to encourage
violence to stop the peaceful transfer of power. What stood in his way
were the many patriotic Americans, at every level of government, who
rejected his efforts to bully them into complying with his demands to
change election results. Instead, they followed the rules and followed
the law. This respect for the rule of law, not the rule of men, is what
has allowed American democracy to survive for more than 200 years.
In
the four years since losing the election, Mr. Trump has become only
more determined to subvert the rule of law, because his whole theory of
Trumpism boils down to doing whatever he wants without consequence.
Americans are seeing this unfold as Mr. Trump attempts to fight off
numerous criminal charges. Not content to work within the law to defend
himself, he is instead turning to sympathetic judges — including two
Supreme Court justices with apparent conflicts over the 2020 election and Jan. 6-related litigation. The playbook: delay federal prosecution until he can win election and end
those legal cases. His vision of government is one that does what he
wants, rather than a government that operates according to the rule of
law as prescribed by the Constitution, the courts and Congress.
As
divided as America is, people across the political spectrum generally
recoil from rigged rules, favoritism, self-dealing and abuse of power.
Our country has been so stable for so long in part because most
Americans and most American leaders follow the rules or face the
consequences.
So
much in the past two decades has tested these norms in our society —
the invasion of Iraq under false pretenses, the failures that led to the
2008 financial crisis and the recession that followed, the pandemic and
all the fractures and inequities that it revealed. We need a
re-commitment to the rule of law and the values of fair play. This
election is a moment for Americans to decide whether we will keep
striving for those ideals.
Mr.
Trump rejects them. If he is re-elected, America will face a new and
precarious future, one that it may not be prepared for. It is a future
in which intelligence agencies would be judged not according to whether
they preserved national security but by whether they served Mr. Trump’s
political agenda. It means that prosecutors and law enforcement
officials would be judged not according to whether they follow the law
to keep Americans safe but by whether they obey his demands to “go
after” political enemies. It means that public servants would be judged
not according to their dedication or skill but by whether they show
sufficient loyalty to him and his MAGA agenda.
Even
if Mr. Trump’s vague policy agenda would not be fulfilled, he could
rule by fear. The lesson of other countries shows that when a
bureaucracy is politicized or pressured, the best public servants will
run for the exits.
This
is what has already happened in Mr. Trump’s Republican Party, with
principled leaders and officials retiring, quitting or facing ouster. In
a second term, he intends to do that to the whole of government.
Concluding Statement
Election
Day is less than four months away. The case against Mr. Trump is
extensive, and this board urges Americans to perform a simple act of
civic duty in an election year: Listen to what Mr. Trump is saying, pay
attention to what he did as president and allow yourself to truly
inhabit what he has promised to do if returned to office.
Voters
frustrated by inflation and immigration or attracted by the force of
Mr. Trump’s personality should pause and take note of his words and
promises. They have little to do with unity and healing and a lot to do
with making the divisions and anger in our society wider and more
intense than they already are.
The
Republican Party has made its choice; soon all Americans will be able to
make their own choice. What would Mr. Trump do in a second term? He has
told Americans who he is and shown them what kind of leader he would
be.
When someone fails so many foundational tests, you don’t give him the most important job in the world.
