US voters should be told if Trump can’t rule without a nanny
THE White House is worse than you imagined. That’s the essential message from Bob Woodward’s new book, ‘Fear: Trump in the White House’. As my colleague Aaron Blake puts it, the details “are damning in a way we simply haven’t seen before – both for their breadth and degree”.
In part, the outsized impact the book is having can be attributed to Woodward’s reputation, sourcing (hundreds of people) and possession of scores of taped interviews.
It is noteworthy that so many people around President Donald Trump spoke to Woodward, even those still at the White House. Moreover, accounts in the book are entirely credible because the incidents he describes explain certain events: John Dowd quitting as Trump’s lawyer, for example, after the president couldn’t hold up during a mock interview with special counsel Robert Mueller.
More so than Michael Wolff’s ‘Fire and Fury’ (which seemed to get the details of various episodes wrong), Woodward’s book raises unavoidable, legitimate issues about the president’s fitness to serve. (A responsible Congress would begin contacting people such as former national security adviser HR McMaster and former economic adviser Gary Cohn to determine the president’s capacity to function.) The president’s insistence that all of this is made up simply doesn’t fly, except with the most devoted cultists.
This is not a story of what Trump’s critics or neutral observers think of him. This is an account by those who know him best. It is they who believe he cannot be trusted to do his job. From ‘The Washington Post’ report: “The combination of (anecdotes) in one book is something we simply haven’t seen. It suggests a White House full of top aides who have almost no confidence in the man they’re serving and feel as if they are constantly averting
The White House staff and cabinet are getting more compliant and less responsible as time goes on, precisely because decent, responsible people don’t want to work for this president
calamity.” They think he’s an “idiot” (Chief of Staff John Kelly), or “unhinged” (Kelly again), or has the mental capacity of a “fifth or sixth-grader” (Defence Secretary Jim Mattis). They deliberately thwart him because he tells them to do dangerous things, such as assassinating Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad. In another instance, they took a document off his desk so he wouldn’t pull out of a South Korea trade deal.
All this is positively frightful for several reasons. For starters, some of the people who countermanded Trump (Cohn, for one) are gone. What happens when someone’s not around to (allegedly) grab papers off Trump’s desk? The White House staff and cabinet are getting more compliant and less responsible as time goes on, precisely because decent, responsible people don’t want to work for this president. The defences, if you will, are getting weaker.
Second, Dowd’s account of a disastrous practice interview confirms suspicions that Trump literally cannot tell the truth: “I’m not going to sit there and let him look like an idiot. And you publish that transcript, because everything leaks in Washington, and the guys overseas are going to say, ‘I told you he was an idiot. I told you he was a goddamn dumbbell. What are we dealing with this idiot for?’”
This is a president who cannot distinguish lies from truth (and cannot speak without lying). His lies are coming at a faster clip, and the inability to rely on anything he says is potentially paralysing for Congress, America’s foes and allies, and the military. His statements concerning the Russia investigation are chock-full of lies (the bugging of Trump Tower, a spy “planted” in his campaign), leading one to conclude from all his antics that at the bottom of the scandal is something very, very bad about which he has been dishonest.
Likewise, we have no reason to believe he accurately conveys his conversations with world leaders. That puts us at the mercy of foreign leaders’ accounts or his aides’ guesswork.
Finally, this is not democracy. Voters elected Trump, not Gary Cohn or John Kelly. If Trump cannot do his job and literally cannot tell the truth, they need to come clean. (© Washington Post Service)