When Trump goes after his own
For years, Donald Trump has pointed to the usual suspects — the media, immigrants, elites, China, Democrats — whenever things are going badly. Early in his presidency, he went after then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions for having recused himself during the Russia investigation. Last week, in a phone interview with Fox Business, Trump went after two new targets: Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Attorney General William Barr.
Like Sessions, they were widely regarded as dogged loyalists, but Trump declared that both men would be “sad” — his signature condemnation — if they didn’t deliver something useful on Barack Obama, Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton before the election. Pompeo quickly caved and promised to release thousands of private Clinton emails ASAP; Barr claimed he was hostage to various legal procedures, but it seems unlikely that the man who has stoutly defended virtually unlimited presidential power on every other occasion will hold out for long.
The next day, Politico reported that, unlike in previous administrations, the White House Presidential Personnel Office may ask nearly all political appointees to submit letters of resignation before the election rather than afterward and only if it loses.
An unprecedented use of presidential muscle to trash rivals (even ones no longer on the ballot), enforce political discipline and muzzle anything less than total subservience? Absolutely. Unexpected? Not if the past truly is a guide to the present.
Four years ago, Americans elected the first president in the history of the country who had never held a position of public trust. Unlike his 43 predecessors, who included former vice presidents, elected federal and state officials, cabinet members and military commanders, or even his own grandfather, a German immigrant elected justice of the peace by a whopping 32-5 vote in 1892 in a tiny mining town outside Seattle, Donald Trump had zero experience being responsible to anyone other than himself.
In 2016, this seemed an admirable background to tens of millions of American voters. They’d seen his name on skyscrapers and steaks, bottled water and ballpoint pens. They’d read his boastful accounts of derring-do in more than a dozen ghostwritten books and watched him in action on the long-running reality TV show, “The Apprentice.” Now he would bring to the Oval Office the same know-how that he claimed had made him a billionaire many times over.
But four years later, in the midst of a pandemic, mounting natural disasters, widespread social unrest, an economic meltdown and his own diagnosis of COVID-19 and possible role as a coronavirus super-spreader, many voters are re-evaluating the man who seemed to have all the answers.
As a first step, they might take another look at those earlier examples of supposed business acumen. In “The Art of the Deal,” Trump’s first and most famous book, a chronicle of self-dealing exploits that ultimately landed his company in bankruptcy court and required his father’s fortune to bail him out, the portrait that emerges is less a mastermind than a con man whose only concern is his own self-interest.
On “The Apprentice,” job applicants given nonsensical tasks like selling lemonade outside the New York Stock Exchange are encouraged to skirt the truth with customers, sabotage each other, and bow and scrape before an all-knowing Trump whose contribution is to dole out hackneyed advice like “Location, location, location” and fire contestants on grounds contrived to fit the show’s needs rather than actual performance.
As entertainment, both the book and the TV show were big hits. But as preparation for running the world’s most powerful country, for being responsible for the health, safety and well-being of hundreds of millions at home and, indirectly, billions more around the globe, they fall dangerously short.
Acting the part of a brilliant business owner in print and on TV has nothing to do with whether Trump has ever been one in real life. According to lengthy investigations in the New York Times, his lifelong record is less one of enduring success than of financial dark arts. Specifically, making losing investments with vast, borrowed sums, yet spinning these failures into gold via canny accountancy (he currently faces over $300 million in personal debt, after years of near-zero tax payments due to those same massive losses).
Rather, it seems to have served as practice for his current role, playing at being president. Instead of providing leadership to a country in crisis, he has surrounded himself with supporting actors, appointees who, like Barr and Pompeo, were chosen not for their integrity and sense of responsibility to the American public but for their political loyalty.
And just as when he was back at Trump Tower, when problems like sinking polls and a possible defeat arise, Donald Trump’s overriding concern is to make sure he’s lined up targets for distraction, diversion and blame. Blair is author of ”The Trumps: Three Generations of Builders and a President.”