No, not Trump, not ever
The following is an excerpt from a column by David Brooks in the New York Times:
Donald Trump is epically unprepared to be president. He has no realistic policies, no advisers, no capacity to learn. His vast narcissism makes him a closed fortress. He doesn’t know what he doesn’t know and he’s uninterested in finding out. He insults the office Abraham Lincoln once occupied by running for it with less preparation that most of us would undertake to buy a sofa.
Trump is perhaps the most dishonest person to run for high office in our lifetimes. All politicians stretch the truth, but Trump has a steady obliviousness to accuracy.
This week, Politico reporters fact-checked 4.6 hours of Trump speeches and news conferences. They found more than five dozen untrue statements. “His remarks represent an extraordinary mix of inaccurate claims about domestic and foreign policy and personal and professional boasts that rarely measure up when checked against primary sources,” they wrote.
He is a childish man running for a job that requires maturity. He is an insecure boast- ing little boy whose desires were somehow arrested at age 12. He surrounds himself with sycophants. “You can always tell when the king is here,” Trump’s butler told Jason Horowitz in a recent Times profile.
In some rare cases, political victors do not deserve our respect. George Wallace won elections, but to endorse those outcomes would be a moral failure. And so it is with Trump. History is a long record of men like him temporarily rising, back to biblical times. Psalm 73 describes them: “Therefore pride is their necklace; they clothe themselves with violence. . . . They scoff, and speak with malice; with arrogance they threaten oppression. Their mouths lay claim to heaven, and their tongues take possession of the earth. Therefore their people turn to them and drink up waters in abundance.”
Success is fragile: “Surely you place them on slippery ground; you cast them down to ruin. How suddenly they are destroyed.”
Trump’s supporters deserve respect. They are left out of this economy. But Trump himself? No, not Trump, not ever.