Seven scary Donald Trump traits that have no place in the White House
From the archives: Despite the court cases and the controversy, not to mention his own combative nature, Donald Trump looks likely to become the Republican Party’s presidential nominee for the 2024 US presidential election. Trump is now criticising and badmouthing his rival and former UN ambassador Nikki Haley while commentators are warning the world to prepare itself if he wins a second term as US president. In this feature from the 2019 Listener archive, Paul Thomas asked why instead of striving to be disciplined, dedicated and presidential, Donald Trump flitted between seven characters that have no place in the White House.
Shortly after the death in November of George HW Bush, the Sacramento Bee newspaper ran a cartoon depicting a group of his predecessors greeting the 41st US President upon his arrival in heaven. A slightly exasperated Ronald Reagan asks Bush, “No. Seriously. Who’s president now?”
Two years have passed since Donald Trump was sworn in. He set the tone for his presidency with an inauguration address accurately characterised by George Bush Jr as “some weird shit”. Trump told the American people that “I’ll be able to make sure that when you walk down the street in your inner city, or wherever you live, you’re not going to be shot. Your child isn’t going to be shot. This American carnage stops right here and stops right now.”
Needless to say, he hasn’t delivered on this preposterous undertaking. School shootings continue to occur with numbing regularity. Eight months into the Trump presidency, the worst mass shooting in US history took place in Las Vegas: 58 people died, 851 were injured. American carnage indeed.
“Trump had no plan to stop such an attack, wrote Conor Friedersdorf in the Atlantic, “nor did he do anything after the fact that would prevent a similar attack.”
The lack of follow-through on this and other similarly grandiose vows doesn’t seem to have reduced Trump’s standing in the eyes of his hard-core supporters. Perhaps their sense of grievance and paranoia makes them prefer apocalyptic rhetoric that “projects strength” to the earnest endeavours of conventional politicians. Or perhaps it just shows the resilience of a cult of personality based on the notion that Trump is the only person who can prevent America being overrun by murderous illegal immigrants.
In many respects Trump is – to use one of his favoured pejoratives – a fake president.
He doesn’t govern, he tweets. He doesn’t drill down into issues and engage in serious policy discussions with a view to generating appropriate legislation, he stages rallies at which he preens and wildly boasts of having already achieved more than any other president.
And why not? For cult members, objective fact is a meaningless concept: they believe whatever the Great Leader tells them to believe. Two years after his inauguration, the idea of Trump as president remains as far-fetched and disturbing as ever. It’s truly remarkable that, halfway through his term, Trump gives no indication of having acquired even a glimmer of understanding of the nature and significance of the position he occupies and the awesome responsibilities it brings with it.
If anything, the opposite is true. Every week, he reaffirms the unfitness for office that was apparent from the outset; the longer he’s president, the more irresponsible, capricious, divisive and dishonest he is, the less presidential he seems. The most laughable claim made on Trump’s behalf was that, once the rogue/clown of the campaign trail had his feet under the Oval Office desk, he would be magically replaced by un homme sérieux; that he’d shed the persona that had brought him wealth, fame and power and knuckle down to the enormous job of running America and leading the Western world.