On Thursday, House Speaker Paul Ryan endorsed Donald Trump as his candidate for president of the United States. “What matters to me more than anything else are our core principles,” he told the Associated Press afterward.
Uh huh, Paul. If you say so. Ditto all the rest of you people of lofty principles who find yourselves suddenly, irresistibly drawn to the thrice-married New York City hotel/casino developer and former reality show host and famous playboy. Whatever you say.
But maybe one of you – Paul? Marco Rubio? Kelly Ayotte? – could let the rest of us know what the attraction is.
Because – and I think every one of you knows it – Donald Trump is not fit to be president. Not by virtue of knowledge, experience, temperament, character – or any other requisite you can think of, including honesty. And those of you who thought he would suddenly “pivot” (as the latest jargon would have it) into a serious and credible presidential candidate once he got the nomination were deluding yourselves.
That should be obvious to any patriotic American who truly puts country above party. Including Speaker Ryan. And Rubio, who for months was disparaged by Trump as “Little Marco” but nonetheless endorsed him, as did most of his fellow defeated (and mocked) contenders.
And let’s remember to include our own Sen. Ayotte, who desperately tries to maintain the bizarre idea that there is some sort of distinction between pledging to support and to vote for Donald Trump in November and actually “endorsing” him, a distinction that was soundly (and justifiably) scorned by the nation’s comics and commentariat.
The truth is, Donald Trump can’t “pivot,” can’t suddenly turn into a reasonable man who takes carefully measured positions on important and sensitive issues. On the contrary, he is a man who has had his own way throughout his remarkably shallow life, and he seems to have the impulse control of a 4-year-old. Which is probably unfair to most 4-year-olds.
Just look at his outbursts – fits of personal pique, really – in the last week, well after he was theoretically switching to his serious grownup mien.
He savaged New Mexico Gov. Susana Martinez for “bringing large numbers” of Syrian refugees to the state (untrue), “not doing her job,” and being responsible for all the state’s woes. His problem? She didn’t attend a Trump function. The popular Martinez is a fellow Republican, the state’s first woman governor and the nation’s first female Hispanic governor as well. Plus, as chair of the 2016 Republican Governors Conference, she’s politically powerful in GOP circles. By any stretch an odd and childish political move from the sage of Trump Tower.
He attacked – not for the first time – a federal district court judge overseeing two of the lawsuits against the defunct Trump University, a glorified real estate “training” program accused of bilking mostly elderly and/or poor Americans of thousands of dollars each. In fact, it was barred from the state of Texas, not normally considered a bastion of consumer protection.
The judge, an Indiana native with a Hispanic last name, was “a hater of Donald Trump” and “a total disgrace,” was biased and should be disqualified because his parents were from Mexico and he, Trump, intends to build a wall on the Mexican border. He added, ominously, that some unspecified powerful authority should “look into” the judge’s activities and beliefs.
Thus a man who is running to be the U.S. president – who, among other things, would appoint all federal judges – is on record as making threats to a sitting federal judge. Such thuggish behavior might work in the world of New York City real estate, but applying it to the third, independent branch of the federal government is beyond the pale.
And then he went completely off the rails at a press conference he’d called to tell the country, at last, what he’d done with the money he’d raised in January at a hastily-arranged fundraiser for veterans last January. But instead of talking about the vets and the good work done by those groups supporting them, he couldn’t stop ranting in an escalating display of rage that he, the great Donald, was being questioned as if he were, well, just a politician.
For 40 minutes on live TV, the presumptive Republican nominee harangued the captive reporters with increasingly vitriolic language. And it got scathingly personal. “I’ve seen you on TV,” he said sarcastically to one. “You’re a real beauty.” He pointed to another correspondent and sneered, “You’re a sleaze.” He repeatedly stressed how the political press is “extremely dishonest,” never mind that a genuinely dishonest reporter would be found out and fired quickly and that most ordinary reporters are only doing their jobs.
If anything, Trump seems to be digressing, not “pivoting.”
And as bad as he seems to be on domestic issues, he is truly terrifying when it comes to foreign affairs and matters of war and peace. Just a smattering of the outlandish and/or terrifying proposals he has dashed off at various times, some more than once:
He would enthusiastically bring back waterboarding (which he has acknowledged is torture) – “and a whole lot worse” – for suspected enemies. And he would happily “take out” – murder – the families of suspected terrorists. Never mind that all such activities would be war crimes, war crimes he would be ordering Americans under his command to carry out.
He would diminish or even end our country’s role in NATO, which is one of the finest organizations arising from the ashes of World War II Europe and is widely considered a bulwark of European stability.
He would ban all Muslims from entry to this country “until we figure out what the hell is going on,” which effectively means forever. And when the newly elected Muslim mayor of London criticized the ban, he sneeringly attacked the man for making “rude” and “nasty” statements. (“Nasty” seem to be a favorite epithet of Trump’s, perhaps because of his well-known germaphobia.)
In an era when nuclear proliferation is one of the most serious issues facing the world, Trump has cheerfully allowed that he’d be fine with allowing Japan, South Korea and Saudi Arabia to acquire nuclear weapons.
Imagine that, nukes in the hands of a Middle East dictatorship that enthusiastically supports (and exports throughout the world) Wahhabism, one of the most conservative and intolerant branches of Islam! Whatever could go wrong?
By the way, Trump heatedly denies he made such suggestions, as he glibly and unashamedly denies saying or doing any number of outrageous things. But he is on tape saying and doing them. Repeatedly.
And speaking of nukes, Trump seems to think using them on ISIS – a group imbedded in densely populated sections of the Middle East – would be a dandy idea. And he says he would never rule out using nukes, even in Western Europe!
Thursday, in a brilliant critique of Trump’s foreign policy pronouncements, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton succinctly scorned her likely rival’s programs as “not even really ideas, just a series of bizarre rants, personal feuds and outright lies.”
And now, back to our own foreign policy savant, Sen. Ayotte. Her people have been quick to criticize her likely rival, Gov. Maggie Hassan, saying she “has a fundamental lack of knowledge and experience” on national security, and Ayotte herself has deplored what she calls Hassan’s “troubling lack of knowledge” on foreign affairs.
So how on earth can Ayotte be so quick to belittle her rival Hassan but blithely endorse Donald Trump?
I’d like to think that there are times when party loyalty has to be trumped by love of country.
(“Monitor” columnist Katy Burns lives in Bow.)