And so, on one day, we had an unhinged and divisive rant by President Trump in Phoenix. Then, the next day in Reno, Nev., a call for national unity and reconciliation. Multiple political personality disorder. Rhetorical schizophrenia.
The gap between Trump extemporaneous and Trump scripted is canyon-like. The normal role of a speechwriter is to find, refine and elevate the voice of a leader. The greatest professional victory comes when a president thinks: This is the way I would sound if I had more time to write and more talent with language. In these circumstances, speechwriting is not deception; it is amplification.
.. But what about speechwriting that is designed to give a leader a different voice? Here moral issues begin to lurk. Is it ethical to make a cynical leader appear principled? A violent leader seem pacific? A cruel leader seem compassionate?
.. Or maybe a speechwriter can hope a president will eventually rise to the level of his teleprompter.
.. he plays rhetorical games with the artificial (for him) constraints of being presidential. “Nobody wants me to talk about your other senator — who’s weak on borders, weak on crime,” he said of (conservative Republican) Jeff Flake. “Now everybody’s happy.” Here the “nobody” clearly included his own concerned advisers. Trump often uses speeches (and Twitter) to cut the strings of their counsel.
- The real voice defending a supporter who had been fired by CNN for writing “Sieg Heil” on Twitter.
- It was the real voice expressing greater passion in criticizing journalists than white supremacists.
.. his transparency reveals a disordered personality.
his Phoenix remarks indicate a loose connection to reality.
- His response to the violence in Charlottesville was, in his view, “perfect.”
- The North Koreans, he claimed, are learning to “respect” America (for which there is no evidence).
- “I don’t believe that any president has accomplished as much as this president in the first six or seven months,” Trump claimed of himself. “I really do not believe it.”
What if Trump really believes what he claims? Then he would be not deceptive, but deluded.
.. Trump is not merely acting unpresidential; he is erratic and grandiose.
On the evidence of the Phoenix speech, Trump believes that a government shutdown is preferable to giving up on funding for the southern border wall. This involves a different type of delusion. Poll after poll demonstrates that about 35 percent of Americans support Trump’s wall. You can’t hold national parks and veterans’ payments hostage over an issue like this and expect to win.
.. “It also takes careful management of the levers available to the administration in a shutdown to keep it from becoming a nightmare immediately, and OMB [Office of Management and Budget] is not doing the work to prepare. Incompetence is the death of these guys over and over.”
.. The unified control of House, Senate and presidency means little when the president lives in a reality of his own.
When the President Is Un-American
Real Americans understand that our nation is built around values, not the “blood and soil” of the marchers’ chants; what makes you an American is your attempt to live up to those values, not the place or race your ancestors came from.
But the man who began his political ascent by falsely questioning Barack Obama’s place of birth — a blood-and-soil argument if ever there was one
.. Real Americans understand that our nation was born in a rebellion against tyranny. They feel an instinctive aversion to tyrants everywhere, and an underlying sympathy for democratic regimes, even those with whom we may currently have disputes.
Real Americans expect public officials to be humbled by the responsibility that comes with the job... Foreign autocrats may rage against unflattering news reports, threaten to inflict financial harm on publications they dislike, talk about imprisoning journalists; American leaders aren’t supposed to sound like that.
When the White House Lies About You
Midway through the interview, Pompeo abruptly slammed The New York Times for publishing the name last month of a senior covert C.I.A. officer, calling the disclosure “unconscionable.” The line was met with audience applause. I said, “You’re talking about Phil Agee,” and then repeated the name. Pompeo replied, “I don’t know that name,” and the interview moved on.
My startled rejoinder was not a reference to the covert C.I.A. officer unmasked by The Times, but rather a fumbled attempt to refer to the law governing such disclosures. Philip Agee, as Pompeo and everyone in the audience knew, was the infamous C.I.A. officer who went rogue in the 1970s, wrote a tell-all memoir, and publicly identified the names of scores of C.I.A. officers, front companies and foreign agents.
.. What I didn’t do is disclose the name of any covert officer — nor would I have, since I disagree with The Times’s decision to publish it. So it came as a bad surprise when, the following morning, Dan Scavino, the White House director of social media, tweeted that I had.
.. Nor is it new that Scavino’s attack is also part of a broader White House effort to demonize The New York Times.
.. Taken with Pompeo’s outburst and Scavino’s lie, it raises the question of whether normally apolitical figures aren’t being conscripted into Trump’s war on the press. That’s a worrying thought for institutions, like the C.I.A., that are supposed to remain above the fray to preserve public trust.
Trump can usually make it about a third of the way through an interview without mentioning Hillary Clinton
President Trump was 20 words into his recent interview with the New York Times when he raised a topic that he seemingly can’t resist: Hillary Clinton.
.. Clinton is Trump’s eternal foil, the person who, Trump seems to think, can always be identified as the unpopular yang to his yin, the looming reminder to his supporters of What Could Have Been. Whatever Trump does or doesn’t do, he’s always willing to point out what Clinton did or didn’t do that’s worse.
.. So she comes up in his interviews a lot. In fact, in 19 interviews that he’s conducted since becoming president, we found that Clinton tended to be mentioned much earlier than a number of Trump’s other favorite topics: The 2016 election, the votes he received, the electoral college and Barack Obama.