The woman who went on every major Sunday-morning news program after the Benghazi terrorist attacks and told flat-out falsehoods about its nature and motivations is now lecturing America about integrity.
.. A person who was one of the chief national-security officials when the Obama administration was spinning false narratives about the Iran nuclear deal
.. watching Demcrats spill crocodile tears over the Supreme Court, convinced that Neil Gorsuch was basically stealing Merrick Garland’s seat. Yet every sentient being in Washington knows that if the roles were reversed and, say, one of the liberal justices stepped down or passed away in the final months of a Republican presidency, the congressional Democrats would have behaved in the exact, same way
.. In fact, none other than Joe Biden made that same promise more than 20 years before.
.. The president and his team have repeatedly issued false denials about contacts with Russians, and the president himself keeps tweeting allegations and assertions that are most charitably described as incomplete, imprecise, and sometimes just outright wrong. Even when he’s “vindicated,” it’s often a strange kind of vindication, where his actual words were wrong, but something still happened. For example, wiretapping becomes “incidental collection.” Millions of illegal votes becomes millions of illegal registrations.
.. All of this nonsense is justified, excused, and indulged through the sheer force of tribalism. Unilateral honesty is seen as unilateral disarmament.
.. In one of John Adams’s most famous letters, he wrote that “our constitution was made for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”
.. “We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge, or gallantry, would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net.”
.. America needs political virtue. Where will she find it?
We already know what Donald Trump does when he loses: He acts like it never happened.
How he responded to business setbacks could predict what he’ll do if he isn’t the next president.
When Donald Trump loses, he lashes out, assigns blame and does whatever it takes to make a defeat look like a win. When that isn’t plausible, he pronounces the system rigged — victory wasn’t possible because someone put in the fix.
.. He has reacted to failure by exploding in anger and recrimination, then moving on to very different ventures, though always in arenas where he can vie for public admiration.
.. Psychologists who study how sports fans shield themselves from the pain of their favorite team’s defeats use the term “CORFing” — “cutting off reflected failure” — to describe a defense mechanism by which fans separate themselves from loss by reframing their relationship to the team. “We lost” becomes “they lost.”
.. even as he has contended that he will win — Trump has repeatedly said that a loss would be the fault of leaders of his party, the news media, pollsters, career politicians and federal investigators. At his final debate with Hillary Clinton, Trump refused to say he would accept the result of the election as legitimate. For more than a week after that, he added almost daily to the list of institutions he said were rigged against him: special interests, Clinton donors, big media companies, “global financial powers.”
.. Losing politicians rarely distance themselves from defeat this way. Traditionally, if they want to maintain their credibility so they can try again in another election, they eat crow, accept the wisdom of the voters and show a modicum of grace toward their victorious opponents. Trump’s approach is one psychologists say they see more often in sports, where defeated athletes sometimes immediately guarantee that they will demolish whomever just beat them, or in business, where executives with an unusually inflated sense of self-worth tend to blame failures on others.
.. How does a man whose image is based on being the ultimate winner cope with losing? His behavior in defeat has stayed remarkably consistent throughout his career: Either he didn’t really lose, or it was someone else’s fault. In other words, he acts like it didn’t happen... Trump is not given to deep analysis of his motives or behavior. But in a series of interviews this year, he did say, with some pride, that he hasn’t changed much since early childhood, when his father, a real estate developer, drilled into his son the directive that he needed to be “a killer,” that there was little in life worse than being “a nothing” and that, whatever he took on, Donald had to be sure to win. Trump’s classmates, neighbors, teachers and friends from New York in the 1950s are united in their recollections of a kid who had a powerful aversion to defeat — and a tendency to blast others when he lost... asked whether he feared the idea of losing and finding that no one was paying attention to him anymore,Trump told The Washington Post that failure represents a loss of control: “I’m not afraid of it, but I hate the concept of it. . . . I hate the fact that it’s a total unknown. . . . If there is a fear at all, it is a fear of the unknown.”.. Sometimes, he argues that he lost because he wasn’t really trying to win. In the most recent phase of his career before politics, Trump attached his name to products ranging fromsteaks and bottled water to mortgages and a university. When some of those ventures went under, Trump said he had only lent them his name and bore no responsibility for any mismanagement. “The mortgage business is not a business I particularly liked or wanted to be part of in a very big way,” he said after Trump Mortgage closed in 2007, leaving some bills unpaid.
.. Trump’s tendency to act against those he blames for his failures is often motivated not so much by the promise of recovering money as by the desire for revenge.
.. And when there is no one to blame for a defeat but himself, Trump has a history of arguing that victory was impossible because the playing field was not level. In high school, when his study partner got a better grade on a chemistry test, Trump questioned whether his classmate had cheated. Later in life, when his reality TV show lost out on an Emmy in 2013, Trump tweeted that “I should have many Emmys for The Apprentice if the process were fair.”
.. But Trump would never concede such a thing. It says so right on his family coat of arms. In 2008, when he was planning his golf course and club near Aberdeen, Scotland, Trump unveiled a family symbol featuring a lion, a knight’s helmet and a Latin phrase, “Numquam Concedere.” Translation: “Never concede.”
Ted Cruz’s Nasty Game
But Cruz had made his point and done his damage, providing the latest (and most vivid) illustration of how little control Trump has been able to exert over his own coronation, how much rancor he has failed to exorcise, how few bridges he has succeeded in repairing, how far short he has fallen in making these four days in Cleveland as dazzling and exciting as he’d long promised they would be.
.. Cruz took that balloon and stomped on it, smiling all the while and turning a dull affair into a freak show. At the conclusion of his remarks, his wife, Heidi, had to be escorted from the convention floor by security officers as some delegates screamed at her.
.. He talked of himself, of America and of Election Day, saying: “We deserve leaders who stand for principle, unite us all behind shared values, cast aside anger for love.”
He clearly wasn’t evoking Trump, and he seemed not to realize that he was listing virtues that he was ignoring at the very moment, with those very words.