The Trumpster Fire in a nutshell: why the guy has gotta go
Early this morning, as he arrived in England for a state visit, our nation's Tweeter-in-Chief embarrassed both himself and the nation he leads yet again and did so in a way which illustrates all too well why he is unqualified to be President of the United States.
He was to have lunch with Prime Minister Theresa May, but after this morning's presidential tweet the luncheon was canceled by 10 Downing Street.
He did meet with the queen. There had been speculation that perhaps that gracious lady would find a reason to cancel the meeting, but she didn't.
So what did Mr. Trump have to say this morning as Air Force One prepared to touch down? Well, he simply couldn't resist the temptation to further compound a blunder he himself made a couple of years ago, and which seems to have been the birth of an obsession.
The two have a history. In December of 2015, candidate Trump proposed that Muslims be banned from the United States. Mayor Khan, who himself is a Muslim, quite properly called that position "outrageous" and expressed the hope that Mr. Trump would lose the election "badly."
Here is what the mayor's predecessor, Boris Johnson had to say about Mr. Trump's proposal. The statement is worth bearing in mind because President Trump recently violated protocol by improperly endorsing the man who made it be Theresa May's successor as leader of the Conservative party and England's Prime Minister, calling him his "friend." Johnson, in fact, is sometimes compared to Trump by his political opponents
In May of 2016, after Mayor Khan had been elected and taken office, Mr. Trump offered what he presumably thought of as an olive branch, suggesting that in spite of his religion Mr. Khan should personally be welcome in the United States, since "there will always be exceptions," and even was so gracious (for Mr. Trump) as to add that his election as mayor was "a good thing."
That same month, Mayor Khan called Mr. Trump's views on Islam (not Mr. Trump himself) "ignorant" and said that the Republican presidential candidate was- "inadvertently," he stressed- playing into the hands of Islamic extremists whose point was exactly the one Mr. Trump seemed to be making: that Islam and Western democratic values were incompatible. He also expressed the hope- again, given the provocation, understandably- that Hillary Clinton would win the election, but added that would seek to work harmoniously with whoever might be the new American president.
Mr. Trump responded in a way that foreshadowed his next- and most famous- clash with the London mayor and illustrated a rather significant personal failing in a world leader: a tendency to take inappropriate offense at something another person never said and then respond not only inappropriately but out of all possible proportion to an insult never given. Apparently not having read the actual text of Mayor Khan's statement, the Republican candidate chose to believe that the mayor had attacked him personally rather than merely criticizing his position, challenging Mayor Khan to an IQ test (!) and adding, “I will remember those statements. They are very nasty statements.”
Which, of course, they weren't. They were quite reasonable and temperate statements which, while understandably critical of Mr. Trump, in no way insulted him personally.
Hey. I sympathize. I have been known to misinterpret things people say and jump to conclusions. I, too, have been known to respond with inappropriate hostility to things I have misheard as personal attacks, and with no more excuse than Mr. Trump has when he does it.
But I am not the President of the United States. And I do not, in principle, regard criticism or even disagreement as a personal attack. Mr. Trump- whose skin seems to be entirely too thin for a public figure- has a clear and unmistakable habit of doing precisely that. We owe the fact that we continue to exist as a species on a living planet to the fact that it's harder for the President of the United States to order a nuclear strike on another country than to fire off an impulsive tweet that can have dire diplomatic consequences and perhaps do significant damage to our relations with a hitherto friendly country.
And when I realize that I have responded inappropriately, I regard it as a point of honor and an ethical imperative to acknowledge my mistake, apologize, and retract what I have said. But even when he has been shown beyond any possibility of doubt that he is wrong, Donald Trump never apologizes. He never admits that he's wrong.
And that brings us to the most serious and best-known dustup between the two men.
Two years ago tomorrow, on June 4, 2017, a van carrying three Islamic extremists crossed London bridge, made a U-turn, crossed from the road onto the sidewalk, and drove down the sidewalk at approximately 50 mph, hitting several people and knocking one off the bridge and into the Thames River. Then the van crashed. The terrorists, who each wore a fake explosive vest and had a 12-inch ceramic knife taped to his wrist, got out and began running toward Borough Market, randomly slashing and stabbing people and shouting, "This is for Allah!"
All three of the terrorists were shot dead by London police. In all, eight innocent people- three Frenchmen, two Australians, a Canadian, a Spaniard, and an Englishman- were killed. ISIS claimed responsibility for the attack.
It was the third such incident in England in as many months. In all, 35 innocent people died.
Mayor Khan made this statement.
Context is of the essence here. This was an off-the-cuff statement without a prepared text, and by any reasonable understanding the mayor said that in view of the attacks there would be an increased armed police presence on the streets of London in the following day but that Londoners should not be alarmed by the increased number of police or by the fact that they would be armed- that it was merely a precaution. Ordinarily, British police are not armed at all.
Everybody in the world understood that. Everybody, that is, except one person, who apparently didn't see the statement and impulsively seized on five words and took them completely out of context:
Completely missing the mayor's point (possibly because he hadn't bothered to actually read the statement), Mr. Trump incredibly understood them as meaning not that Londoners shouldn't be alarmed by the precautions Mayor Khan was taking, but that they shouldn't be alarmed by the attack itself!
Immediately responses came from all over the world pointing out that Mr. Trump had completely misinterpreted Mayor Khan's statement. Merely reading the text should have made that clear even to Mr. Trump. The mayor's press secretary brushed the president's tweet off as "ill-informed."While no other president would have shot from the hip that way, to begin with, any other president who had would have instantly apologized once the mistake was pointed out.
Instead, President Trump- who famously doesn't apologize even to God for his sins- doubled down.
To this day- as usual- Mr. Trump refuses to acknowledge his mistake.
So what prompted this morning's presidential tweet? An article by Mayor Khan in The Observer in which he argued that Mr. Trump is the antithesis of everything that both Britain and America stand for and that it shouldn't be "rolling out the red carpet" for the man. In a distinction which was as certainly lost on Mr. Trump as it will be on his supporters, the mayor compared elements of his behavior (again, not Mr. Trump personally) to that of the dictators of the 1930s and of people like Kim Sun-Un and Vladimir Putin today.
You know. The kind of people Mr. Trump is in the habit of praising so lavishly for actions even more violently inconsistent with Anglo-American values than the ones Mayor Khan criticizes in his article.
Here is the text of Mayor Khan's article. Frankly, I agree with every word of it. I would not fault Mr. Trump for disliking it or even for responding to it- substantively, and probably when he got home, instead of beginning a state visit to a major ally on a sour note. But instead, he once again displayed the deep personal insecurity which interprets any criticism of himself as an inappropriate attack on him personally and responded to it as such.
It would have been completely fair for the president to have criticized the mayor's public statements and positions on substantive grounds, just as the mayor criticized his. But instead of the kind of concrete criticisms Mayor Khan offered of him, Mr. Trump- as usual- chose instead to deal in insults and unsubstantiated personal attacks on Mayor Khan. Once again, the President of the United States acted like a fifth-grader.
Contrast the tone of these words from Mayor Khan's article with President Trump's response to it:
Donald Trump is a national embarrassment. He is seen as a buffoon by the rest of the world. Dictators give lip service to the same respect for him that he openly professes for them, but our friends and allies try to put the best possible face on their disdain for the man.
And that disdain is warranted. Today, once again, Donald Trump has demonstrated as he has time and time again that he lacks the temperament to be President of the United States and is simply unable to deal with foreign nations and their leaders in an appropriate manner or one in keeping with America's interests.
Impulsiveness in a president is disastrous. And in a president, an unwillingness to recognize and acknowledge mistakes is dangerous. Its consequences can be far serious than squandering the respect foreign leaders have for him personally and undermining their respect for America. It endangers our very national security.
He's been like this all his life. He's demonstrated his erratic behavior, lack of filters, inability to accept criticism and even disagreement, and personal immaturity the entire time he has been in the public eye. That's the primary reason why I believed it was so important to keep him out of the White House. That's the reason I find it hard to believe that the people who voted for the man had paid the slightest attention to him all those many decades.
I hope he isn't impeached because Mr. Trump has divided America enough as it is. Yes, perhaps President Obama divided America, too. But he didn't build his entire political career on it. And Donald Trump's impeachment and removal from office even on the basis of overwhelming and irrefutable evidence of gross wrongdoing would bring the more delusional and easily led of his supporters to the point of violence, and perhaps beyond. It might well divide us as we haven't been divided since the Civil War.
The 2020 election is coming, and he needs to be turned out of office by the American people. I am confident that he will be- and it won't be a moment too soon.
Photo: Matt Brown [CC BY 2.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)]
He was to have lunch with Prime Minister Theresa May, but after this morning's presidential tweet the luncheon was canceled by 10 Downing Street.
He did meet with the queen. There had been speculation that perhaps that gracious lady would find a reason to cancel the meeting, but she didn't.
So what did Mr. Trump have to say this morning as Air Force One prepared to touch down? Well, he simply couldn't resist the temptation to further compound a blunder he himself made a couple of years ago, and which seems to have been the birth of an obsession.
The two have a history. In December of 2015, candidate Trump proposed that Muslims be banned from the United States. Mayor Khan, who himself is a Muslim, quite properly called that position "outrageous" and expressed the hope that Mr. Trump would lose the election "badly."
Here is what the mayor's predecessor, Boris Johnson had to say about Mr. Trump's proposal. The statement is worth bearing in mind because President Trump recently violated protocol by improperly endorsing the man who made it be Theresa May's successor as leader of the Conservative party and England's Prime Minister, calling him his "friend." Johnson, in fact, is sometimes compared to Trump by his political opponents
In May of 2016, after Mayor Khan had been elected and taken office, Mr. Trump offered what he presumably thought of as an olive branch, suggesting that in spite of his religion Mr. Khan should personally be welcome in the United States, since "there will always be exceptions," and even was so gracious (for Mr. Trump) as to add that his election as mayor was "a good thing."
That same month, Mayor Khan called Mr. Trump's views on Islam (not Mr. Trump himself) "ignorant" and said that the Republican presidential candidate was- "inadvertently," he stressed- playing into the hands of Islamic extremists whose point was exactly the one Mr. Trump seemed to be making: that Islam and Western democratic values were incompatible. He also expressed the hope- again, given the provocation, understandably- that Hillary Clinton would win the election, but added that would seek to work harmoniously with whoever might be the new American president.
Mr. Trump responded in a way that foreshadowed his next- and most famous- clash with the London mayor and illustrated a rather significant personal failing in a world leader: a tendency to take inappropriate offense at something another person never said and then respond not only inappropriately but out of all possible proportion to an insult never given. Apparently not having read the actual text of Mayor Khan's statement, the Republican candidate chose to believe that the mayor had attacked him personally rather than merely criticizing his position, challenging Mayor Khan to an IQ test (!) and adding, “I will remember those statements. They are very nasty statements.”
Which, of course, they weren't. They were quite reasonable and temperate statements which, while understandably critical of Mr. Trump, in no way insulted him personally.
Hey. I sympathize. I have been known to misinterpret things people say and jump to conclusions. I, too, have been known to respond with inappropriate hostility to things I have misheard as personal attacks, and with no more excuse than Mr. Trump has when he does it.
But I am not the President of the United States. And I do not, in principle, regard criticism or even disagreement as a personal attack. Mr. Trump- whose skin seems to be entirely too thin for a public figure- has a clear and unmistakable habit of doing precisely that. We owe the fact that we continue to exist as a species on a living planet to the fact that it's harder for the President of the United States to order a nuclear strike on another country than to fire off an impulsive tweet that can have dire diplomatic consequences and perhaps do significant damage to our relations with a hitherto friendly country.
And when I realize that I have responded inappropriately, I regard it as a point of honor and an ethical imperative to acknowledge my mistake, apologize, and retract what I have said. But even when he has been shown beyond any possibility of doubt that he is wrong, Donald Trump never apologizes. He never admits that he's wrong.
And that brings us to the most serious and best-known dustup between the two men.
Two years ago tomorrow, on June 4, 2017, a van carrying three Islamic extremists crossed London bridge, made a U-turn, crossed from the road onto the sidewalk, and drove down the sidewalk at approximately 50 mph, hitting several people and knocking one off the bridge and into the Thames River. Then the van crashed. The terrorists, who each wore a fake explosive vest and had a 12-inch ceramic knife taped to his wrist, got out and began running toward Borough Market, randomly slashing and stabbing people and shouting, "This is for Allah!"
All three of the terrorists were shot dead by London police. In all, eight innocent people- three Frenchmen, two Australians, a Canadian, a Spaniard, and an Englishman- were killed. ISIS claimed responsibility for the attack.
It was the third such incident in England in as many months. In all, 35 innocent people died.
Mayor Khan made this statement.
Context is of the essence here. This was an off-the-cuff statement without a prepared text, and by any reasonable understanding the mayor said that in view of the attacks there would be an increased armed police presence on the streets of London in the following day but that Londoners should not be alarmed by the increased number of police or by the fact that they would be armed- that it was merely a precaution. Ordinarily, British police are not armed at all.
Everybody in the world understood that. Everybody, that is, except one person, who apparently didn't see the statement and impulsively seized on five words and took them completely out of context:
Completely missing the mayor's point (possibly because he hadn't bothered to actually read the statement), Mr. Trump incredibly understood them as meaning not that Londoners shouldn't be alarmed by the precautions Mayor Khan was taking, but that they shouldn't be alarmed by the attack itself!
Immediately responses came from all over the world pointing out that Mr. Trump had completely misinterpreted Mayor Khan's statement. Merely reading the text should have made that clear even to Mr. Trump. The mayor's press secretary brushed the president's tweet off as "ill-informed."While no other president would have shot from the hip that way, to begin with, any other president who had would have instantly apologized once the mistake was pointed out.
Instead, President Trump- who famously doesn't apologize even to God for his sins- doubled down.
To this day- as usual- Mr. Trump refuses to acknowledge his mistake.
So what prompted this morning's presidential tweet? An article by Mayor Khan in The Observer in which he argued that Mr. Trump is the antithesis of everything that both Britain and America stand for and that it shouldn't be "rolling out the red carpet" for the man. In a distinction which was as certainly lost on Mr. Trump as it will be on his supporters, the mayor compared elements of his behavior (again, not Mr. Trump personally) to that of the dictators of the 1930s and of people like Kim Sun-Un and Vladimir Putin today.
You know. The kind of people Mr. Trump is in the habit of praising so lavishly for actions even more violently inconsistent with Anglo-American values than the ones Mayor Khan criticizes in his article.
Here is the text of Mayor Khan's article. Frankly, I agree with every word of it. I would not fault Mr. Trump for disliking it or even for responding to it- substantively, and probably when he got home, instead of beginning a state visit to a major ally on a sour note. But instead, he once again displayed the deep personal insecurity which interprets any criticism of himself as an inappropriate attack on him personally and responded to it as such.
It would have been completely fair for the president to have criticized the mayor's public statements and positions on substantive grounds, just as the mayor criticized his. But instead of the kind of concrete criticisms Mayor Khan offered of him, Mr. Trump- as usual- chose instead to deal in insults and unsubstantiated personal attacks on Mayor Khan. Once again, the President of the United States acted like a fifth-grader.
Contrast the tone of these words from Mayor Khan's article with President Trump's response to it:
I am proud of our historic special relationship, which I’m certain will survive long after President Trump leaves office. The US is a country I love and have visited on many occasions. I still greatly admire the culture, the people and the principles articulated by the founding fathers. But America is like a best friend, and with a best friend you have a responsibility to be direct and honest when you believe they are making a mistake.
Donald Trump is a national embarrassment. He is seen as a buffoon by the rest of the world. Dictators give lip service to the same respect for him that he openly professes for them, but our friends and allies try to put the best possible face on their disdain for the man.
And that disdain is warranted. Today, once again, Donald Trump has demonstrated as he has time and time again that he lacks the temperament to be President of the United States and is simply unable to deal with foreign nations and their leaders in an appropriate manner or one in keeping with America's interests.
Impulsiveness in a president is disastrous. And in a president, an unwillingness to recognize and acknowledge mistakes is dangerous. Its consequences can be far serious than squandering the respect foreign leaders have for him personally and undermining their respect for America. It endangers our very national security.
He's been like this all his life. He's demonstrated his erratic behavior, lack of filters, inability to accept criticism and even disagreement, and personal immaturity the entire time he has been in the public eye. That's the primary reason why I believed it was so important to keep him out of the White House. That's the reason I find it hard to believe that the people who voted for the man had paid the slightest attention to him all those many decades.
I hope he isn't impeached because Mr. Trump has divided America enough as it is. Yes, perhaps President Obama divided America, too. But he didn't build his entire political career on it. And Donald Trump's impeachment and removal from office even on the basis of overwhelming and irrefutable evidence of gross wrongdoing would bring the more delusional and easily led of his supporters to the point of violence, and perhaps beyond. It might well divide us as we haven't been divided since the Civil War.
The 2020 election is coming, and he needs to be turned out of office by the American people. I am confident that he will be- and it won't be a moment too soon.
Photo: Matt Brown [CC BY 2.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)]
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