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Graydon Carter on Trump's Constitutional Crisis ... - Vanity Fair
www.vanityfair.com/news/2017/05/graydon-carter-donald-trump-first-100-days
Graydon Carter on Trump’s Constitutional Crisis, Ruskiegate, and the Worst First 100 Days in Presidential History
The president has become a farce to be reckoned with.
President Trump boards the Marine One helicopter in Maryland, January 26, 2017.
By Jonathan Ernst/Reuters.
The
media, the opposition, the resistance, and indeed the rest of the Free
World are playing by outmoded rules of engagement with regard to the man
in the White House. The thing is, you cannot rise above Donald Trump,
you cannot go under him, and you cannot engage him in a conventional
way. Before he became president, you could basically ignore him—he was a
local joke, after all. Now that he’s commander in chief, you must
resist him, with everything that is in you and in every way you can. As
anyone who has followed his jerry-rigged career from the 1980s onward
will tell you, Trump just drags you to the bottom of the pond every
time. Decades ago, he was a short-fingered vulgarian
tooling around town in a mauve stretch limo, reeking of Brut. In those
days, competitors, subcontractors, politicians, and wives were the ones
who found themselves mired in the Trump muck. Now it is the country
that’s up to its knees in it.
With
Trump, everything past is prologue. On the day after his inauguration,
while millions in the U.S. and around the world protested his improbable
election, Trump went to C.I.A. headquarters, in Langley, Virginia. The
ostensible purpose of the visit was to patch things up after he had
repeatedly trashed the intelligence community in the weeks leading up to
his swearing-in. Trump’s speech was short, just 15 minutes, but even
here, after paying lip service to the C.I.A. and its heritage, he went
off piste, claiming that his beef with the intelligence
community was a figment of the media’s imagination—as was the slim size
of the crowd at his inaugural. These complete fabrications were made
despite all printed, oral, and visual evidence to the contrary. That he
spoke these words standing before the marble wall of 117 stars
representing the lives of the men and women from the agency who had died
in the line of duty was troubling enough. Across the hall from him,
however—and in plain sight—was another marble wall, with a clearly
visible quote from John 8:32 put there by former C.I.A. director Allen
Dulles: AND YE SHALL KNOW THE TRUTH AND THE TRUTH SHALL MAKE YOU FREE.
Had
Trump heeded those words, his presidency wouldn’t be so trussed up in
the Gordian knot of his appalling lies, contradictions, and deceptions.
His presidency is effectively doomed—it’s only a question now of how and
when it will end. Treason? Impeachment?
Incapacity? Until that day, you should be forgiven if you think you are
suffering from extreme, full-blown P.T.S.D.—President Trump Stress
Disorder. You are not alone. A serial liar in the office or home is one
thing—and stressful enough. But a serial liar in the highest office in
the land is something else altogether. Couple that with an erratically
fragile ego, a severely diminished mental capacity, a lacerating temper,
and access to the nuclear codes, and it’s going to get a whole lot
hotter in here.
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If you think you
are having a tough time of it since the election, please have some
sympathy for the journalists, career civil servants, and White House
supplicants who have to deal with Trumpian levels of insanity on a
minute-to-minute basis. Trumpian! The word “trump” formerly was
a verb used in polite bridge and whist circles. Trump, the man, is now
up there with Hercules and Sisyphus with his own branded adjective. I’m
not completely sure what it stands for. But when it finally settles into
the lexicon, I’m certain that it will be a disconcerting combination of
petulant, preening, ignorant, shameless, vulgar, paranoid,
vainglorious, reckless, imperious, impulsive, unhinged, callous,
corrosive, narcissistic, intemperate, juvenile, disloyal, venal,
chaotic, squalid—what have I forgotten? Oh, yes!—and just
mind-numbingly, epically incompetent.
In removing not only F.B.I. director James Comey
but also Sally Yates, the acting attorney general, in the middle of
sweeping investigations into Trump’s links to the Russians as well as
their role in the election, the president committed about as
open-and-shut a case of obstruction of justice as you are going to find
outside of a banana republic. Comey’s contemporaneous notes to himself
of an Oval Office meeting involving the investigation of former
national-security adviser Michael Flynn—“I
hope you can let this go,” the president urged—are merely proof of what
was already clear. I suspect we’ll be seeing a lot more of Comey’s
detailed and verbatim accounts; he will not be an unpublished author for
long. In the olden days, when Trump sent threatening legal letters to
competitors or journalists (and I was on the receiving end of a number
of them), they were generally first sent to the New York Post’s
“Page Six,” which is where most of the targets read his complaints
about them for the first time. When Comey learned from a television
report that he had been sacked, it came as no surprise to serious Trump
scholars. The F.B.I. chief was just the most recent victim of the
president’s rules of combat. The Oval Office cameos the day after the
Comey firing, by the Russian foreign minister and ambassador, followed
by Richard Nixon’s Angel of Death, Henry Kissinger, added a Marx
Brothers Night at the Opera element to the whole episode. It
was later revealed that only a TASS photographer had been allowed into
the Russkifest and that Trump had divulged classified information about
ISIS to the Russian guests, compromising the source and jeopardizing a
key intelligence relationship. A different Marx—not one of the
brothers—had a famous remark about history repeating itself first as
tragedy, then as farce. Trump has it the other way around.
As
the country emerged from the ill-fated first 100 days of the Trump
presidency, the odor of permanent scandal was already palpable. The
Comey firing, the Comey memo, the secrets spilled by Trump to his
Russian visitors, and the appointment of Special Counsel Robert Mueller
were merely the capstone to weeks of chaos and conflict of interest.
Gobbling up headlines before Comeygate were Flynn’s paid links to
Russian president Vladimir Putin
and the Kushner family’s craven attempt to lure Chinese investors to a
New Jersey luxury-apartment project with the promise of EB-5 visas and a
tacit connection to the White House. When it comes to the president’s
extended family, if this is what they think they can get away with out
in the open, you can only imagine what they are up to in the shadows.
Trump says that he has no business dealings with the Russians. My guess
is that this is an out-and-out lie. If, on the outside chance, he
doesn’t actually have Russian investors, it certainly hasn’t been for
lack of trying. And it would prove that even Russian oligarchs have
their standards.
In describing the events surrounding Russkigate, making any sort of reference to Seven Days in May—John
Frankenheimer’s Cold War thriller about the attempted overthrow of a
president going easy on the Soviet Union—is almost too obvious. Instead,
you could cast the entire Comey affair with actors from Frank Capra’s Mr. Smith Goes to Washington: Jimmy Stewart as Comey, Claude Raines as Jeff Sessions, Eugene Pallette as Steve Bannon, Guy Kibbee as Sean Spicer,
Porter Hall as Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, and devilish old
Edward Arnold as Trump himself. Sadly, though, the Trump administration
is no Capra movie. If anything, it will probably end up being more like
a Quentin Tarantino film—the final act being a Mexican standoff with
all the participants’ lawyers in a circle, aiming their guns at one
another.
Far
and away the most unfit man ever to hold the nation’s highest office,
Trump has crammed so much into his first few months that most of us have
trouble keeping track of the quotidian acts of executive mayhem. He has
no foreign or domestic policy to speak of—he bases most of his
decisions on what will play best to his base out there among the
Twitterati. He cozies up to dictators and fellow strongmen, flattering
them and giving them unwarranted credibility, while running roughshod
over traditional allies. He has signed executive orders that attempt to
slash decades of advancement in educational, medical, and environmental
protections. The torrent of hate that Trump has so cavalierly unleashed
has moved attacks against Jews, Muslims, Hispanics, and
African-Americans from the margins toward the mainstream. Both the
Anti-Defamation League and the Southern Poverty Law Center report spikes
in hate crimes and bias-related incidents since Trump’s election. And
he has stuffed agencies with Trump loyalists—stooges, really—hired on
the basis of their fidelity to the president rather than their
qualifications. At the same time, whether through negligence or
ineptitude, or both, he is letting vital positions necessary to run the
government go unfilled. A hack of unprecedented scale hits 150
countries, and, still, top cyber-security jobs remain vacant.
In one randomly vindictive act, Trump wants to do away with the initiative by former First Lady Michelle Obama
to make the nation’s school lunches healthier. This was a balm for the
trade group the School Nutrition Association, whose sponsors, in true
Orwellian fashion, include a number of companies that sell
less-than-healthy food to school districts. (The S.N.A. has argued
against the requirement that schoolchildren choose half a cup of fruits
or vegetables.) Trump did his own bit for nutrition when he had three Time
staff members to dinner and served them a more dietetic single scoop of
ice cream for dessert, while he selflessly had two scoops.
As
an executive, Trump is a shambles. Can you imagine a company in America
that would hire Trump as its C.E.O.? (Enron doesn’t count: it’s no
longer in business.) He’s not a true leader in any proper sense of the
word; he’s a ringmaster of a heaving, leaking White House that is much
closer to the Circus Maximus or a traveling carny show than any
traditional government operation. When he told NBC News that Comey was
“a showboat” and “a grandstander,” what he really meant was that there
was room for only one of those in this town. The Republican rank and
file, or at least the more aware ones—that’s excluding quislings like
Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell and Speaker of the House Paul
Ryan—are already eyeing the exits. A West Wing housecleaning may only
make things worse for the top man. Releasing the likes of his chief
strategist into the wild is a particularly dangerous move. When it comes
to Visigoths like Steve Bannon, it’s best to keep them inside the
fortress peeing on the underlings, rather than outside with their
torches and battering rams.
What
the Kardashians are to authentic glamour the Trumps are to authentic
executive acumen. To paraphrase Fran Lebowitz, Trump is an unsuccessful
person’s idea of a successful person. His son-in-law, the all-purpose
Secretary of Everything, Jared Kushner, is cut from similar cloth. An
heir to a sizable New Jersey real-estate concern, he has two signature
business initiatives under his belt. In one case, he burdened his family
with staggering debt by paying a record price for a badly located
office tower at 666 Fifth Avenue. And he bought The New York Observer
(a paper I ran at one point), and through boneheaded firing and hiring,
and routine mismanagement, he ran this religiously read weekly right
into the ditch.
From all outward
appearances, Trump is not a well man, physically or mentally. He has the
limited vocabulary and shockingly nonlinear sentence structure of an
immigrant new to English. You can only imagine what mornings are like up
there in the White House private quarters: the sleeping garments, the
personal-grooming routine, the bronzer, the spray volumizer, and the
careful hair placement, interspersed with continual tantrums over what
the morning television shows are saying about him. Actually, put all
those thoughts out of your mind. I’m sorry I even brought them up.
In
a rare instance of blinding insight, Trump knows that the world, the
Establishment, and most business and government acquaintances think he
is an illegitimate president who will forever carry an asterisk after
his title. And it is clearly driving him nuts. He says that he doesn’t
care—but, oh, you know he cares. He cares the way a teenage boy cares
about the reasons his first girlfriend dumped him. (“Your hands are just too small!”)
And to compensate for all of this, Trump travels with the imagined
magnitude of his tarnished victory and his inaugural audience like a
length of toilet paper stuck to the heel of his shoe. Regardless of the
event, whether the National Prayer Breakfast, or that first meeting at
the C.I.A., or an N.R.A. rally, or in a formal setting with foreign
diplomats, he suddenly goes off message, and with hands circling sassily
in the air, he reverts to the size of his victory, the size of his
crowds.
It’s hard not to sympathize with the plight of Trump’s “fans,” as V.F. Contributing Editor Lili Anolik likes to call his followers. In Joan Williams’s book White Working Class: Overcoming Class Cluelessness in America,
Williams lays out the values that the great swath of U.S. voters prize.
They include hard work, community, self-reliance, and
interdependence—all attributes that helped build this country. That
these Americans—the nation’s backbone—would hitch their wagon to a man
so at odds with all of those values (along with many more, like modesty,
honesty, fairness, fidelity, generosity, and general decency) is a
mystery, and a testament to how out of touch the Democratic Party has
become.
Trump has spoken of the
media’s trying to muddy his message of unifying the country. With his
brazen attempts to gut government entities like the Environmental
Protection Agency, the Department of Energy, and the State Department,
as well as his plans to roll back financial legislation such as
Dodd-Frank, among so many others, about the only people he is uniting
are scientists, economists, environmentalists, health-care
professionals, diplomats, career civil servants, parents, children,
educators, and other afflicted groups. They have come together in
historic droves as they resist the rules of engagement and the reign of
terror of the petulant man-child in the Oval Office. And in the end,
they will win the day.
Inauguration Crowd-Size Debacle
It took less than two days after his inauguration for Trump to hit his first speed bump. After photos revealed a drastically smaller crowd at Trump’s inauguration than at Obama’s first, Trump griped about the coverage
during a speech at the C.I.A., and claimed that “a million and a half
people” showed up. He later backed down from the remarks, but not before
two things happened. First, the world was introduced to Trump’s press
secretary, Sean Spicer, whose first, apoplectic, rumpled press briefing became a flashpoint of its own. And second, Trump aide Kellyanne Conway introduced “alternative facts” into the lexicon.
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