by Joe Walsh
The President, the German officials concluded, harbored a deep animus toward Germany in general, and Merkel in particular. “There’s a single-mindedness to it and almost an obsession, it seems, and this is something we are hearing from colleagues in the Administration, too: an obsession with Germany,” one of the senior German officials told me. “It seems like it’s very often issues that can seemingly be boiled down to a single number, like two per cent [spending on NATO], or to a single concept. . . . He latches on to that with a certain fixation.” Niels Annen, a Bundestag member who is the German equivalent of the Deputy Secretary of State, told me, “Unfortunately, Germany seems to be very high on the agenda of the President himself.”13
You can make the argument that Germany and other European countries should foot more of the bill for NATO—but you can’t think about getting out of NATO altogether.14 You can criticize Merkel and not agree with the way she’s handled Europe’s refugee crisis in her own nation—but you can’t let your opinion of her torpedo a crucial strategic relationship. You can’t be the president of the United States and treat your closest democratic allies across the Atlantic as though they are an annoyance and have them end up looking at you as though you’re a complete dumbass.
Trump neither understands nor appreciates this. Instead, he prefers the rogues like himself who go it alone, break the rules, and really retaliate against their political adversaries. People such as Chairman Kim, who runs a family murder business. Freedom House, a pro-democracy human rights group, describes his regime like this: “North Korea is a one-party state led by a dynastic totalitarian dictatorship. Surveillance is pervasive, arbitrary arrests and detention are common, and punishments for political offenses are severe. The state maintains a system of camps for political prisoners where torture, forced labor, starvation, and other atrocities take place.”15 A UN Human Rights Council report from 2014 found “systematic, widespread and gross human rights violations” in the country, “many” of which “entailed crimes against humanity based on State policies.” The Kim regime “has used food as a means of control over the population,” “imposes on citizens where they must live and work,” orchestrates “almost complete denial of the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion, as well as of the rights to freedom of opinion, expression, information and association,” and “disappears” political foes to prison camps without due process.
“In the political prison camps of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea,” the UN report elaborated, “the inmate population has been gradually eliminated through deliberate starvation, forced labour, executions, torture, rape and the denial of reproductive rights enforced through punishment, forced abortion and infanticide. The commission estimates that hundreds of thousands of political prisoners have perished in these camps over the past five decades. The unspeakable atrocities that are being committed against inmates of the kwanliso political prison camps resemble the horrors of camps that totalitarian States established during the twentieth century.”16
Trump explained Kim’s barbarity by telling Fox News anchor Bret Baier, “Well he’s a tough guy.”
He complimented Kim for inheriting the regime from his dad, Kim Jong-il: “You take it over from your father—I don’t care who you are, what you are, how much of an advantage you have. If you can do that at 27 years old, that’s one in 10,000 that could do that.”17
Trump absolved Kim of blame for the death of American student Otto Warmbier, who died shortly after experiencing seventeen months in North Korean captivity: “Some really bad things happened to Otto—some really, really bad things. But Kim tells me that he didn’t know about it, and I will take him at his word.”18
Trump said he “smiled when [Kim] called Swampman Joe Biden a low IQ individual.”19
He’s joked about being pen pals with Kim: “He wrote me beautiful letters and they’re great letters. We fell in love.”20
He said that “Chariman [sic] Kim has a great and beautiful vision for his country,” and that “He will do the right thing because he is far too smart not to, and he does not want to disappoint his friend, President Trump!”21
“His friend.”
The Art of the Deal can go fuck itself if it means befriending a despot. And I really think it’s appropriate to tell Trump to do the same.
Let’s see, who else . . . there’s General Secretary Xi, of China.
In October 2019, Trump tweeted, “Congratulations to President Xi and the Chinese people on the 70th Anniversary of the People’s Republic of China!”22
The People’s Republic of China is a Communist dictatorship, created by Mao Zedong, that is responsible for the deaths of millions. Its current “president for life,” Xi, operates a cult of personality. “Thousands of Christians in an impoverished county in rural southeast China have swapped their posters of Jesus for portraits of President Xi Jinping as part of a local government poverty-relief programme that seeks to ‘transform believers in religion into believers in the party,’ ” the South China Morning Post, Hong Kong’s leading newspaper, reported in 2017.23
His crackdown on religious expression is comprehensive: an American-based Christian nonprofit and a Chinese pastor documented the Chinese government “destroying crosses, burning bibles, shutting churches and ordering followers to sign papers renouncing their faith” in 2018, according to the Associated Press, and it has built reeducation camps and a surveillance system to monitor millions of Muslim-minority people. The imprisonment rates in such regions have swelled, the New York Times reported in 2019.24 A 2018 report from our own Congress—the bipartisan Congressional-Executive Commission on China—documented a “dire human rights situation inside China and the continued downward trajectory, by virtually every measure, since Xi Jinping became Communist Party General Secretary in 2012 and President in 2013.”25 Xi made himself president for life in 2018.26
Trump said that Xi “is a great leader who very much has the respect of his people. He is also a good man in a ‘tough business.’ ”27
As for the others:
The antidrug policy of President Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines features untold numbers of extrajudicial killings—either by police or by private individuals acting with some kind of government sanction. The government’s official count of all drug war–related deaths since 2016 is 6,600; human rights groups peg the statistic at more than three times as high.28 According to an official White House transcript, the first thing Trump said after exchanging pleasantries with Duterte during a phone call in 2017 was “I just wanted to congratulate you because I am hearing of the unbelievable job on the drug problem. Many countries have the problem, we have a problem, but what a great job you are doing and I just wanted to call and tell you that.”29
It’s widely accepted that President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan of Turkey is responsible for democracy in retreat in his country. “After initially passing some liberalizing reforms, [his] government showed growing contempt for political rights and civil liberties, and its authoritarian nature has been fully consolidated since a 2016 coup attempt triggered a more dramatic crackdown on perceived opponents of the leadership. Constitutional changes adopted in 2017 concentrated power in the hands of the president, and worsening electoral conditions have made it increasingly difficult for opposition parties to challenge Erdoğan’s control,” Freedom House reported in 2019.30 Amid that development, Trump complimented Erdoğan on “running a very difficult part of the world” and “getting very high marks” for it.31 In 2019, Trump called Erdoğan a “friend of mine, somebody I’ve become very close to, in many respects, and he’s doing a very good job.”32
And as for Vladimir Putin, well . . .
Putin probably deserves more than just a bullet point. In fact, it was Trump’s wimpy, traitorous behavior around him in Helsinki in July 2018 that caused me to dump Trump for good. Forgive me for quoting myself, but the way I put it exactly was: “Trump asked just now who he believes, his own intelligence agencies or Putin. He won’t answer.
But he speaks more favorably of Putin. TRUMP WON’T STAND WITH HIS OWN COUNTRY. That’s it. That should be the final straw. It is for me.”33
I think it’s worth citing in full the Q and A with a journalist that led me to state that. It was during a joint press conference—Putin was right by his side. Trump is six foot three. Putin is five foot seven. But you tell me which man seemed to stand taller.
Question: President Trump, you first. Just now, President Putin denied having anything to do with the election interference in 2016. Every U.S. intelligence agency has concluded that Russia did. What—who—my first question for you, sir, is, who do you believe?
My second question is, would you now, with the whole world watching, tell President Putin—would you denounce what happened in 2016? And would you warn him to never do it again?
President Trump: So let me just say that we have two thoughts. You have groups that are wondering why the FBI never took the server. Why haven’t they taken the server? Why was the FBI told to leave the office of the Democratic National Committee? I’ve been wondering that. I’ve been asking that for months and months, and I’ve been tweeting it out and calling it out on social media. Where is the server? I want to know, where is the server? And what is the server saying?
With that being said, all I can do is ask the question. My people came to me—Dan Coats came to me and some others—they said they think it’s Russia. I have President Putin; he just said it’s not Russia.
I will say this: I don’t see any reason why it would be, but I really do want to see the server. But I have—I have confidence in both parties. I really believe that this will probably go on for a while, but I don’t think it can go on without finding out what happened to the server. . . .
So I have great confidence in my intelligence people, but I will tell you that President Putin was extremely strong and powerful in his denial today.34
On the world stage, Donald Trump favored the Russian thug whose people interfered in our election process over the intelligence people in his own government who concluded, definitively, that the Russian thug was guilty. I don’t care if Trump weakly tried to clear up his long-winded comment a day later, saying he had meant to say “wouldn’t” when he had said “I don’t see any reason why it would be.”35 He can’t clarify his way out of being a mealy-mouthed coward.
Donald. Trump. Does. Not. Promote. American. Interests.
Period.
Canceling Elections
I’ll mention this part briefly; it’s pretty timely to mention strongmen and dictators like this during election season here at home. Again, Xi recently made himself president for life; Erdoğan turned his democracy, with checks and balances, into a one-man show, starring him; and Putin will have been Russian president for twenty years, with a four-year break, by the time his term ends in 2024. These are men who found ways to consolidate their power by rigging the political system against their challengers. So would it surprise you to learn that the Trumpified Republican Party has been proactive in trying to eliminate diversity of viewpoint in its ranks and quash dissent?
In January 2019, the Republican National Committee adopted a resolution offering “its undivided support for President Donald J. Trump and his effective Presidency,”36 which isn’t the norm before actually nominating the guy. (It wasn’t that long ago that Lyndon B. Johnson, a sitting Democratic president, bowed out during his reelection campaign in a primary fight that he looked destined to lose.) The resolution also called Trump a “courageous leader for the American People,” which, after reading all that dictator love a few pages ago, is a complete joke, but whatever.
In February, the Associated Press reported that the Trump campaign was “taking steps to change state party rules, crowd out potential rivals and quell any early signs of opposition that could embarrass the president.” The story added that it “has used endorsements, lobbying and rule changes to increase the likelihood that only loyal Trump activists make it to the Republican nominating convention in August 2020,” and it “plans to organize at county and state caucuses and conventions over the next 18 months to elevate pro-Trump leaders and potential delegates . . . [and] aims to have complete control of the convention agenda, rules and platform—and to identify any potential troublemakers well in advance.”37
In the summer of 2019, various states started canceling their primary elections and caucuses. South Carolina—a key early primary state every four years—Nevada, and Kansas were the first.38 Arizona followed.39 Then Alaska.40 Then Minnesota’s state GOP decided that Trump would be the only Republican candidate listed on the presidential primary ballot in March 2020. So did the state GOPs in Georgia and North Carolina.41
These are not the signs of a confident president; they’re the signs of a weak one, who wants to make it easier to hold on to his power. That’s the exact type of attitude that pissed Republicans off in 2010 during the Tea Party wave and in 2016 on the way to Trump’s election—it was all about throwing out the bums who were desperate to cling to their offices. Who knows? Maybe the swamp has gotten the better of Trump?
Chapter 5
The Cultist
Let’s do a quick compare-and-contrast involving some world history. I’m going to excerpt a few passages from an ode to Josef Stalin written by a contemporary Soviet author named A. O. Avidenko.1 Below each excerpt, I’m going to place a quotation from someone in Trump World in praise of Trump—a “mini-ode,” if you will. When you read the quotes in each pair, think about how similar they are on a scale of 1 to 10. (I’ll get into what that scale measures in a minute.) Here we go:
* * *
“I shall be eternally happy and joyous, all thanks to thee, great educator, Stalin. Everything belongs to thee, chief of our great country.”
“Have a great weekend. The president makes such a thing possible for us all.”
—Fox Business host Lou Dobbs, September 13, 20192
* * *
“The men of all ages will call on thy name, which is strong, beautiful, wise and marvelous.”
“President Trump has a magnetic personality and exudes positive energy, which is infectious to those around him. He has an unparalleled ability to communicate with people, whether he is speaking to a room of three or an arena of 30,000. He has built great relationships throughout his life and treats everyone with respect. He is brilliant with a great sense of humor . . . and an amazing ability to make people feel special and aspire to be more than even they thought possible.”
—former White House director of strategic communications Hope Hicks, May 30, 20173
* * *
“Every time I have found myself in [Stalin’s] presence I have been subjugated by his strength, his charm, his grandeur. I have experienced a great desire to sing, to cry out, to shout with joy and happiness.”
“The President was treated like a Rock Star inside the hospital, which was all caught on video. They all loved seeing their great President!”
—White House social media director Dan Scavino,
August 7, 2019, after Trump’s visit to a Dayton, Ohio,
hospital that had received mass shooting victims4
These tributes are all too damn close for comfort to one another. You have a major cable news personality and Trump lackey saying that Trump himself is due credit for making Americans’ downtime “great,” which is creepy as hell and a depressing way to see life; the president’s spokeswoman calling Trump all but the greatest thing since sliced bread; and Trump’s chief Twitter henchman saying that families in a hospital ward treated Trump like a “Rock Star” and “loved seeing their great President”—while they grieved loved ones who had just been slain in an incident of mass slaughter. On a scale of 1 to 10—on which 1 was normal political speech in a free society and 10 was pure propaganda—A. O. Avidenko scored a perfect 10.
Lou Dobbs, Hope Hicks, and Dan Scavino combined to get about 100 percent of the way to a perfect 10 themselves.
Their rhetoric is the rhetoric of cults. Per
iod. Cults in which the central figure is someone who can do no wrong—like Trump, whose campaign secretary, Kayleigh McEnany, said he has never lied to Americans5—and has total authority—like Trump, whose Republican Party chairwoman, Ronna McDaniel, dismissed Republican challengers to him by saying, “So have at it, go ahead, waste your money, waste your time and go ahead and lose.”6 That’s the thing about this over-the-top adulation of Trump: It’s not just Dobbs, Hicks, Scavino, McEnany, and McDaniel, it’s Sean Hannity, Fox & Friends, Mark Levin, the official news channel of alternate reality One America News Network, and his other news allies; it’s Jerry Falwell, Jr., Robert Jeffress, Franklin Graham, televangelist James Robison, and the other Christian leaders who go all in for him; it’s the politicians who have sold out their conservative virtues completely, including the House Freedom Caucus, Lindsey Graham, Newt Gingrich, and a rotating cast of D-list Republicans (such as Matt Gaetz) and bizarre social media celebrities for whom facts are utterly optional (“Diamond and Silk,” Charlie Kirk, Jacob Wohl). The examples from this cast of characters are so numerous that they could fill a book all by themselves. And they go from being nausea inducing to being a genuinely alarming threat to the country; they abet the creation of a leader who presents himself as flawless and give him the cover he craves to do whatever he wants. They make him into someone who walks around as though there’s a halo over his head.
But Joe, weren’t there pictures of Obama in which it looked as though he actually had a halo over his head? I know which ones you’re talking about: the ones from the Associated Press, in which the presidential seal is behind Obama’s head and that the AP explained as having an unintentional “halo effect” that had been a problem photographing George W. Bush during his presidency, too.7 Then there was the issue of Newsweek that declared Obama the “first gay president” and whose cover depicted Obama with a rainbow-colored halo directly over his head.8 It wasn’t just images, either: a Politico story from the 2008 campaign headlined “Messianic Rhetoric Infuses Obama Rallies” included the statement “Obama’s wife, Michelle, opened the rally with a description of her husband that could, at moments, have been a description of Jesus Christ.”9 Newsweek later referred to Obama’s second term as “The Second Coming.” The iconography around Obama was uncomfortable—and an indication, I think, that our presidential politics were getting more cultish even before Trump hopped onto the stage.