by Joe Walsh
The whistle-blower claimed further that “senior White House officials had intervened to ‘lock down’ all records of the phone call,”36 and Trump aides, both official and unofficial—including his personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani—met Ukrainian government officials to discuss the call further. It’s not as though the call was the end of the matter—or the beginning of it, for that matter.
All of this is to say that the whistle-blower reported a troubling pattern relevant to our national security through the proper channels, and the big kahuna of that pattern was proved publicly shortly thereafter—something for which I thought at the time Trump should be impeached.37 But the way Trump responded cinched the case for impeachment further, if such a thing is possible. The whistle-blower’s attorney demonstrates why I thought so, in a letter to the acting director of national intelligence, Joseph Maguire:
The purpose of this letter is to formally notify you of serious concerns we have regarding our client’s personal safety. We appreciate your office’s support thus far to activate appropriate resources to ensure their safety.
The events of the past week have heightened our concerns that our client’s identity will be disclosed publicly and that, as a result, our client will be put in harm’s way. On September 26, 2019, the President of the United States said the following:
I want to know who’s the person that gave the Whistleblower, who’s the person that gave the Whistleblower the information, because that’s close to a spy. You know what we used to do in the old days when we were smart? Right? With spies and treason, right? We used to handle them a little differently than we do now.
The fact that the President’s statement was directed to “the person that gave the Whistleblower the information” does nothing to assuage our concerns for our client’s safety. Moreover, certain individuals have issued a $50,000 “bounty” for “any information” relating to our client’s identity. Unfortunately, we expect this situation to worsen, and to become even more dangerous for our client and any other whistleblowers, as Congress seeks to investigate this matter.38
Four days later, Trump said his team “was trying to find out” the whistle-blower’s identity.39
A day after that, he wondered in a tweet, “why aren’t we entitled to interview & learn everything about. . . . . . . . the Whistleblower, and also the person who gave all of the false information to him”?40
There’s a great line—the subheadline, actually—of a story in the now-shuttered Pacific Standard magazine, about Trump and cult behavior.
“What do you call an organization where total loyalty to a charismatic but volatile leader is strictly enforced?” it asks.41 I’ll let you guess the word.
And I’ll show you once more that word in action—congressional Republicans rallied to Trump’s defense over the Ukrainian mess en masse. Sure, some of them grumbled off the record, according to one House Democrat.42 And few of them were alarmed or even critical on the record, though they were among the more independently minded “usual suspects,” such as senators Lisa Murkowski and Mitt Romney.43 But far more of them were there again to man the front lines on Trump’s behalf, in the face of evidence and reason. That includes the two highest-ranking Republicans in Congress, Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell and House minority leader Kevin McCarthy. It also includes the House Republicans’ number two, Steve Scalise, who went back and forth with George Stephanopoulos during a November 2019 interview after he was asked for his response to Deputy Secretary of State John Sullivan’s comment that “[s]oliciting investigations into a domestic political opponent, I don’t think that would be in accord with our values.”
Scalise: Well, first of all, that’s not what was happening on the phone call. Even when the president said will you do me a favor, he then went on to ask about Crowdstrike, that wasn’t about Joe Biden. And so taking that out of context . . .
Stephanopoulos: No, it’s about his domestic political opponents. And the transcript clearly shows the president was asking the Ukrainian president to investigate his political opponents, both the Democrats in 2016, Joe Biden going forward. Do you think that was appropriate?
Scalise: That wasn’t, first of all, about political opponents. The law, George, requires President Trump, or any president, when they’re sending foreign aid, taxpayer money, to another country, to ensure that that country is rooting out corruption. He and [Ukrainian president] Zelensky were talking about that on the phone call.
Stephanopoulos: The only two instances he raised were Crowdstrike in 2016, involving the Democrats, Burisma in 2017 and ’18 involving Joe Biden. And again, it’s just a very simple question, do you think it’s appropriate for the president to ask the Ukrainians or the Chinese, which he’s also done in public, to investigate his domestic political opponents?
Scalise: Well, first of all on that call he was not talking about the 2020 election or political opponents, he was talking about corruption relating to the 2016 elections.
Stephanopoulos: That’s not what the transcript shows.44
Trump critics on the right are often accused of being part of some club that’s out of touch with reality. When the “reality” is built upon “alternative facts,” I guess I have no choice but to confess.
Chapter 6
The Narcissist
It’d be impossible for you to picture the earth by looking at just your backyard. Sure, you could describe what you see, and what you see would certainly be a part of some bigger image. But the planet is so vast, so varied, so colorful that you’d have to pull way, way, way back to take in all of its roundness and its blue and its green. And withdrawing to that point takes time. The same goes for grasping Donald Trump’s total mental unfitness for office—the real and obvious instability in his conduct that Americans witness every day. There is an overwhelming number of examples, only a few of which have been chronicled in this book so far. They can’t be judged as though they’re one-offs, because ultimately, they’re more like individual brushstrokes on some yuge mural. In sum, they add up to an overwhelming and worrying picture no one could possibly appreciate by staring at it up close—by thinking about Trump twenty-four hours in a row.
There’s no way to succinctly describe all the occasions long before he got into politics that Donald Trump called reporters on the phone pretending to be his own spokesman—not as a gag but as a serious disguise—so he could defend his business deals or brag about his romantic life.1 There’s no way to briefly recall all the instances when he has denied saying or doing things that he said on the record, with evidence to back it, or did in plain sight, with cameras and witnesses around. If I tried to put the full evidence of Trump’s megalomania into words here—I mean, it’d take a thousand pages, and the pages would spontaneously combust. (And people would say they’d never seen anything like it, believe me.)
So instead of doing any of that, I’d like to recognize a couple of people who’ve already tried. George Conway and Peter Wehner are loyal conservatives—loyal to principle, not to some guy who holds some political title—who’ve explained Trump’s behavioral dangers at length and why they’re the reasons, above any others, to oppose him as president. Wehner, who was a speechwriter and policy adviser for President George W. Bush and served in the Bush 41 and Reagan administrations before that, made that point pretty much from day one. Pay attention to the italicized part of the following quote, which comes from an interview he did with C-SPAN in July 2016: “I think [Trump] is temperamentally unfit to be president. I think he’s erratic, I think he’s unprincipled, I think he’s unstable, and I think that he has a personality disorder; I think he’s obsessive. And at the end of the day, having served in the White House for seven years in three administrations and worked for three presidents, one closely, and read a lot of history, I think the main requirement to be President of the United States isn’t where you check the boxes on policy, though I think policy is very important . . . but it is temperament, it’s disposition, it’s the idea of whether you have wisdom,
and judgment, and prudence.” (My emphasis.)2
Peter’s description of the presidency is dead on. The job of president isn’t to own the libs or the conservatives. It isn’t to be a culture warrior, to purge every frustration about politics and society we’ve ever had—and that goes for the Republicans who can’t stand the media and Hollywood the same as it does for the Democrats who condescend to middle America. The job of president is to oversee the world’s most powerful government and to use that power measuredly in most cases, appropriately in the most stressful ones, and intelligently in all of them. Let me tell you: Donald Trump’s extreme narcissism prevents him from doing any of that.
As Conway noted in an essay in The Atlantic, our Founding Fathers made it so that the president would be a “public fiduciary,” whose fundamental responsibility was to do what was best for the country. “To act as a fiduciary requires you to put someone else’s interests above your own, and Trump’s personality makes it impossible for him to do that. No president before him, at least in recent memory, has ever displayed such obsessive self-regard. For Trump, Trump always comes first. He places his interests over everyone else’s—including those of the nation whose laws he swore to faithfully execute. That’s not consistent with the duties of the president, whether considered from the standpoint of constitutional law or psychology.”3
The psychology angle on Trump has gotten a lot of airtime and column space the last few years. Conway himself has argued that Trump’s conduct meets the literal book definition of something called “narcissistic personality disorder,” which the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM)—the authoritative guide for health professionals on such things—says is evidenced by a set of nine criteria, any five of which need to be present for there to be a diagnosis. Whether mental health professionals would diagnose Trump with this condition is a discussion exclusively for them. But that discussion is irrelevant to deciding whether the president’s mentality causes him to fail in his office and fail the nation. Conway and Wehner have made the points respectively that you don’t need to be a doctor to tell that a football player suffered a gruesome leg injury or be a mechanic to tell that your car is leaking oil and puffing smoke from underneath the hood. I think reasonable people should agree that one, mental health is a serious topic, and two, we can treat it with the sensitivity it deserves while observing something pertinent about our country’s chief executive: that he acts like a destructive egomaniac any way you look at it.
I’d like to look at it from the perspective that Trump lacks sound judgment to a large extent exactly because he’s a narcissist. It impairs his ability or his willingness—your guess is as good as mine—to make good choices in his capacity as president, regardless of whether those choices are about policy or simply enforcing laws as he is constitutionally bound to do. The problem is that Trump’s narcissism makes him mistrust any advice that goes against his own instincts and his self-described “great and unmatched wisdom.”4 Only somebody omnipotent could get away with dismissing everything but his own mind and experience—every set of data, every expert insight, every alternative—and come to the best conclusion every time. Trump, although he’d never admit it, is not omnipotent. So he needs to rely on outside sources to guide his decision making, even when he has a strong instinct one way or the other.
Of course, that’s not his style. As he told the Washington Post in an interview, “I have a gut, and my gut tells me more sometimes than anybody else’s brain can ever tell me.”5
I know, I know—that’s the rebellious, screw-the-Poindexters attitude that many of the people who voted for him liked, especially after eight years of a president who prided himself on being cerebral and cosmopolitan, while leaving half of Americans feeling as though they had been cast off as dumbass bumpkins. But people: Don’t. Buy. The. Sham. Donald Trump is not the commonsense cowboy he thinks he is. Give this paragraph from Conway—which is fully cited—a chance:
In July [2019], [Trump] described himself in a tweet as “so great looking and smart, a true Stable Genius!” . . . That “stable genius” self-description is one that Trump has repeated over and over again—even though he has trouble with spelling, doesn’t know the difference between a hyphen and an apostrophe, doesn’t appear to understand fractions, needs basic geography lessons, speaks at the level of a fourth grader, and engages in “serial misuse of public language” and “cannot write sentences,” and even though members of his own administration have variously considered him to be a “moron,” an “idiot,” a “dope,” “dumb as shit,” and a person with the intelligence of a “kindergartener” or a “fifth or sixth grader” or an “11-year-old child.”6
I should pause here to say that just because Trump has demonstrated these characteristics and his subordinates have described him this harshly doesn’t mean I view his supporters the same way. Because I absolutely do not. I made that point in the opening chapter, but it bears repeating here: Trump has conned people into believing he’s a big deal by talking a big game—truly bigger than anyone in US politics has ever talked it. If you were a voter fed up in 2016 with the political status quo—a Bush here, a Clinton there, Romney, Obama, not one of them, in your opinion, stopping the country from going in a direction you didn’t like—you might have asked yourself, why not believe Trump’s bluster? After all, his name is on everything, it seems. He’s been one of America’s most famous celebrities since the 1990s. He had that TV show with a catchphrase everyone used all joshing-like for years. “Trump” seems like a successful brand and a successful man. If he says he wants to do the same for the country and do it by speaking the language of the average Joe for once—instead of talking about how some trade deal would be awesome for our “GDP” and our “economic growth,” talk about what it may do to my community and me—why in the hell wouldn’t I give him the chance?
That’s why it’s so important to acknowledge that two things can be true: one, Trump is right that politicians have lost touch with common Americans, and two, he is the wrong man to look out for them. Because when the going gets tough, he will look out only for himself. He cares about the concerns of flyover country only as long as seeming to care gives him power. If he truly cared—if he were an actual problem solver—then wouldn’t he use every tool at his disposal to make the United States’ problems go away? Yes, he would. But he doesn’t. Here’s what he does, instead, to quote Conway once more:
Trump claims to be an expert—the world’s greatest—in anything and everything. As one video mash-up shows, Trump has at various times claimed—in all seriousness—that no one knows more than he does about: taxes, income, construction, campaign finance, drones, technology, infrastructure, work visas, the Islamic State, “things” generally, environmental-impact statements, Facebook, renewable energy, polls, courts, steelworkers, golf, banks, trade, nuclear weapons, tax law, lawsuits, currency devaluation, money, “the system,” debt, and politicians. (My emphasis.)7
This is a new level of megalomania. He’s completely dismissed the possibility that anyone knows more than he does about this stuff. And I honestly think that if you listen to the guy talk for a few minutes without thinking about what political party he belongs to—yours or someone else’s—you’d have a difficult time concluding that he wasn’t epically narcissistic about his brilliance and capacities. Good leaders understand that they’re not the smartest person in the room sometimes, even a lot of the time. Donald Trump implies that he has intelligence on the scale of a fucking god. It is ludicrous. And we have to take him at his word that he really believes it. If Trump were just joking, he wouldn’t back up his supposed supergenius by acting as though he were a supergenius—as though he knew better than the weathermen, because Dorian was truly threatening Alabama, and so he had the hurricane map drawn on to prove it. (Here again, you can see how several chapters in this book can apply to single episodes of his behavior.)
Let me pose the same question here that I did about Trump and his cult: Okay, so w
hy does it matter? I’ll acknowledge that talking about all of his awful traits isn’t revealing any startling new insight into the president’s nonexistent character. Everybody, even most of his fans, knows what sort of person he is. Trump’s personal favorability is in the tank; tons of his voters, in surveys and in conversations, don’t defend his personality; only the most burn-it-down of his backers actually like the fact that Trump talks to dictators as though they met on a dating app and has zero self-control on Twitter. The problem is, many of his fans think it doesn’t matter. Here are two reasons why it does.
One: all these categories of kinglike or authoritarian actions eventually cause a society to collapse if you let them go on long enough, and two: a clear-as-day character defect such as narcissism prevents Trump from delivering on many of the promises he makes.
Trump’s narcissism influences or even controls his decision making and then produces conclusions and follow-through that are bad for the United States. Because we don’t have all day, I’ll take just a few examples to show you what I mean.
One, which applies more to the dystopian societal collapse business, has to do with how Trump mistakes himself, as president, for “the state.” What do I mean? Let’s take the instance of Adam Schiff, the California Democrat and chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, exaggerating a transcript of a call between Trump and the Ukrainian president, Zelensky, in September 2019. During a committee hearing, Schiff mischaracterized Trump’s side of the exchange like this: “It reads like a classic organized crime shakedown. Shorn of its rambling character and in not so many words, this is the essence of what the president communicates: We’ve been very good to your country, very good. No other country has done as much as we have. But you know what? I don’t see much reciprocity here. I hear what you want. I have a favor I want from you though. And I’m going to say this only seven times so you better listen good.” (My emphasis.)8