Every President Leaves a Legacy, So What Will Donald Trump’s Legacy Be?

    As our country struggles to recover from the Trump presidency, it’s hard not to think about what Pres. Donald Trump’s legacy will be. We’re living it every day.

If you Google “Donald Trump’s legacy” (with the quote marks so you only get hits with those words in that order), you get 57,000+ hits, and it’s interesting to see the various takes on his legacy. The #1 hit is, appropriately, from the BBC, which has the useful perspective of being British but with a nightly news program on public television, which I record and occasionally watch. (There is an entire BBC America channel on both Dish Network and DirecTV.)

That article makes the observation that “If Donald Trump had followed the example of his predecessors and conceded power graciously and peacefully, he would have been remembered as a disruptive but consequential populist leader…. a president who, before the pandemic, presided over an economic boom, re-oriented America's opinion of China, removed terrorist leaders from the battlefield, revamped the space program, secured an originalist (conservative) majority on the US Supreme Court, and authorized Operation Warp Speed to produce a Covid-19 vaccine in record time.”

Indeed, the legacy of Donald Trump turned on his Jan. 6th incitement of violence because he could not accept defeat, an aspect of his personality so well laid out in his niece Mary Trump’s book, “Too Much and Never Enough.”

But that was not his first incitement of violence. At least one clip from his many rallies comes to mind where he encouraged his followers to assault a protestor, declaring that he would pay the legal expenses if they were prosecuted.

The BBC article describes his Alt-right followers as “Trump’s shock troops,” and indeed they were just that, appropriately reminiscent of the Nazi Brownshirts, aka Storm Troopers.  A big element of Trump’s legacy will be his emboldening of violent right wing extremists, including white supremacists, epitomized by his response to the Charlotteville “Unite the Right” rally.

Trump’s “Big Lie” about losing the 2020 election due to fraud and his emboldening of right-wing extremists is his most enduring legacy (in that we are living with it well beyond his term in office), but there are other important elements of his legacy worthy of highlighting.

We lost four years of leadership in addressing climate change, which poses an existential threat to our planet. He cut funding for renewable energy and boosted support for coal and other fossil fuels. He emboldened climate deniers, but that was just one element of a larger denial of science. We’re living with that legacy not only in the forest fires and drought plaguing our country but in lives lost due to vaccine hesitancy and misinformation, which he fostered despite taking credit for Operation Warp Speed.

Trump’s damage to the Republican Party may or may not be long lasting, depending on how successful the party, propelled by his rhetoric, is in the 2022 and 2024 elections. Losses in those elections would be a second repudiation of Donald Trump and could, hopefully, lead to a return to the GOP of old which did, for the most part, put country above party — at least until the election of Barack Obama, when it truly assumed the role of being the “Party of No” under the leadership of Sen. Mitch McConnell.

Trump’s reshaping of the judiciary, not just the Supreme Court, will be an enduring legacy, too. With the help of Sen. McConnell, he appointed over 250 judges, most of them recommended by the conservative Federalist Society. The American Bar Association rated 10 of Trump’s appointees “unqualified,” but the Senate confirmed them anyway.

Donald Trump succeeded as no previous president has in demonizing the free press, or what he called the “lamestream media.”  (The use of insult name-calling is also part of his legacy.) If a news item didn’t flatter him, it was deemed “fake news” and his followers believed him. He called the free press “the enemy of the people,” but saying so identifies Trump as the true enemy of the people.

Will Trump Followers Ever Realize How Insecure and Dangerous Their Idol Is?

   I read many business-oriented email newsletters, including one from Fast Company which had the following attention-grabbing headline this week: “How to spot the warning signs of an insecure leader.”

The subhead went further: “We humans aren’t very good at assessing true leadership qualities and gravitate towards arrogant confidence in those in charge. Unfortunately, that is often a sign of weakness, and the fallout can be tough on teams.”

The article -- click here to read it in full -- was written about business (hence the reference to teams) by a professor of leadership and management at Harvard Business School and a professor of business psychology at Columbia, but it encapsulates the tragedy of the Trump era. It’s bad enough when a business is dragged down by a leader who has deceived both himself and others that he is competent, but it’s tragic when a whole country is victimized by him.

Here are some key excerpts from that article, which will resonate for those of us who recognized Donald Trump as an arrogant, narcissistic incompetent from day one. Try to remember that this was written about business leadership:

We are so seduced by confidence that we habitually end up with overconfident, arrogant leaders.... 

   According to the authors of one study: “Those with limited knowledge…suffer a dual burden: Not only do they reach mistaken conclusions and make regrettable errors, but their incompetence robs them of the ability to realize it”... 

    What drives educated, rational people...to select people who seem unaware of their limitations and unjustifiably pleased with themselves, as if being your own greatest fan was indicative of talent or...a useful skill in leading others?….

Imagine you aspire to leadership or power and you have managed to delude yourself into thinking that you are amazing when in fact you lack critical skills. Although this delusion makes you a liability, a risk for others..., it can make you more popular. People will gravitate towards you, thinking your certainty is indicative of skill and talent rather than delusion….

We get distracted by irrelevant information provided in the form of confidence, bravado and aggression, which pertain to style rather than substance. Sadly, we live in a world where style without substance will get you farther than substance without style….

Arrogant leaders are more likely to be insecure than competent. Recent academic research conceptualizes narcissism not as self-love but as self-loathing in disguise. The reason is unsurprising. Arrogance is defined as exaggerating one’s own worth or importance. This takes effort and can be seen as a cover for something that one wishes not to be discovered. It’s a deliberate attempt to compensate for self-perceived deficits or flaws….

Research on narcissism further finds that arrogance and entitlement are often a desperate call for validation and affirmation from others. Bragging about talents that are actually lacking is a strategy for fooling oneself by fooling others and suggests insecurity. This is why narcissists get defensive and aggressive when challenged or belittled. 

This is exactly what Donald Trump’s niece, psychologist Mary Trump, described in her analysis of Trump based on her personal knowledge of his upbringing. The title says it all: Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man. I can picture this book becoming a textbook in future classes about the Trump era.

Regarding those who continue to resonate with Trump’s rhetoric, I can’t urge you enough to read White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide, by historian Carol Anderson. While the events of Ferguson, Missouri in 2014 got people talking about “black rage,” she wrote in a Washington Post op-ed that this was instead “white rage at work. With so much attention on the flames, everyone had ignored the kindling.”

The legacy of Donald Trump will be that by emboldening white supremacists with his rhetoric, he lit the kindling, bringing to the surface what had always been there: continued systemic racism.

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On a personal note, I want to express my humble appreciation for the support my writing has garnered. Not only have readers donated over $15,000 to my GoFundMe campaign (which you can find at www.FundTalkingTurkey.com), and sent me over $3,000 in checks, they continue to give my broker associates and me their real estate business.  Thank you so much!

 

Did Melania Get Her “I Really Don’t Care” Jacket From Donald’s Closet?

   It’s beginning to make sense now. Even Donald Trump’s supporters must recognize by now that he really doesn’t care about anything except himself. 

My headline for this week’s column was going to be, “Does Anyone Not See by Now That Trump Is a Self-Obsessed Criminal and Con Man?”  But then I remembered the jacket Melania wore on her visit to the border. As a former model, it was so out of character for her to wear an  ill-fitting jacket, much less one with a scrawled message on it. The only explanation can be that it was really Trump’s jacket, not hers. Of course, he would never wear it, but how could he resist buying it?  Borrowing it for her trip to the border fit Melania’s passive aggressive nature, which has been to give the middle digit to her husband — much like how she adopted the issue of cyber bullying. 

If you Google it, you’ll see that the jacket is for sale by multiple vendors.  I wonder how well it is selling among the MAGA crowd, since there are a lot of things they must not care about to continue supporting a man, much less a president, like Donald Trump.

“The President Is Missing” is a phrase we heard starting in mid-November as it became clear there was nothing on the president’s mind except overturning the election of Joe Biden. There has been no comment by the president about anything else, including the pandemic and, more recently, the Nashville bombing.

When he said before the election that the only way he could lose the election was if it were stolen, I suspect he believed it — and still does. The fact that he can’t produce any evidence must surely be frustrating for him, but he is mentally incapable of not believing that he really won. This is how mentally disturbed the man is. We can only hope that he won’t take his psychosis to its logical conclusion, which would be to declare martial law and then resist eviction from the White House, kicking and screaming like the child his niece, Mary Trump, has described him as.

Her description of the president is summarized as follows in an article by the CBC: “The president of the United States, in her opinion, struggles to control his impulses; tell the truth; learn new facts; apologize for mistakes; and lives in constant terror of having people perceive his flaws.”

This is the description of a profoundly disturbed individual — someone that his die-hard fans would likely ban from their personal circle, but whom they support because, despite such flaws, he expresses racial and other prejudices which they endorse privately — and, for some, way too publicly.

Those of us who see the man for what he truly is are holding our breath, hoping he doesn’t do more damage to the country between now and January 20th, worried that his personality disorder might compel him to do some pretty destructive things. As the jacket says, he really doesn’t care about what his actions do to the country. It’s all about him.

It’s easy to foresee a 2021 in which Donald Trump faces the music regarding the illegalities committed by himself and his enterprises. The Trump Foundation was already shut down for its illegal activities.

We can expect that the former president will continue to hold rallies on the pretext of being a candidate in 2024, but the funds raised will be used to pay the $400 million-plus in debts that the New York Times has already reported are facing him in the next four years. He has already raised half that amount through his fundraising ostensibly to fund his challenge of the 2020 election.

At his rallies he will label any indictments and convictions and bad press as politically motivated fake news, which will fly long enough for him to collect more funds from his remaining supporters. His political support by other Republicans will slowly go away, as it already started to do during December, when he was unable to get members of Congress to sustain his veto of the National Defense Authorization Act and to change the Covid-19 relief payments to $2,000 per adult.

The defense bill contained one provision that has really bad ramifications for Trump and his family. It contains the provisions of the Corporate Transparency Act which bans shell corporations from hiding their owners, thus laundering money. Trump himself used a shell corporation created for him by Michael Cohen to disguise the hush money payment to porn star Stormy Daniels, and he has used shell corporations in his businesses too. The technique is also used by foreign actors to launder money.

Please see my blog post from this past Monday at www.JimSmithBlog.com for a longer explanation about this law, excerpted from Heather Cox Richardson’s email newsletter.

    Above I mentioned the Nashville bombing. You probably heard on the news that a girlfriend of the bomber had warned police in 2019 that he was making bombs in his RV. The police went to his house but were refused permission to inspect his home and RV. Because he had no history of criminality, they were also unable to obtain (or perhaps didn’t seek) a warrant to do so.

    This story reflects something that has always bothered me in the discussion about background checks for gun purchases. So often, the people who commit heinous crimes such as in Nashville, or the bombing in Oklahoma City, or the killing of school children in Newtown, Connecticut, are people with no prior criminal record. 

Of the 300 million firearms in civilian hands in America, between 5 and 10 million are AR-15s, the kind used to kill the children at Sandy Hook elementary school. Presumably those owners passed background checks, but let’s say that a mere 1% of them are mentally unstable and could be triggered (excuse the word) by some personal or other event to commiet a heinous mass casualty event with their firearm. That computes to between 50,000 and 100,000 AR-15s in the hands of future mass murderers.

Too extreme a thought? Okay, let’s say that one-tenth of 1% of those AR15s are in the hands of potential domestic terrorists or mass murderers. That’s still 5 to 10 thousand AR15s that someday will make their owner “famous.”

 

Some Say to “Move On” and Stop Talking About Trump. Here’s Why I Disagree.

  We’ve heard it said by Winston Churchill and others, reportedly paraphrasing George Santayana, that those who don’t learn from history are doomed to repeat it. I agree, and we certainly don’t want to repeat the past four years.

We need to keep studying how Donald Trump came to power and, just as important, how he created and maintained the grip he continues to have on 30% or more of the American electorate.

Yes, we’re glad to put the Trump administration behind us, but I for one will continue to study the man, his techniques, and his followers. Like Germany, which suffered even worse from their own misguided leader in the 1930s and 1940s, we need to fully understand what just happened.

It’s primarily a psychological and mental health study, and I’m so grateful for all the primary sources, such as Trump’s niece, Mary Trump, his long-time fixer, Michael Cohen, and his longest-serving National Security Advisor, John Bolton, for the first-hand information and insights they have provided through their books about Donald Trump. There are more books to come, and, as a student of history, I welcome them.

I have said from the beginning that “history will not be kind to Donald Trump and those who have fallen under his spell.” The question remains as to how much damage, including violence by far-right, gun-toting extremists, might be done in the meantime.

We all recognize that Trump’s racist dog whistles have emboldened countless “deplorables” — a term coined by Hillary Clinton but also adopted with affection, we're told, by Trump himself — to come out of the shadows, as they did in the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, resulting too often in violence and death. By echoing conspiracy theories concocted by others, such as Q-Anon, he gave them legitimacy leading to yet more activism and violence.

    An early expression of that was “Pizzagate,” a conspiracy theory that the Clintons and other “Washington elites” were conducting a pedophile ring out of the basement of a Washington, DC, pizza parlor (which doesn’t even have a basement). One man, infected by that conspiracy theory, showed up with his AR-15 to save the children he believed were being trafficked for sex. Fortunately he was arrested with no shots fired.

And just this Tuesday, the following event unfolded, as described by my favorite newsletter writer, Heather Cox Richardson:

In Houston, Texas, today [Dec. 15], police arrested a former police department captain for running a man off the road and pointing a gun at his head in a misguided attempt to foil a massive voter fraud scheme. Sixty-three-year-old Mark Anthony Aguirre claimed to be part of a citizens’ group investigating voter fraud. Believing his victim was hiding 750,000 fraudulent ballots in his truck, Aguirre rammed the truck with his SUV and held the driver first at gunpoint and then with his knee in the man’s back until police came. Upon inspection, it turned out the truck was full of air conditioning parts. The district attorney, Kim Ogg, said “His alleged investigation was backward from the start — first alleging a crime had occurred and then trying to prove it happened…. [W]e are lucky no one was killed.”

We can’t pretend that once Trump leaves and sanity returns to the White House that these kooks will stop believing everything Trump has told them and will tell them in the future, including that the landslide election of Joe Biden was fraudulent. These people are deeply patriotic in their own minds and would go to war for this country. I cringe to think how that war will play out on American soil. Remember, there were death threats made against fellow citizens counting ballots and to the Secretaries of State for whom they worked.

Sen. Mitch McConnell is now being attacked and probably threatened by the same people for acknowledging that “the electoral college has spoken” and Joe Biden is president-elect.

This whole episode of our history is an embarrassment for our country, but it is also a serious threat. In light of this, the worst thing we could do, in my mind, is to “move on” and not address this threat directly — and I don’t mean by meeting violence with violence.

Fortunately, brave prosecutors will press their cases against the Trump organization and Donald Trump after he leaves the safe haven provided by the White House. I still believe that after he has preemptively pardoned everyone he wants to pardon, including his children, that he will step down, saying he wants to “honor” Mike Pence by giving him the opportunity to be president, whereupon President Pence will preemptively pardon Donald Trump to “put the baseless charges against him behind us.”

But pardoning Trump from federal crimes doesn’t lessen the many crimes he can be charged with by DAs such as New York’s Cyrus Vance, who this week won another victory in court to obtain financial records from the Trump Organization.

It has already been reported by the New York Times that our ex-president has $400 million in personal debts coming due in the next four years. We now know how he’s planning to pay some or most of those debts — by continuing to raise funds promoting conspiracy theories that he himself probably doesn’t believe but his gullible supporters do believe because he is voicing them. As I wrote in my Nov. 26 column, his actions in doing so make it clearer than ever that he puts his own interest ahead of the country’s — that it was always “Trump First,” not “American First.”

It’s really a sad and pathetic unraveling of his presidency, and I believe the unraveling needs to be documented and that Americans need to pay attention to it.  If Germany could do it, so can the United States. Let’s learn from this history so we never repeat it.

 

Michael Cohen’s Book Tells the Story of How Trump Won Over the Evangelicals

  Of all the books written by former confidants, friends and family about Donald Trump, only Michael Cohen’s book Disloyal addresses the biggest mystery of Trump’s ascendancy — his popularity among Christian evangelicals.

Even the evangelicals admit that Trump is not a model Christian. Heck, he doesn’t even attend church. So how did this man gain the undying support of evangelicals? Michael Cohen describes with some pride and in convincing detail how he, not Trump, made it happen.

As he recounts in an early chapter, it all began with, of all people, Justin Bieber. Cohen learned that Jerry Falwell Jr.’s daughter Caroline was infatuated with Bieber, and when there was a Bieber concert in town, he offered to get a VIP pass for her. With his connections, Cohen made the arrangement, even offering the possibility of a meet and greet for Caroline.

Falwell was so blown away by this favor that he said he’d do anything in return. That return favor ended up being to arrange for himself and a number of other evangelical leaders to meet with Donald Trump in Trump Tower.

This was in 2011 when Cohen was urging Trump to run for president and it was being considered. At the get together, Michael Cohen, who is Jewish, watched with astonishment as Falwell orchestrated a laying on of hands by all those evangelical and Pentacostal leaders on Trump, a germaphobe, who pretended it was all very real for him. After the clerics had left, according to Cohen, Trump said, “Can you believe that bullshit? Can you believe people believe that bullshit?”

During that same meeting, there was a discussion of Trump running for president in 2012, and Falwell said the timing wasn’t right. As Cohen describes it, Trump agreed for two reasons. First, he couldn’t see himself being successful up against Barack Obama, but secondly, there was money still to be made on his reality show.

By 2015, the money engine was beginning to slow down, and Cohen again pressed Trump to run. About this time, Falwell came to Cohen, the friend and fixer, with a serious problem. A photographer had convinced Falwell’s wife, Becki, to pose draped over the front of a farm tractor, like you might see on certain calendars. As the shoot proceeded, clothing started coming off and finally there Becki was, reclining topless on the tractor.

The photographer was ready to publish those pictures, and Falwell sought Cohen’s help in preventing that from happening. Cohen swung into action and was successful primarily through threats of legal action against the photographer. Falwell was delighted and, although there was no quid-pro-quo about it, Cohen subsequently got Falwell to endorse Trump as a “repentant Christian” just prior to the Iowa caucuses. The rest of the evangelical leadership, many of whom had participated in the 2011 laying on of hands at Trump Tower, fell in line, and their congregations followed suit, convinced by their leaders that Donald Trump was one of them and shared their values despite his worldly (and abundant) flaws.

Now it all makes sense. And now we know that it was Michael Cohen who orchestrated Trump’s evangelical following, without whose considerable support he could not have won the presidency in 2016.

Previously, it was John Bolton who gave me the up-close portrait of the president which made so much sense, and Mary Trump’s explanation of family dynamics along with her psychological insights were so convincing, but this book by Michael Cohen, which I haven’t yet finished, is the final touch. Please read it.

How long it will take for his followers to become disillusioned about Trump we don’t yet know, but there is enough in print already to do the job.

 

It Couldn’t Be Clearer Now: It Was Always ‘Trump First,’ not ‘America First’

  Since this is Thanksgiving week, I have to say two things — first, that I am thankful that Joe Biden is our President-Elect; and second, that “Talking Turkey” is not related to the Butterball Turkey hotline. You’re on your own, friends!

On a personal note, I am thankful for those readers who pushed my GoFundMe campaign to $11,931. That is less than the $17,000+ I paid to print this column in the Denver Post each week starting in March, but I would have gladly spent the entire amount myself if I had to, and I’m happy if this column somehow contributed to Joe Biden’s landslide win in Colorado and gave some comfort to my fellow progressives that they were not outnumbered by members of Cult 45.

Now, as Joe Biden said in his Thanksgiving address, we need to turn our attention to healing the partisan divide. But how do we do that when the president himself is sowing disbelief in our American electoral system? How will his supporters, egged on as they are by Trump, the Fox News opinionistas, OAN, Newsmax and QAnon, ever accept President Biden and Vice President Harris as legitimately elected leaders?

   In 2009, the Republican leadership in Congress committed themselves to being the “Party of No” and making President Obama a one-term president. With only 2 years of Democratic control in both the House and Senate, it’s impressive that the 44th President accomplished as much as he did.

I have donated to the Democratic Senatorial campaigns in Georgia in hopes that Joe Biden will have the same advantage for at least his first two years as president.

As Chris Christie put it on Sunday, Trump’s fight to overturn the election, led so appropriately by Rudy Giuliani, is a “national embarrassment,” but more to the point, it demonstrates even to his supporters who claim to love America and the constitution, that Donald Trump has never put our country first. As John Bolton expressed in his best-selling book, every decision and every action that this president took was predicated on what was best for Donald Trump, not for the country. Click here to read psychiatrist Vincent Greenwood’s treatise demonstrating how Donald Trump exceeds the criteria of a narcissist and meets the criteria of a psychopath. Read it and weep — but weep tears of joy that he will be put out of pasture in January, ready to face $400 million in debts and countless criminal charges, especially in the Southern District of New York.

As I predicted in the past, once the man reaches the end of his “I won” rope, I believe that he will resign for two reasons. First, he can then be pardoned by Pres. Mike Pence, protecting him from federal prosecution, and, second, his fragile ego will not permit him to attend the inauguration of President Biden. He’s such an insecure child — but we already knew that, didn’t we?

From the picture of Donald Trump painted by Mary Trump, John Bolton, Anonymous and so many others, it’s so in character for Donald Trump to be acting the way he is. His supporters haven’t grasped that picture yet, but maybe this current behavior, once it has run its course, will enlighten even them.

At a closed door meeting  on April 16, 2016, Trump told Republican leaders, in effect, that the “act” he was putting on during his campaign would change once he became president. The same day, at a Pennsylvania rally, he told the crowd, “I’m going to be so presidential that you people will be so bored.”

“Promises made, promises kept”? Not that one! And the reason is simple. Immediately after his inauguration, he announced his re-election campaign and continued his “act” at rallies throughout his time in office.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

unpresidential term. .