What's Wrong With Trump?

Michael

Getting to Know Trump



Every critic, every detractor, will have to bow down to President Trump.

—Omarosa Manigault-Newman, former Apprentice and Trump advisor

Donald Trump is worse than any horror story I’ve written.

―Stephen King, author

Trump is what he is, a floundering, inarticulate jumble of gnawing insecurities and not-at-all compensating vanities, which is pathetic.

—George F. Will, conservative political commentator

Donald Trump is a major setback to the hopes, dreams and aspirations of all Americans.

—John Lewis, Democratic Representative from Georgia

Trump is manifestly unfit to be president. This is rapidly becoming a question of not whether a crime has been committed, but how many crimes were committed.

—Denny Heck, Democratic Representative from Washington

He has been adept at getting attractive foreign women to marry him, though not especially good at making the marriages last. And he is clearly an absolutely world-class con artist, with a genuinely impressive ability to lie, prevaricate, evade, mislead, stretch the truth and dissemble. These skills clearly served him well as a real estate developer, but they aren’t helping him very much as president. Because once people decide you’re a bumbler, either they take advantage of your ineptitude or they prefer to deal with those who are more reliable.

—Stephen M. Walt, professor of international relations at Harvard University

Toxic lunacy

—Richard Blumenthal, Democratic Senator from Connecticut

He’s a joke.

—Joe Biden, former Vice President

Republicans have learned that his word is meaningless. Whatever complex issues absorb Congress this year—defense spending, immigration, healthcare, infrastructure—better be managed without much White House input. The more involved he is, the less likely there will be a deal. The great disrupter can create chaos and controversy, but the harder task of negotiating policy compromises eludes him.

—Jennifer Rubin, Washington Post

I knew he was a shallow, lazy ignoramus.

—Ann Coulter, conservative columnist and author

Donald Trump is an evil genius.

—Jon Bon Jovi

Of all the national politicians I’ve met over the decades, Trump may be the one least interested in government or policy; he’s absorbed simply with himself. And what we’re seeing more clearly now is that he has crafted an administration in his own image: vain, narcissistic and dangerous.

—Nicholas Kristof, New York Times

He doesn’t understand how diplomacy works.

—Michael McFaul, former U.S. Ambassador to Russia

The Kochs finally have a compliant ignoramus that would sign over property rights to the Grand Canyon if they promise to drill baby, drill on it. Mitch McConnell is ecstatic that he will be able to unleash the full power of an unregulated capitalistic rigged market. The train is at maximum speed and the bridge is out. We can only hope that the Trump doesn’t set off any nukes, as the disaster that his presidency already is, unfolds.

—Thomas Clay, AmericanNewsX.com

When experienced Republicans warned that Trump was unfit for office during the 2016 campaign, most of their concerns revolved around issues of character. But their warnings didn’t prepare us for the parade of buffoonery and ineptitude that has characterized his administration from Day One.

—Stephen M. Walt, Chicago Tribune

"The only realms in which Trump has proven himself adept are those of popular manipulation and treachery, along with the related arts of show business. No doubt he will use them in the coming days to mislead and scapegoat his way out of accountability.

—Stephen Stromberg, Washington Post

a president who proudly traffics in mistruths and obfuscations

—Ashley Parker, Josh Dawsey and Philip Rucker, Washington Post

After the election, it quickly became clear that the culture of corruption fostered by candidate Trump would persist and grow under President Trump. In a departure from the practice of former presidents Barack Obama and George W. Bush, President Trump announced he would accept millions of dollars from corporations and wealthy donors for his inauguration. Nearly a year later, much of the unspent money remains unaccounted for. He refuses to divest from his business holdings, creating unparalleled conflicts of interest and leading to a number of suits arguing he is violating the Constitution’s anti-corruption clause. He frequently travels to his own properties and profits from the cost of government officials’ stays. For example, taxpayers were charged more than $1,000 for an official’s two-night stay at President Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club. He has held expensive political fundraisers at the Trump International Hotel in Washington, D.C., which has become a hotspot for foreign dignitaries and special-interest lobbyists seeking to curry favor with the president. And these are only a few of the extensive conflicts of interest created by President Trump’s intertwining of his businesses and public responsibilities.

—Center for American Progress

Trump has spent his career in the company of developers and celebrities, and also of grifters, cons, sharks, goons and crooks. He cuts corners, he lies, he cheats, he brags about it, and for the most part, he’s gotten away with it, protected by threats of litigation, hush money and his own bravado.

—Editorial in New York Times

None of this is normal. The incompetence, the sloppiness and the leaking is unprecedented.

—Steve Schmidt, Republican political strategist and analyst for MSNBC

More than at any time in history, the president of the United States is actively using the power and prestige of his office to line his own pockets: landing loans for his businesses, steering wealthy buyers to his condos, securing cheap foreign labor for his resorts, preserving federal subsidies for his housing projects, easing regulations on his golf courses, licensing his name to overseas projects, even peddling coffee mugs and shot glasses bearing the presidential seal. For Trump, whose business revolves around the marketability of his name, there has proved to be no public policy too big, and no private opportunity too crass, to exploit for personal profit.

—Joy Crane and Nick Tabor, New York magazine

This is a guy who thinks the Justice Department works for him, as opposed to working for the people.

—Cecilia Muñoz, former Director of White House Domestic Policy Council and White House Director of Intergovernmental Affairs

Trump is morally unfit to be president. This president does not reflect the values of this country.

—James Comey, former FBI Director

We have a president who continually undermines our most basic institutions, from attacking an independent judiciary and law enforcement agents, to belittling a free press that has been a bedrock of our nation since its founding, to normalizing an invective form of politics while injecting increasing volatility into both our economic and national security, to flirting with the onset of a constitutional crisis caused by his own actions. Likewise, on policy, under this president we face rising economic inequality, health-care costs that continue to spike, an immigration policy that is crippled, insufficient access to higher education, soaring deficits and no response to national tragedies like those of Parkland and Sandy Hook.

—David Jolly, TV news analyst and Republican former member of Congress

In a way, America is being governed by the dimmest of wits on the most unscrupulous of networks. The very thought of it is horror-inducing.

—Charles M. Blow, New York Times op-ed columnist

The corruption and malfeasance of the Trump administration is unprecedented in U.S. history.

—Max Boot, Washington Post

Do I like him as a person? Hell no. He’s disgusting. He’s obnoxious. I don’t know how his wife stands him. He’s got the worst haircut in the world. No manners. Insolent. Arrogant. Obnoxious. But he gets things done. He cut taxes. He’s telling NAFTA to go pound salt.

—Paul Ambrose, retired apparel manufacturer who lives in Canonsburg, Pa.

There is no question that this administration is certainly the most corrupt in my lifetime, including Richard Nixon—which is quite a low bar… legalized bribery. Trump was running a criminal enterprise out of the White House.

—Howard Dean, physician and former Vermont governor

Donald Trump has returned explicit racism to political life, and his success has energized a new generation of activists and organizations committed to the expansion of white supremacy, by violence if necessary.

—Jamelle Bouie, chief political correspondent for Slate magazine, and political analyst for CBS

If you take Trump’s words literally, you have no choice but to conclude that he is psychotic. If we could construct a psychiatric Frankenstein monster, we could not create a leader more dangerously mentally ill than Donald Trump. He is a paranoid, psychopathic, narcissist who is divorced from reality and lashes out impulsively at his imagined enemies.

—John Gartner, psychotherapist

Is Trump capable of formulating—or operating in accordance with—any meaningful conception or vision of what is good for the country? … Again and again and again, Trump has made decisions that are obviously not rooted in any meaningful effort to evaluate their substantive and moral complexities or potential consequences.

—Greg Sargent, Washington Post

Donald Trump embodies almost everything wrong with America: He is a greedy, craven, untruthful bigot and bully, the living product of a celebrity-driven popular culture prefaced on distraction and crudeness. Trump’s political movement and presidency seem to resemble a slow-motion car accident, but instead of running away from this destruction and chaos, Trump’s voters and Republicans en masse largely seem to welcome the mayhem. ... His followers have made a choice to stand by their Great Leader—even when that loyalty is personally harmful to them as well as the country they supposedly love. Why? Because Donald Trump and his supporters are intertwined in a state of collective narcissism.

—Chauncey DeVega, politics staff writer for Salon

He lies all the time. This is part of this so-called charm. Some people call it charisma, but it’s not really charisma. Having no conscience, Trump does not experience guilt or shame or remorse, so he can say whatever pleases him at the moment to get people to do whatever he wants or needs of them. People fell for this because they want what he has to offer. Ultimately, Trump embodies values that people do not necessarily want to admit to.

—Elizabeth Mika, therapist and counselor

The White House runs as a shambolicity, as the Trump Organization did and as crazily as any of The Apprentice episodes did. The incompetence, chaos, and mismanagement, the corruption up and down the cabinet, around the West Wing is unprecedented. It’s not normal. The administration functions at a perpetual level of incompetence.

—Steve Schmidt, Republican political strategist and analyst for MSNBC

He lies in the way anybody who scams people does. He’s tried to sell an idea or a product by telling you something that is untrue. There is also the kind of lie he has that in a way is more serious, that he has a loose grip on reality. We can say that because he lies about things that aren’t that important.

—Lance Dodes, Training and Supervising Analyst Emeritus with the Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute, and former assistant clinical professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School

He’s saved the country. It’s not done yet, but he’s going to become the greatest president to ever serve in office.

—Kim Shannon, ultrasound technician who lives in Ohio

What you think is crazy, he thinks is successful.

—Chuck Todd, anchor of Meet the Press

Trump will never experience a period of tranquility. There will always be shrapnel flying in the form of wild tweets, inexplicable lies, distracting odd-ball characters, off-message surrogates and the like.

—Ed Rogers, Washington Post

Trump campaigned as the purported champion of a working class that was being robbed blind by dastardly elites. He has governed, however, as robber in chief.

—Eugene Robinson, Pulitzer-winning associate editor of Washington Post

The president of the United States has massive impulse control problems. That’s about the most terrifying thing that has ever happened to this country.

—Austan Goolsbie, Professor of Economics at the University of Chicago, former Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers and Chief Economist of the Economic Recovery Advisory Board for President Obama

Nobody has any idea whether he has any sense of what it means to deal with a crisis. It creates a really uncomfortable feeling because we really don’t know if we’re going to be able to confront a crisis successfully.

—Leon Panetta, President Clinton’s chief of staff, former head of the CIA, and Secretary of Defense under President Obama

When I look at him I see a man without any inner life. I see the most superficial person on Earth. This is a guy who has been totally hollowed out by greed and self regard and delusion. If I caught some sort of brain virus and I started talking about myself the way Trump talks about himself, I would throw myself out a fucking window.

—Sam Harris, scientist and author

He comes from a family of criminals: His grandfather made his fortune running whorehouses in Seattle and in the Yukon Territory. His father, Fred, had a business partner named Willie Tomasello, who was an associate of the Gambino crime family. Trump’s father was also investigated by the U.S. Senate for ripping off the government for what would be the equivalent of $36 million in today’s money. Donald got his showmanship from his dad, as well as his comfort with organized criminals. I think it is very important for religious Americans to know that Donald Trump says that his personal philosophy of life is revenge. He has called anyone who turns the other cheek—which is a fundamental teaching of Christ in the Sermon on the Mount—a fool, an idiot or a schmuck. Trump is a man who says things that are absolutely contrary to the teachings of the New Testament. He also denigrates Christians. Yet you see all of these ministers endorsing him. I’ve followed Donald for 30 years. I don’t see any evidence that he has changed, and he certainly hasn’t repented, which is a fundamental Christian obligation. He is a racist through and through. He has been found in formal judicial proceedings to discriminate against nonwhites in rentals and employment. It’s important to understand that Trump is aggressively anti-Christian, despite claiming to be one. He is bluntly a racist. Most importantly, he is literally ignorant about almost everything.

—David Cay Johnston, Pulitzer-winning author (interviewed in Salon)

Even for those of us who had braced for catastrophe, the first year of Donald Trump’s presidency was worse than expected—more divisive, mean-spirited, erratic, unhinged, incompetent and egomaniacal than could have been imagined. Any glimmer of hope for a better Trump after the election, any speck of it once he took his oath of office, all that is now extinguished.

—Ruth Marcus, Deputy editorial page editor of Washington Post

Trump’s presidency has done daily damage not only to the Republican Party and the conservative movement but, more important, to our constitutional system of government. The president is eroding the unwritten norms that serve as the civic girders beneath our political and legal infrastructure. And his foreign policy, insofar as he has one, is diminishing our global standing and jeopardizing our security. ... Trump has deprived the presidency of its majesty, its gravity and its ability to inspire. In doing so, he has distilled the role of executive power to its elemental minimum as an almost purely destructive force. When Trump talks policy, he is ignored. But he is still the most powerful man in the world, so there is no avoiding him when he seems bent on creating havoc.

—Tom Nichols, professor at Naval War College and Harvard Extension School

The fight for America’s future has begun, and the time for rationalizing Trump’s aberrant behavior is long past. Trump is trying to destroy our Constitutional norms. Everything he does is against his best interests. Few should be surprised by the depths to which Trump sinks when attacking law enforcement personnel.

—Joe Scarborough, broadcaster, Washington Post commentator and former GOP Congressman from Florida

Donald Trump’s inflammatory rhetoric has crossed the line from spreading hatred to inciting violence. By directly stating that the only way to stop terrorism is to murder Muslims in graphic and religiously-offensive ways, he places the millions of innocent, law-abiding citizens in the American Muslim community at risk from rogue vigilantes.

—Nihad Awad, national executive director of CAIR

Donald Trump would be a very unhappy man if no one paid attention to him.

—Tony Schwartz, ghostwriter for Trump

If Donald Trump is the nominee and eventually the president, he would take, I think, unapologetic steps to use executive power to confront Congress in a way that is truly unconstitutional.

—Future EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt

There has never been a time when Washington was as consumed as it is right now with the things that come out of a president’s mouth, because we’ve never had a president who said the kind of bizarre, ludicrously false and despicable things that Donald Trump says.

—Paul Waldman, writer

Trump’s America is brutal, perverse, regressive, insular and afraid. There is no hope in it; there is no light in it. It is a vast expanse of darkness and desolation.

―Charles M. Blow, columnist for New York Times

Just a fire hose of bullshit

—John Oliver, Emmy-winning HBO funny newsman

Trump displayed a level of cruelty and recklessness that should give even his political allies pause.

—Michael D’Antonio, author of The Truth About Trump

Trump is the most despicable human being... an embarrassment and a national disgrace. Members of Congress have a responsibility to the American people and our democracy to impeach him. This is a dishonorable human being. He is a con man. He came to this job as a con man.

—Maxine Waters, Democratic Congresswoman from California

It’s a bloodbath, basically. It’s a financial bloodbath. Nobody wants to go there. If you’ve got a Marriott and a Hyatt and a Trump, you’re not going to Trump.

—Jeffrey Rabiea, owner of rooms in the Trump International Panama hotel

Trump is effectively a professional wrestling heel (i.e., villain). He lies, demeans his opponents, cheats and then insults anyone who disagrees with him. When he gets caught conducting his foul business, he announces that he is the real victim. Trump is a master salesman who keenly understood how to sell his particular brand—which consists of racism, sexism, nativism, misogyny, ignorance, violence and crude behavior—to his fanbase of human deplorables, who installed him in the White House. Trump is a political con artist and a skilled showman. His reality TV-inspired spectacle is highly compelling to the lost, lonely and angry people who saw in him a role model and a human happiness pill.

—Chauncey DeVega, politics staff writer for Salon

The thing to fear from the Trump presidency is not the bold overthrow of the Constitution, but the stealthy paralysis of governance; not the open defiance of law, but an accumulating subversion of norms; not the deployment of state power to intimidate dissidents, but the incitement of private violence to radicalize supporters.

—David Frum, Republican author, editor, speechwriter

The man has no moral core. Disgraceful, disgusting, he just continues to hurt the prestige of the United States of America

—Terry McAuliffe, Virginia governor

Donald Trump was the dumbest goddam student I ever had.

—William T. Kelley, professor at Wharton School of Business and Finance, University of Pennsylvania

Trump acts like a nasty, small-minded despot, not the leader of a democracy more than two centuries old in which rule of law is a sturdy pillar.

—Washington Post editorial board

"This was a real-life version of Mel Brooks’s The Producers, where the mistaken outcome trusted by everyone in Trump's inner circle—that they would lose the election—wound up exposing them for who they really were."

—Michael Wolff, author

This man is a scoundrel and his values are just intolerable.

—Susan Del Percio, Republican strategist

Down the decades, Donald Trump has shown an impressive versatility of conviction, but the one constant in the jumble of quarter-baked and discordant prejudices that pass for his ideas has been hostility to free trade. It perfectly expresses his adolescent delight in executive swagger, the objectives of which are of negligible importance to him; all that is important is that the spotlight follows where his impulses propel him.

—George Will, Pulitzer-winning conservative writer & television commentator

Anything that Trump has done would be the end for a British politician.

—Ricky Gervais, comedian, actor, writer, producer, director, singer, musician

Donald Trump represents a threat both to the party and to the country. I believe he makes the world far more dangerous. I believe he puts America’s economy in jeopardy. And his temperament is totally unsuited for the presidency.

—Mitt Romney, former Republican governor and presidential candidate

Donald Trump is the worst president in the history of the world.

—D. Watkins, Editor-at-large for Salon and professor at University of Baltimore

Trump may be setting the U.S. on the path to World War III.

—Bob Corker, Republican senator from Tennessee

A Manhattan-based playboy who has had life handed to him on a silver platter might look like a strange vehicle for the pain of the American heartland. But Trump is a winner with the soul of a loser: He is consumed by imagined slights to his fragile ego, hypersensitive to the pretensions of smarty-pants liberals, a man who spends many hours a day watching cable news and seething with anger. He is also an anti-intellectual with the soul of a postmodernist: He believes that reality is something that can be bent into any shape you choose provided that you have enough power.

—Adrian Wooldridge, political editor of The Economist

Trump’s main topics are money and himself—maybe his only topics.

—David Owen, staff writer at The New Yorker

I, of all people, am aware that there is some irony in the fact that I am leaving while a man who has bragged on tape about his history of sexual assault sits in the Oval Office. Donald Trump never laughs.

―Al Franken, former Senator and comedian

I think the entire Trump views on immigration are heartless.

―Bernie Sanders, Senator and former presidential candidate

When I ran for office, I said he is a chaos candidate and would be a chaos president. Unfortunately, chaos organizes the presidency right now.

―Jeb Bush, former Governor of Florida and presidential candidate

Trump is a sniveling coward, a pathological liar, utterly amoral, a narcissist at a level I don’t think this country’s ever seen and a serial philanderer

―Ted Cruz, Senator and former presidential candidate

We’re living through a time when fundamental rights, civic virtue, freedom of the press, even facts and reason are under assault like never before.

―Hillary Clinton, former Secretary of State and presidential candidate

PREFACE

This book is titled What’s Wrong With Trump? and is overwhelmingly negative. It’s extremely difficult for me to find anything good to say about him, but he did accomplish one good thing in over seven decades on the planet—and I am willing to publicly recognize his limited good work before I deal with the abundant bad.



Wollman Rink is a public ice-skating rink in Manhattan’s Central Park. It opened in 1949 thanks to $600,000 donated by Kate Wollman (1869–1955) to honor her family.

The rink was closed in 1980 for a planned two-year/$9.1 million renovation. After six years of non-completion, New Yorker Donald Trump persuaded Mayor Ed Koch to let him complete the work in four months at a cost of $3 million. Trump finished the job on-time and below-budget. He was rewarded by being allowed to have the Trump name on the Wollman website, on the walls of the rink, on a Zamboni ice resurfacer and on a carousel in the park.

The world might be better if Trump concentrated on parks, not politics. —Michael N. Marcus

(UPDATE: Trump deserves compliments for pardoning Jack Johnson and commuting the sentence of Alice Johnson. If he produces lasting peace in Korea and the Middle East, then his good thing total will increase to five. Maybe he could even reach six.)

FOREWORD

by Jerome Kowalski, Esq.

The great American experiment was born 242 years ago, led by its first president, who could not tell a lie; and is now dying under the leadership of its 45th president―who cannot tell the truth.

This great American experiment realized its underlying premise that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, under the inspired leadership of Abraham Lincoln. That aspiration and basic premise of the American experiment is being torn asunder by its current president who believes that only white Christian men are endowed by the Creator with inalienable rights.

America came of age in the industrial revolution. Men of great wealth, business prowess and substance―like the Mellons, the Carnegies and the Rockefellers―built industrial empires that ultimately benefitted all Americans, albeit if the paths they chose for doing so were unseemly, seen through the prism of today’s business ethos.

America is today being undone by a president who has serially failed at almost every endeavor he pursued: a man with a uniquely reverse Midas touch, turning every bit of gold he touches into dross.

When the western world was threatened with virtual extinction at the hands of a tyrant in the middle of the twentieth century, the nation was brought together as never before by a president whose popularity caused him to be elected four times. Today, America is being led by a president who has divided the nation as never before and who embraces every tyrant in the world.

America historically required the highest ethical standards of its presidents. Nelson Rockefeller was denied a presidential nomination because he had divorced. Nixon was ousted for his own banal dishonesty. Bill Clinton was impeached because of his sexual assault of an intern and his subsequent dissembling when asked about the affair. Today, we have a president who is a serial sexual predator who arrogantly boasts of his misogyny.

America reached new zeniths of greatness under a youthful president in the 1960s who took to Washington with him the best and brightest. Today, America is led by a president who took to Washington the most corrupt, bungling and dishonest team of sycophants the world has ever seen.

In this remarkable book, prolific author Michael N. Marcus presents the catalog of horror, sleaze, dishonesty, criminality, incompetence and indifference to integrity that are the hallmarks of the presidency of Donald J. Trump.

Trump’s unlikely ascent to the presidency epitomizes H. L. Mencken’s trenchant observation that nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the average American.

Trump’s populist stance has gained widespread support from a lumpen mass of the populace, characterized as his base which exalts Trump’s purported unique ability to say what’s on his mind.

But―like everything else about Trump―that notion is a lie, a canard, a falsehood. He says only what he knows his base wants to hear, with total indifference to its truthfulness.

Trump’s statements on policy have the firmness of Jell-O.

He is said to be a man of many opinions. He often expresses different opinions on the same subject several times a week; and, most often, he or his gang of thieves take steps that are totally inconsistent with each of his many erratic