This Is Who Trump Is And Always Will Be
Donald Trump is a serial sexual predator. He is an abuser. He is a compulsive liar. He has the temperament of a child. He is ignorant and has no patience for details, especially the details required for governance. And he is a salesman who loves to make deals, especially deals that will line his own pockets. This is who he is. At 70, this is what he always will be. And this is how he will be as President of the United States. And all of these attributes were on full display yesterday.
Trump started off the day being interviewed by Matt Lauer on the Today show as they presented Trump as Time magazine’s Man Of The Year. To paraphrase one clever pundit, this breaks a streak of 78 years of Time not have a white, nationalist, racist as Man Of The Year. Besides reiterating his determination to keep using his Twitter feed to keep us all up to date on his latest abuse and bypassing the “liars” in the press, Trump also promised to keep on making deals like Carrier and Softbank and abusing companies that might actually have the temerity to criticize our dear leader, because that’s what he does. I cannot find a video of the interview or a transcript (please let me know if you find one), but I believe the specific comment that Trump made was something like, “I’ll continue to make deals like that because that’s what I do”. So we can expect more of the same in this regard.
That was followed by a brief appearance in the lobby of Trump Tower after a meeting with Masayoshi Son, the CEO of Softbank. Trump announced that Softbank had agreed to invest $50 billion in the US and create a further 50,000 jobs. He then took to his Twitter feed to say that “Masa[Yoshi Son] said he would never do this had we (Trump) not won the election!” The reality, of course is slightly different. The $50 billion was already part of an investment that a fund set up by Softbank and the Government of Saudi Arabia had already decided to put into the US. The number of 50,000 jobs is also apparently pulled out of thin air. In addition, documents that Son flashed to the media in the lobby seemed to indicate part of the investment might also involve the Chinese firm Foxconn, a company that has a history of worker abuse that was uncovered during their work on manufacturing the Apple iPhone. You can be sure that any Foxconn factory in the US will be in a right-to-work state and that no union activity will be tolerated. Other investments from Softbank, which is really a technology firm, will probably be focused on Silicon Valley and other high tech areas, which is hardly going to bring jobs to the large swath of the country that voted for Trump. Finally, the real benefit to Softbank will probably come in the telecom industry. The company already owns Sprint and has already proposed a merger with T-Mobile. That merger was rightfully rejected an antitrust grounds. I’m pretty sure that the merger will now go ahead after the meeting with Trump. Sprint and T-Mobile employ over 75,000 people combined. How many of those jobs do you think will disappear when the merger is actually completed. It will certainly be a large enough number to offset 10% or 20% of those 50,000 jobs that have been “promised”.
Later in the afternoon, Trump nominated General John Kelly to head the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). This would be the third general in Trump’s cabinet. As one pundit noted, right now the Situation Room in the Trump administration would be composed of a representative from the Joint Chiefs of Staff, another general as National Security Adviser, another general as Secretary of Defense, and another general as head of the DHS. We are still waiting for the Secretary of State, but another military officer in that spot would mean that the only civilian presence in the room would presumably Mike Pence and perhaps Donald Trump if he could be bothered to show up. The preponderance of generals in Trump’s cabinet seemingly reflects a fascination that Trump never left behind from his checkered period at the New York Military Academy, where he apparently honed his talent for abuse and not playing by the rules.
Trump ended the day by taking to his Twitter feed once again and attacking Chuck Jones, the head of the union representing the Carrier workers whose jobs Trump had “saved”. Jones made the unfortunate mistake of pointing out that Trump “lied his ass off” when he told those Carrier workers that 1,100 jobs would be saved. Jones noted that the real number of jobs saved was a little over 700, while over 500 others would lose their jobs. Whereupon Trump accused Jones and his union of being responsible for the lost jobs that Trump had just claimed he saved because of…union dues.
Meanwhile, reports indicate that Trump has blown off intelligence briefings, leaving that to Mike Pence. We all know what happened the last time an inexperienced President ignored intelligence briefings and it did not end well. In addition, one of the top priorities of both Republicans and the Trump administration is the repeal of Obamacare but figuring out how to repeal it without seeing tens of millions of people lose their insurance has proven rather difficult, primarily because it’s impossible. But when GOP Congressional leaders needed to meet with the incoming administration to map out a way forward, Trump was nowhere to be seen. It was again left to Pence to attend that meeting. His cabinet picks have shown that he only has interest in loyalty and ideology and that experience is not really necessary.
Despite some in the media still clinging to the hope that Trump will become Presidential, it’s just not coming to happen. And those in the media who have clung to that belief are slowly beginning to admit the error of their ways. He will still be out there selling his latest deal and lying about the details. He will never be interested in the details of governing and he will leave that all to Pence. When Trump offered Pence the VP slot, he reportedly told Pence that he would be the most powerful VP in history, more powerful than even Cheney. That may be one promise Trump will actually keep. And he will still abuse anyone and everyone who slights him even in the most minimal way. He is an abuser by instinct. And, as Josh Marshall has noted, he will spend the next four years abusing the American people. Part of the fear that abusers create in the people they abuse is due to the fact that they are totally unpredictable so that the abused will never know what will set the abuser off. And that will be the fear that all of us will live with during a Trump presidency. We will never know when we will wake up and find that Trump has possibly started a real war or thankfully just a trade one. We will never know when some factual correction of what Trump said will prompt a tweetstorm that will cause you to fear for your life. And it is all of a piece of Trump feeding his own insecurities and exerting his power over all of us, while destroying the norms that we all have previously lived under.