If there is a twelve-step program for superlative dependency, someone should throw Donald Trump an intervention. Can you imagine his first support group meeting? “Hi, my name is Donald, and I’m a hyperbole abuser. In fact, I am the most marvelous, magnificent, outstanding hyperbole abuser who was ever born.” Needless to say, his road to linguistic recovery will be long and winding.
According to the Donald, every person he has hired or appointed is absolutely fantastic, even those he later fired or forced to resign. He claims (incorrectly) to have signed more legislation in his first six months than any other president. He once gave an unremarkable, but relatively gaffe-free, speech to a joint session of Congress. He claims it was the best oration ever uttered in the House chamber.
The same is true on the flip side. Trump never experiences run-of-the-mill adversity. It’s always horrendously horrible, beyond all compare. In what had to have been the absolute least uplifting commencement address on record, Trump told Coast Guard Academy graduates in May that he is the world’s most mistreated pol. Here’s how he characterized his allegedly unparalleled plight: “No politician in history, and I say this with great surety, has been treated worse or more unfairly.” Never mind that other politicians – at home and abroad – have been assassinated, kidnapped and imprisoned. Donald has to endure CNN and Saturday Night Live. Cue the violin section. Boo hoo. Boo hoo.
Actually, Trump, in many ways, is the most Teflon president in modern history, a rare superlative he’s likely to reject. Throughout the campaign, and during the first six months of his presidency, he got by with more atrocities, flubs and mistakes than any of his predecessors. Who else could have mocked John McCain’s war record, belittled a Gold Star mother and revealed a proclivity for sexual assault, only to go on and become president? Trump entered the office with an expectations bar set so low a Trinidad limbo dancer couldn’t shimmy under it.
Let’s take a close look at just one class of White House transgressions, and compare the repercussions for Trump with those of his predecessors. Numerous presidential tongues have taken bad slips when it comes to declaring a person’s guilt or innocence. This can be quite problematic since the government’s prosecutorial arm – the U.S. Justice Department – serves under the president’s command. Legal experts, including Harvard’s Noah Feldman, say it is an impeachable “abuse of authority” for a president to accuse someone of committing a crime without evidence. It has happened not infrequently over the years. And, in every instance prior to January 20, 2016, the gaffe provoked an immediate dustup of criticism, usually followed by some sort of presidential mea culpa.
In 1970, President Nixon said Charles Manson was “guilty, directly or indirectly, of eight murders.” Since Manson’s trial had just gotten underway, the president’s declaration of guilt caused considerable pandemonium. Nixon apologized and walked his premature verdict back. In 1980, President Carter accused former attorney general Ramsey Clark and nine other Americans of a crime for defying his order to stay out of Iran. Carter’s declaration of guilt triggered a huge political blow up. Harvard’s Laurence Tribe called his remarks “a terrible blunder.” In 1988, President Reagan stunned his staff when he declared that Oliver North was not guilty in the Iran-Contra scandal, days after a grand jury indicted North on 23 charges. In 1998, President Clinton drew heavy criticism for saying that he didn’t think there should be a plea bargain in the Unabomber case because the defendant, Theodore J. Kaczynski, “if he’s guilty, killed a lot of people deliberately.” In 2009, President Obama opened a week-long media frenzy when he said the Cambridge, Massachusetts police department acted “stupidly” in the arrest of a black Harvard professor who was trying to get into his own home. Obama also took flack for implying that the alleged architect of the September 11 terrorist attacks would be found guilty and executed, should he be tried in U.S. Courts.
Trump, of course, soars far above the separation of powers concept, moonlighting as a wannabe Judge Judy. He pronounces someone’s criminal guilt on a near daily basis. Using Twitter as his gavel, the Donald dispenses his verdicts with terms like: “guilty as hell”, “totally illegal” and “so illegal”. The president has dispersed imaginary convictions for Hillary Clinton, her former campaign manager, John Podesta and his brother Tony; Obama and his former national security advisor, Susan Rice, and his former attorney general, Loretta Lynch; and recently fired FBI director James Comey. Just this morning, he accused his own attorney general and the acting FBI director of ignoring Hillary Clinton’s unspecified and unproven “crimes”. Unlike his predecessors, Trump has managed to issue these totally bogus claims of criminality against his political opponents with total impunity. In fact, they have become a staple of his presidency, akin to an innocuous proclamation for, say, National Condiment Appreciation Week.
Aside from a couple of obscure blogs, like the one you’re reading, there has been no public clamor about Trump bludgeoning his opponents with presidential criminal convictions. Yet, a single similar transgression by previous presidents kept the chattering class in a constant scold for days. This is just one of many ways in which this president has been held to a far lower standard than those who preceded him. There is an abundance of deficiencies that would invite rapt attention to any other president, but where Trump gets a pass. Like his speeches with the prosaic quality of a telephone book, his five-word sentence fragments that are utterly without meaning, his inability to know just what it is he doesn’t know, and his innate lack of intellectual curiosity.
Unfortunately, there is a lesson here for future presidents: If you want to deflect attention from your inherent inadequacies, be sure to collude with a foreign adversary, obstruct justice and tell lots of lies. Nobody will notice the other foibles.
The way he behaves, the way those around him behave and the way Congressional Republicans behave is pure madness.