Official White House Photo by Shealah Craighead
President Donald J. Trump in the Oval Office on Dec. 21, 2018.
When Donald Trump announced his sudden decision to begin withdrawing U.S. troops from Syria and Afghanistan, I couldn’t help thinking about all those peace marches I participated in circling the old and new federal buildings in Milwaukee with some of the most decent, most moral people I’ve ever known. Could one of the most indecent, immoral presidents in American history really transform himself into “Peacenik Trump,” hero of the anti-war movement? Surely not. We still remember “Madman Trump” bragging about the size of his nuclear button and threatening to rain down “fire and fury like the world has never seen” upon millions of human beings in North Korea.
Many pacifists opposing war are deeply committed Christians, but they’re not those right-wing Christians supporting Trump’s racial and religious bigotry. The Christians at anti-war rallies shelter and support immigrants and refugees fleeing violence in their own lands instead of slamming America’s door in their faces.
As a country, we’re certainly long overdue for a thoughtful national debate about what we’re achieving in the endless war since the 2001 attack on America. After 17 years, with Osama bin Laden long gone and other perpetrators imprisoned and tortured without trial, U.S. troops continue to fight all over the world, seemingly forever. So, sure, let’s have an intelligent national debate about war and peace and ending endless wars.
Big Gut, Small Brain
But, of course, Trump has never encouraged intelligent national debate. He simply woke up one morning and sent out a tweet immediately withdrawing all U.S. troops from Syria and half of its troops from Afghanistan. There were no military plans assuring troop safety. No one in the military—and nobody who knew anything about what’s going on in those countries—was even consulted.
Rather than wasting time on policy debates, Trump simply consults his own ample gut, which he brags is smarter than most people’s brains. Trump doesn’t rely on facts when making decisions. Constant lying is the most consistent feature of his presidency. The Washington Post’s fact checker documented an average of 15 lies or misleading statements a day from Trump in 2018—nearly tripling his 2017 mendacity rate from his first year as president.
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Nearly everyone realizes the president rarely tells the truth, but many dismiss his pathological lying as a harmless presidential eccentricity. It’s not. His public dishonesty makes negotiating with our president impossible. That’s on glaring display in the non-negotiations to end Trump’s government shutdown. It also stymies countries seeking international agreements with an American president who routinely trashes international agreements.
Every measure passed last week by Democrats controlling the House of Representatives to end Trump’s government shutdown was part of a bipartisan agreement with the Senate that Trump supported. That was way back… several weeks ago. All it took was criticism from Rush Limbaugh for Trump to reverse himself. Now, he says, he’ll keep the government shut down for years unless Democrats agree to spend billions of U.S. tax dollars on a wall he promised voters Mexico would pay for.
Beyond the daily lies, Trump’s presidency has exposed the two biggest lies of his life. The first is that he’s a master negotiator. It’s clear Trump never read The Art of the Deal, his own best-selling book actually written by Tony Schwartz, who has said of Trump: “He’s incapable of reading a book, much less writing one.” Trump’s brilliant negotiating strategy is to insist Democrats waste billions on a worthless 2,000-mile wall the majority of Americans oppose.
The second lie about Trump’s life is that he must be smart because he’s a rich businessman. The spotlight of the presidency exposed just how little Trump actually knows about… well, anything. That might seem like an overstatement, but he’s seriously impaired. Imagine how little any of us would know if, like Trump, we were incapable of reading. He’s either functionally illiterate or possesses such an infinitesimal, childlike attention span that he can’t concentrate on reading anything more than a few minutes. The intelligence experts who prepare daily presidential briefings on complex world problems need to reduce Trump’s reports to pictures and flashy graphics.
That such a profoundly ignorant man could still retain an enormous family real estate fortune despite multiple bankruptcies is a public testament to the overwhelming bias of America’s laws and tax system in favor of the wealthiest among us.
There’s a very good reason why lack of education is one of the most important predictors of support for Trump and why Trump once publicly exclaimed, “I love the poorly educated!” That’s why no one in the anti-war movement would ever be foolish enough to believe any U.S. military withdrawals promised by this president. They know most of what he says never happens.
