Photograph Source: 内閣官房内閣広報室 – CC BY 4.0
All presidents bring their own characteristics and governing styles to the White House. Lyndon Johnson, who assumed the presidency in the most awful of circumstances, was infatuated with himself, taking a LBJ bust to the Vatican to present to the Pope. Ronald Reagan arrived at the White House so grossly ill informed that a Washington Post reporter remarked that the “task of watering the arid desert between Reagan’s ears is a challenging one for his aides.” Reagan’s principal biographer, Lou Cannon, wrote that Reagan “may have been the one president in history of the republic who saw his election as a chance to get some rest.” George H.W. Bush was particularly nasty during the 1987-1988 campaign, so he had to prove he was really a good guy. Bush was only the third president in two centuries to be inaugurated with both houses of Congress in the control of the opposition, so he had to reach out to Democrats.
In our 250 years of history, we have never had to endure as president as ignorant and uncouth as Donald Trump. His rancid and irredeemable character was unveiled in his second week in the White House when an Army helicopter collided with a commercial airliner over the Potomac River. The day after the tragedy, Trump blamed the Federal Aviation Authority for hiring disabled people as air traffic controllers, saying they suffered from “intellectual disability, psychiatric disability, and dwarfism.”
Trump didn’t mention that on his first full day in the White House, he had fired all members of the aviation security advisory committee that had been created in 1989 after the terrorist bombing of Pan Am flight 103 over Scotland. Instead of leading and performing the traditional presidential duty of consoler-in-chef, Trump chose to be combative and point the finger of blame.
Trump’s favorite target is the diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs throughout the government, particularly in the Pentagon. In his second day in office, Trump issued an executive order to eliminate DEI programs throughout the federal government. Trump has falsely accused the Agency for International Development (AID) of funding a DEI musical in Ireland; a “transgender comic book” in Peru; and financing sex changes and “LGTB activism” in Guatemala. As DEI programs are designed to widen the act of hiring to pull in more diverse applicants, Trump’s actions are an expression of his white supremacist agenda.
In taking steps to dismantle AID, Trump froze all foreign aid for 90 days, which endangered the lives of participants in AID trials for new medicines and procedures. The dismantling of AID, which distributes tens of billions of dollars’ worth of foreign aid annually, assures the spread of disease as well as delays in the development of vaccines and new treatments. TB alone kills over one million people per year and makes an additional ten million people ill.
As a candidate, Trump pledged to get “transgender insanity the hell out of our schools” and “keep men out of women’s sports.” On his first full day as president, he signed an executive order barring transgender athletes, thus “restoring biological truth to the federal government. In doing so, Trump’s bigotry regarding transgender athletes in women’s sports stopped 10 transgender athletes from competing against more than 530,000 women in the NCAA, which amounts to .000056 of those participating in college athletics. (Overall, transgender women represent just 0.6 percent of the American population.)
Donald Trump is particularly unusual, applying a style of meanness and mendacity that has worsened in his second term in the White House. On his second day in office, Trump fired the Coast Guard commandant, Linda Fagan, who was given 60 days to move out of her house at Joint Base Anacostia. But Trump ordered her to leave her quarters in three hours, leaving the commandant little time to remove all of her personal effects. What could be more petty and personal?
Trump’s meanness and mendacity over a period of several weeks have violated a congressional law that structured AID as a stand-alone agency; a congressional law that stated 30 days’ notice and “substantive rationale” were needed to remove inspectors general; First Amendment rights that blocked the freezing of domestic grants and other government spending; the Impoundment Control Act that prevents a freeze on most foreign aid; and the ban on birthright citizenship that violates the 14th Amendment.
Trump’s revenge and vengeance campaign has led to the nomination of a number of unqualified and unsavory individuals to important Cabinet posts and senior positions. One of the worst of them is Anthony Tata, a retired brigadier general, to become undersecretary of defense for personnel and readiness. Tata has a history of Islamophobia and other inflammatory comments, once calling former President Barack Obama a “terrorist leader.” Meanwhile, Trump’s revenge campaign against the Department of Justice, FBI, CIA, NSA and the Pentagon continues apace, while uncleared moles in the name of Elon Musk rummage through private and classified personnel files.
