Note this kind comment from a new paid subscriber: "You are always on point. You tackle serious and divisive issues with tact and a measured coolness.” How Unfit? Dangerously UnfitIn a cover story and two interviews, Time magazine gets the malignant ex-president on the record. We can't trust a word he says.
Time magazine put Donald Trump on its cover this week with an unavoidable title: “If He Wins.” What readers find inside and online is a detailed article that largely matches the dangers plotted by “Project 2025” and its authoritarian agenda to move the country toward dictatorship. That includes mass deportations and detention camps for migrants, a once-independent Justice Department turned into a weapon of Trump’s whims and a once-nonpartisan civil service devolved into a cadre of loyalists. Time reporter Eric Cortellessa heard Trump’s plans to pardon January 6 insurrectionists, deploy the National Guard in American cities at will, give police immunity from prosecution, close the White House office responsible for pandemic preparedness, and permit red states to monitor women’s pregnancies and prosecute abortion ban violators. If you read the article you may be led to believe that Donald Trump has a systematic plan to pursue his darkest desires. But TIME also makes available a transcript of Cortellessa’s two interviews with Trump. Honestly, I barely survived the reading because it vividly displays how profoundly unfit this man is—morally and particularly intellectually—to be anywhere near the levers of power. They reveal a deeply untrustworthy man untethered from reality, swarming in lies, absorbed by grievance, unable to grapple with policy nuance and dependent on empty slogans to motivate himself. None of this is surprising, but when you read through the hours of interview material, you can see just how shallow his thinking is, how unreliable are his pronouncements and equivocations, how utterly ill-equipped he is to confront the complexities of our modern world—and, really, how crazy it is that serious people are forced to take this man seriously. My mind drifts to Rex Tillerson, Trump’s first secretary of state, privately calling his boss a “fucking moron.” (This was later confirmed in Bob Woodward and Robert Costa’s book Peril, but when asked about it Tillerson chose a more careful alternative: “It was challenging for me, coming from the disciplined, highly process-oriented Exxon Mobil corporation, to go to work for a man who is pretty undisciplined, doesn’t like to read, doesn’t read briefing reports, doesn’t like to get into the details of a lot of things, but rather just kind of says, ‘This is what I believe.’”) I often argue with myself over whether I should devote more space here to raising doubts and describing the dangers of this malignant man. But as Time puts it on the cover, fate has required us to address a reality “if he wins.” The consequences are real and require maximum seriousness and attention, especially at a time when so many other issues are roiling the body politic and could motivate Democratic voters to misunderstand their duty to their country. I’m thinking particularly about young protestors who imagine that their commitment to the Palestinian cause is a reason to reject President Biden, thereby increasing the possibility of a Trump win. Consider a few samples from Time’s Trump transcripts: On complying with the law over migrant deportations:
On the decline of violent crime and the FBI releasing statistics of a 13 percent drop in 2023:
On presidential immunity:
On his attack on the peaceful transfer of power:
On litmus tests for GOP employees to say the election was stolen:
On how his statement that he would be a dictator on day one could scare people:
So much more of this blathering. Even though Time’s reporter worked valiantly to push Trump, to get at the truth and pin him down, the overall effect is that virtually anything he says is unreliable. There’s nothing to hold him to—since nothing he says can’t be changed a day or a minute later if it serves him. Never has our country suffered a man who lies so freely and who millions of voters have chosen to reward anyway. As if—in this upside down world—his rejection of factual reality is a badge of honor. One last thing: Asked about all the former aides and cabinet secretaries who refuse to endorse or openly criticize him now, Trump either rejected them as incompetent or rejected the premise altogether.
But the truth, of course, is otherwise. In the coming months, it’s critical that many of those who know and worked for him speak out—not just once, but again and again, as the election draws closer. Remember a few from the list of two dozen chronicled by CNN last October:
It will take more than divine intervention to ensure a man like this never sees the inside of the Oval Office again. It will take all of us—and tens of millions of others who decide that they will vote and do everything they can to ensure the survival of American democracy, the promise of America, basic human decency and the primacy of factual reality. |
