Excerpt: "The only people in America who didn’t seem to understand that making Trump president was the equivalent of handing a gun to a chimpanzee were the people who voted for him."
Yesterday we talked about Russia’s commitment to chaos as a strategy. Funnily enough, Fiona Hill just published a piece in Foreign Policy on how Putin is winning.
Hill’s strategic analysis is important—and we’ll get to it. But just as important is her eyewitness reporting on Trump as president:
I had spent just over a year serving in the Trump administration as deputy assistant to the president and senior director for European and Russian affairs on the National Security Council. Like everyone else who worked in the White House, I had, by then, learned a great deal about Trump’s idiosyncrasies. We all knew, for instance, that Trump rarely read the detailed briefing materials his staff prepared for him and that in meetings or calls with other leaders, he could never stick to an agreed-on script or his cabinet members’ recommendations. This had proved to be a major liability during those conversations, since it often seemed to his foreign counterparts as though Trump was hearing about the issues on the agenda for the first time.
When Trump was winging it, he could be persuaded of all kinds of things. If a foreign visitor or caller was one of his favored strongmen, Trump would always give the strongman’s views and version of events the benefit of the doubt over those of his own advisers. During a cabinet meeting with a visiting Hungarian delegation in May 2019, for example, Trump cut off acting U.S. Defense Secretary Patrick Shanahan, who was trying to make a point about a critical European security issue. In front of everyone, Trump told Shanahan that the autocratic Hungarian prime minister, Viktor Orban, had already explained it all to him when they had met in the Oval Office moments earlier—and that Orban knew the issue better than Shanahan did, anyway. In Trump’s mind, the Hungarian strongman simply had more authority than the American officials who worked for Trump himself. The other leader was his equal, and his staff members were not.
The past is a foreign country, so you may have forgotten that in 2015, before Trump morphed into an aspiring authoritarian, the diagnosis from basically every person in America who was not a Republican primary voter was that Trump was “manifestly unfit” for office.
What did “manifestly unfit” mean? It’s a moral judgment, not a legal definition, so there’s no way to cite chapter and verse. But a quick sketch would give you something like this: A person who…
Could not have passed a background check for the job.
Did not have any requisite experience for the job.
Did not have the cognitive ability to learn the job.
Was borderline delusional and lacked the requisite attachment to reality.
Potentially suffered from a clinical personality disorder.
None of this was about “liking” or “disliking” Trump. You could name a whole host of unsavory figures whose politics you find abhorrent—Newt Gingrich, Ted Cruz, Andrew Cuomo, Julian Castro—and you could make the case that they would be terrible presidents. That it would be very bad for America if they were to reach the Oval Office. But none of them would have been manifestly unfit.
And here’s the thing: Everyone around Trump realized this about him. Mike Pompeo knew it. Mike Pence knew it. Jim Mattis and Betsy DeVos knew it. I’d bet a watch that Kellyanne knew it, too. It wasn’t like Trump’s mental deficiencies were hidden. He wasn’t one of those crazy people who passes as sane.
The only people in America who didn’t seem to understand that making Trump president was the equivalent of handing a gun to a chimpanzee were the people who voted for him.
And in our democracy, that’s all that matters. Yay people!
