Slate: Donald Trump's Personality Is an Impeachable Offense [View all]

[highplainsdem]

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2019/04/mueller-report-donald-trump-egomaniac-bad-boss.html

Donald Trump has committed so many brazen acts of cruelty, dishonesty, and stupidity in full view of the public that it’s not really a surprise to hear about the cruel, dishonest, and stupid things he does behind closed doors. But the lightly redacted version of special counsel Robert Mueller’s report that was released on Thursday morning is still a revelatory document. Read as a profile of the president—a piece of reporting informed by interviews with sources under oath—the Mueller report shades in the portrait of Trump that’s already imprinted on our brains. It also makes it clearer than it’s ever been that the president drives everyone around him absolutely mad.

The Donald Trump that readers encounter in the report takes great pains to avoid information that will cause him any emotional discomfort, even if he’ll eventually have to confront it when it blows up into a P.R. disaster. Former White House communications director Hope Hicks told the special counsel that she tried to tell the president about emails documenting how Donald Trump Jr. organized the June 2016 meeting between Trump campaign officials and a Kremlin-linked lawyer at Trump Tower. Hicks suggested they release the emails to get ahead of the story. “The President said he did not want to know about it and they should not go to the press,” the Mueller report says. “Hicks warned the President that the emails were ‘really bad’ … but the President was insistent that he did not want to talk about it and said he did not want details.” At another meeting, Hicks said, Jared Kushner tried to show Trump a folder of documents that Kushner was supposed to provide to congressional committees investigating Russian interference in the 2016 election. According to the report, the president “stopped Kushner and said he did not want to know about it, shutting the conversation down.”

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The report depicts Trump as a haughty child of privilege convinced that his social capital and powers of personality are strong enough to make any negative accusations against him (even the true ones) dissipate on their own. Chris Christie told investigators that Trump was shocked to learn that “this Russia thing” was still a thing even after Michael Flynn left the administration. “Flynn met with the Russians. That was the problem. I fired Flynn. It’s over,” Christie said Trump told him over lunch in February 2017, the day after Flynn resigned.

Trump’s seeming naïveté about the severity of “this Russia thing” and his confidence that any repercussions would be absorbed by his underlings isn’t merely evidence of his willful ignorance and stunted capacity for critical thinking. It’s the logical response of a man who has, for a lifetime, evaded consequences for his bad behavior (creating a scam university, doing sketchy tax stuff) and been rewarded with the presidency thanks to his worst tendencies (racist provocations, bragging about sexual assault).

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Trump also thinks the same primitive, manipulative tactics that work on him will work on everyone around him. Christie told investigators that, in early 2017, the president told him to call then–FBI Director James Comey, who was launching an investigation into Russian election interference, to tell Comey that Trump “really like[s] him.” “Tell [Comey] he’s part of the team,” Trump told Christie. Trump’s conviction that Comey could be swayed with secondhand flattery delivered via the governor of New Jersey is so foolish it’s almost sad.

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In these please-like-me anecdotes, Trump comes off as deeply pathetic. He appears to be a socially inept child who lives in a fantasy world that revolves around his own ego, believes no rules apply to him, barely maintains a weak grasp on logic, and is desperate to be loved. None of these observations are groundbreaking. But it’s still both troubling and satisfying to read these firsthand accounts of Trump’s failures as a president, boss, American, and human being in what was commissioned to be a dispassionate government report. It’s not just Trump’s political opponents and those beset by #resistance brain who think he’s unqualified to lead a nation, a business, a family, or a productive life. The people working hardest to protect him think so, too.

Of course, they're still working to protect that vicious child, putting his interests above those of the country, which fits perfectly with his fantasy world.