Let’s get one thing straight before Election Day — and before nearly half the electorate votes for him: Donald Trump was never remotely qualified to run for president of the United States of America, let alone to hold that office.
Likewise, although he still pathetically boasts about being “like, really smart” and attending a great business school, Trump never had the brain power, seriousness or attention to detail necessary to become a legit businessman.
That judgment doesn't come from me; it’s what people closest to him have said for decades, from the journalist who first warned us about Trump to the ghostwriter who regrets working on “The Art of the Deal” to the people who worked most closely with him during his four years degrading the presidency, shredding political norms and tearing our country apart.
And let’s not forget that professor at the Wharton School of Business who privately told friends that Trump was the dumbest student he’d ever encountered during his lengthy teaching career.
Protected by a fortune from his father while playing the part of a canny real estate developer, Trump repeatedly bankrupted himself upward. The “King of Debt” learned early on how to profit from public money and make the public pay for his mistakes. Wayne Barrett, the journalist who saw Trump’s grifting ways from the get-go, wrote: “Like his father, Donald Trump has pushed each deal to the limit, taking from it whatever he can get, turning political connections into private profits at public expense."
Occupying the White House allowed him to amp up his shameless grifting and shady dealing, from profiting on his office via Washington’s Trump International Hotel (which has since been sold and rebranded) to selling Trump superhero NFTs and golden sneakers and hawking Bibles that encourage people to laugh off all that nonsense about the separation of church and state.
So as we at last (and yet somehow too soon) come to Election Day 2024 and hear from ever more prominent people that Trump is unfit and unqualified to be president — often from the highest level people who worked with him during his first term of occasionally occupying the Oval Office — we should not forget that he was never fit, or qualified, to be president.
Indeed, one could easily argue, as people have for years, that he is not qualified or fit to serve in any job in any capacity.
It’s difficult to imagine a compulsive liar with dozens of sexual assault allegations against him being hired by any legitimate business. He may have recently play-acted working at McDonald’s, and for whatever weird psychological reasons may insist that Kamala Harris never worked there in college (as she evidently did). But the larger truth is that his beloved purveyor of “hamberders” would never have hired him, given his lengthy record of accusations, indictments and now felony convictions.
Would you hire a guy who sees most of your customers as “the enemy within”?
It may seem a small point in a moment where we appear on the brink of losing our democracy and seeing Trump’s critics face retribution, but any history not written by the MAGA faithful will note that Trump had no business running for president in the first place. He had no public service experience and knew next to nothing about governance or foreign affairs or, it seemed, much of anything else — except of course how New York political bosses and the New York mob operated, along with all the lessons in bullying and fighting back he absorbed from his father and his later mentor, the ruthless Roy Cohn.
Even when he ran for a second term in 2020, after being impeached twice, Trump — in his singularly lazy and incurious fashion — managed to remain utterly unqualified. His handlers tried to trick him into paying attention to national security briefings. His infamous “executive time” spent watching Fox News every morning and his frequent golf outings kept him away from the Oval Office. He was a part-time president but, as throughout his career, a full-time liar and grifter.
He has no interest in serving anyone but himself, not even his most loyal followers. Despite what Trump may claim at his 2024 campaign rallies, many of the most senior members of his administration, including his vice president, have refused to support his candidacy this time around. Many prominent former military leaders also oppose him, some going so far as to call him a dangerous authoritarian.
In every way one can imagine — and even in ways no one could ever have imagined — Trump has proved himself, as Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell told an aide after the 2020 election, “a despicable human being.” According to journalist Michael Tackett's account in his new McConnell biography “The Price of Power,” the legendary Kentucky senator also described Trump as “stupid” and “ill-tempered.”
Trump appears to be a sad physical specimen, likely due to his atrocious fast-food diet, but as bad as his body looks (driving all those childish superhero fantasy posts, laughable claims and compulsive comments about male genitalia), the condition of his mind is more concerning: Hundreds of mental health experts have signed statements warning Americans of his narcissism, sadism and sociopathy — all now made worse by what is widely perceived as obvious cognitive decline, although the corporate media avoids the subject as much as possible.
If "sane-washing" isn’t the Oxford Dictionary’s word of the year, I’ll be gobsmacked.
But, again, none of this is new. Nearly any New Yorker could have told you that “The Donald” was a grasping, self-serving dude as far back as the 1980s. For years, publisher Graydon Carter referred to Trump as a "short-fingered vulgarian" in Spy magazine. New York icons like actor Robert De Niro and author and humorist Fran Lebowitz know precisely who he is and are disgusted by what they see — and don’t consider him a real New Yorker. Despite his ego-fluffing rally at Madison Square Garden — during which he displayed his fascist tendencies before the entire world — the New Yorkers he still longs to impress most remain, to put it mildly, unimpressed.
Any American who was halfway paying attention to the news could have concluded that Trump was a race-baiting nutcase when he lied about Muslims celebrating the 9/11 attacks and pushed his crackpot "birther" theory that Barack Obama hadn't been born in Hawaii. Back in 1989, Trump paid for full-page ads in The New York Times and other city papers saying that the young men known as the Central Park Five were guilty and implied they should face the death penalty. (Those five men spent years in prison before being fully exonerated.)
Perhaps the ultimate irony at the end of that tale of Trump race-baiting is that those young men were falsely convicted of rape and demonized by a man who, many years later, would be found liable by a civil jury for a sexual assault committed around the same time — an assault that the judge described as rape, "as many people commonly understand the word."
Trump kicked off his 2016 run for president by saying of Mexican immigrants, “They’re bringing crime. They’re bringing drugs. They’re rapists.” We would soon come to understand that he was, as always, talking about himself.
In my career as a medical editor, I once managed a journal on geriatric nursing. I was struck by an editorial that pointed out that as we age we tend not to change but to become more concentrated versions of ourselves. Trump was never fit for anything (he even cheats at golf) and was never qualified to hold any public office. For nearly a decade, we have been witnessing all of his bad traits worsening and degrading into a tainted, bitter sludge.
Yes, I know that's exactly what his cult followers like most about him: In their fantasy universe, this rich scoundrel is the political outsider they need to blow up the system that has let them down. In fact, this coddled man-child has sold those people on the age-old idea of blaming others for their lot in life and encouraged them, with the help of Fox News and far worse forms of right-wing media, to swallow the lies they want to hear all day long.
Perhaps Trump’s greatest con of all, abetted by the enablers and grifters of the so-called manosphere, has been to sell young men on the idea that he is a manly guy, someone to emulate. Unlike Trump, actual men don’t degrade women and possess both humility and the capacity for normal human emotions, such as empathy and sorrow.
None of his so-called plans or policies will improve any American lives except for those who are already doing very well. He’s not going to bring back manufacturing or support unions, or increase the minimum wage or steer us, as Obama and Joe Biden have largely done, toward a better economic future. (Again, don’t listen to little old me; listen to more than 80 Nobel Prize laureates, including 23 economists.) He will destroy our relations with our historic NATO allies, destroy public education, tear apart our already thin social safety net and end our chance to fight climate change.
This fake Christian will “stand back and stand by” as the Supreme Court allows religious zealots to tell the rest of us how we can live our lives. Unlike during in his first term, there will be no serious adults with any expertise on hand to stop him.
Given that this country was founded by members of many different religious sects whose members were too devout and, arguably, too unhinged to fit comfortably in the Old World, Trump's right-wing radical Supreme Court justices apparently believe that our republic should go out that way too.
Last week, my wife and I found ourselves in a restaurant in the neighborhood of Cleveland known as Ohio City. We were sitting next to a group of diners, one of them a young woman decked out with inflatable versions of the Statue of Liberty’s crown and torch. My wife asked why and she told us, smiling broadly, that she had become a U.S. citizen that day. We congratulated her, and I joked that she now knows more about American history and civics than most of us.
When we left the restaurant, we were forced to wonder what version of America this brand-new citizen has signed up for. Will it be the innovative, diverse, prosperous one we thought we knew, where facts are facts, expertise is valued and our neighbors keep their religious beliefs out of politics? Or will she find herself in a plutocratic theocracy ruled by ignorance and led by weak men who claim to be strong?
One thing is certain: Donald Trump lacks any understanding of what has made American democracy, flawed and imperfect as it has always been, a beacon of hope for the world. We can only hope that enough of that understanding, and enough faith in that promise, can be found in the rest of us.
