Leadership and heart
US presidents have brought varying degrees of humanity to the job; this is the first time one has been utterly devoid of it
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Well-informed Precipice reader that you are, I' would imagine you’ve already seen this:
“Happy Easter to all, including the Radical Left Lunatics who are fighting and scheming so hard to bring Murderers, Drug Lords, Dangerous Prisoners, the Mentally Insane, and well known MS-13 Gang Members and Wife Beaters, back into our Country. Happy Easter also to the WEAK and INEFFECTIVE Judges and Law Enforcement Officials who are allowing this sinister attack on our Nation to continue, an attack so violent that it will never be forgotten! Sleepy Joe Biden purposefully allowed Millions of CRIMINALS to enter our Country, totally unvetted and unchecked, through an Open Borders Policy that will go down in history as the single most calamitous act ever perpetrated upon America. He was, by far, our WORST and most Incompetent President, a man who had absolutely no idea what he was doing — But to him, and to the person that ran and manipulated the Auto Pen (perhaps our REAL President!), and to all of the people who CHEATED in the 2020 Presidential Election in order to get this highly destructive Moron Elected, I wish you, with great love, sincerity, and affection, a very Happy Easter!!!
It’s of a piece with some previous holiday behavior:
Trump’s Easter Sunday attack on his foes immediately joins the canon of off-the-wall messages from holidays past. On Christmas Day in 2023, he famously went after Special Counsel Jack Smith.
“ROT IN HELL,” Trump wrote — in a message directed at Smith and other foes. “AGAIN, MERRY CHRISTMAS!”
On Mother’s Day 2023, the president directed his message to the moms of his enemies.
“Happy Mother’s Day to ALL, in particular the Mothers, Wives and Lovers of the Radical Left Fascists, Marxists, and Communists who are doing everything within their power to destroy and obliterate our once great Country,” Trump wrote. “Please make these complete Lunatics and Maniacs Kinder, Gentler, Softer and, most importantly, Smarter, so that we can, quickly, MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!!!”
Then there’s that time he did try to convey some hint of understanding Easter. Here’s what he came up with:
When asked in 2016 what Easter means to him, incredibly Trump made no mention of God, crucifixion, atonement, resurrection or even of Jesus himself:
Well, it really means something very special. I’m going to church in an hour from now and it’s going to be – it’s a beautiful church. I’m in Florida. And it’s just a very special time for me. And it really represents family and get-together and – and something, you know, if you’re a – a Christian, it’s just a very important day.
Here’s another glimpse into the depth of his theological formation:
That’s not an anomaly. Here is Trump’s response when asked by the columnist, Cal Thomas, what Jesus means to him:
Jesus to me is somebody I can think about for security and confidence. Somebody I can revere in terms of bravery and in terms of courage and, because I consider the Christian religion so important, somebody I can totally rely on in my own mind.
One big thing that’s currently on the world’s plate, and certainly Trump’s, is the Ukraine situation. As we know, the spin-free condensed version of its essence is that Russia invaded and annexed Crimea in 2014, fomented unrest in the Donbas, and then launched an all-out attack on its sovereign neighbor in late winter 2022, using missiles, tanks, ground troops, kidnapping and rape to inflict misery across Ukraine. The carnage continues to this day.
If aggressor and aggressee could somehow reconcile and commit to a future of goodwill (impossible while Putin still rules Russia), it would involve sincere contrition on Russia’s part, and absolution and healing on Ukraine’s. That’s hard to do. I remember the 1980s, when Japan emerged as a major player in world manufacturing and the US market for cars and other consumer goods. People old enough to remember World War II, and especially those who had fought in it, were quite vocal about refusing to even consider buying such products from that island nation, even though its national character had completely transformed after its defeat in 1945.
But I have personally known some Russians and some Ukrainians, and they’re the same mixture of virtue and fallibility one finds anywhere. If they could surmount what the present Russian leadership has imposed, I think the idea of being peaceable neighbors with a mutually productive relationship would appeal to them. There would have to be difficult conversations, tears, raw accounting for damage of the ugliest sort, and a supportive international community. It would have to involve the spiritual level.
But true to form, the VSG thinks an appeal to the juicy business opportunities available is the winning sales pitch:
Russia and Ukraine will be able to "do big business" with the United States if they secure a peace deal in the next week, U.S. President Donald Trump wrote in a social media post on April 20.
Trump's comments come shortly after he threatened to pull U.S. support from the peace process altogether if either Russia or Ukraine caused negotiations to stall.
"Hopefully Russia and Ukraine will make a deal this week," Trump wrote on Truth Social.
"Both will then start to do big business with the United States of America, which is thriving, and make a fortune."
But I don’t want to make this about posing the question of what he may have done right in these first 100 days of his second administration. For one thing, the obvious answer is “very little,” but that’s not the main concern.
Presidents, being fallible creatures like the rest of us, have all fallen short of whatever their proclaimed ideals and visions for the nation were. My personal hero (and I don’t have too many of those, given public figures’ knack for disappointing), Ronald Reagan, made a mess of relations with Iran, muddying the resolute opposition to the Khomeini theocracy he’d come into office with. But he did so because it tore him up to think of the Americans held captive in Beirut (during Lebanon’s long and multilayered civil war) by Iranian proxy terrorists.
A president’s heart should be involved in policy decisions, even given the inherent risk of miscalculations, because the core objective is to do what’s right, and in the deepest sense, that means working toward a situation in which all parties flourish and harmony is cultivated.
That’s not how the VSG sees it. His first concern is whether he personally “wins,” and the second is whether the US “wins,” so he can thereby be glorified.
We’ve always liked signs of humanity in our presidents. We’ve liked them to have dogs and / or cats in their families. We’ve liked them to like the outdoors (beyond the golf course). We’ve liked for their senses of humor to be laced with some graciousness and even self-deprecation. We like presidents with strong families. One of the most memorable anecdotes from Harry Truman’s years in office was when he came to his daughter’s defense when a Washington Post reviewer panned her vocal performance at Constitution Hall.
The VSG is incapable of demonstrating humanity. That has ramifications for world-stage developments. He’s unable to react to what Ukraine has suffered for three years the way a normal human being does. He finds insults he hurls at others - and, indeed, insults and attacks hurled at him (as evidenced by making Rick Perry, who called Trump “a cancer on conservatism” his energy secretary, or Marco Rubio, who, in 2016, called Trump a “con artist” with a “sweat mustache” and is now Trump’s Secretary of State) irrelevant to his relationships with people. It’s just the way sharp-elbowed swaggerers in his world interact.
It doesn’t lead to a world with maximal flourishing and harmony. That stuff’s for suckers, anyway. It’s all about dying with the most toys.
Which gets me back to a core tenet of Trumpism, the movement that sprang up immediately after his campaign announcement in 2015, and has utterly transformed the Republican Party. That would be the relishing of stomping those with whom one ideologically differs into the dust. One sees it in the column titles every day at Townhall, where the writers and editors love to characterize someone on their side as “destroying” or “obliterating” some opponent on cable TV or the House or Senate floor.
As I’ve asked before: Given that no political (or even military) outcome is ever permanent, what do Trumpists think happens to all those commie perverts they’ve stomped into the dust? Do they not consider that they reach out to each other and plan their comeback? As more than one pundit has asked, what will be the MAGA Right’s reaction if a President AOC finds unconstitutional ways to remove its voices from the public square?
Are we stuck with this monster until 2029? It looks like it. That makes the task of restoring humanity on a societal scale even more daunting.
But, really, what else is worth working on?