You know what I think of Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump. I’ve made no secret of my contempt for him since he first metastasized across the American body politic in 2015. But what do the people who know him best think? The people who have worked in his administration? Who are members of his own party? Who support conservative causes in general? Perhaps even part of his family?
Let’s find out, shall we?
--
General James Mattis (USMC, ret), former Secretary of Defense
Trump's use of the Presidency to destroy trust in our election and to poison our respect for fellow citizens has been enabled by pseudo political leaders whose names will live in infamy as profiles in cowardice. Donald Trump is the first president in my lifetime who does not try to unite the American people - does not even pretend to try. Instead, he tries to divide us.
General John Kelly (USMC, ret), former Secretary of Homeland Security and former Chief of Staff
He certainly falls into the general definition of fascist, for sure. He never accepted the fact that he wasn’t the most powerful man in the world, and by power I mean an ability to do anything he wanted, anytime he wanted.
He’s certainly the only president that has all but rejected what America is all about, and what makes America America, in terms of our Constitution, in terms of our values, the way we look at everything, to include family and government — he’s certainly the only president that I know of, certainly in my lifetime, that was like that.
A person who admires autocrats and murderous dictators. A person that has nothing but contempt for our democratic institutions, our Constitution and the rule of law.
General Mark Milley (US Army, ret), former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Trump is a wannabe dictator. We don't take an oath to an individual. We take an oath to the Constitution, and we take an oath to the idea that is America - and we're willing to die to protect it.
A fascist to the core.
Fiona Hill, former advisor on Europe and Russia
He was extremely vulnerable to manipulation. And that became a problem for him as a president. And what I mean by that is, he had a very fragile ego, and he was very susceptible to flattery, as well as taking massive offense, as we all saw, to any kind of criticism.
Mark Esper, former Secretary of Defense
I do regard him as a threat to democracy, democracy as we know it, our institutions, our political culture, all those things that make America great and have defined us as, you know, the oldest democracy on this planet.
Trump is not fit for office because he puts himself first and I think anybody running for office should put the country first.
John Bolton, former National Security Advisor
In no arena of American affairs has the Trump aberration been more destructive than in national security. His short attention span (except on matters of personal advantage) renders coherent foreign policy almost unattainable.
Mike Pence, former Vice President
I believe anyone that puts themselves over the Constitution should never be president of the United States and anyone who asks someone else to put them over the Constitution should never be president of the United States again.
It should come as no surprise that I will not be endorsing Donald Trump this year.
Alyssa Farah Griffin, former Communications Director
He is wholly unfit to be in office.
Rex Tillerson, former Secretary of State
There were multiple occasions where, in my view, the actions the president wanted to take were not consistent with our national security objectives. ... His understanding of global events, his understanding of global history, his understanding of U.S. history was really limited.
Miles Taylor, former official in the Department of Homeland Security
The root of the problem is the president’s amorality. Anyone who works with him knows he is not moored to any discernible first principles that guide his decision making.
Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC)
He’s a race-baiting, xenophobic, religious bigot. He doesn’t represent my party. He doesn’t represent the values that the men and women who wear the uniform are fighting for.
Dick Cheney, former vice president for George W. Bush
In our nation’s 246-year- history, there has never been an individual who is a greater threat to our republic than Donald Trump. He tried to steal the last election using lies and violence to keep himself in power, after the voters had rejected him. He is a coward. A real man wouldn’t lie to his supporters. He lost his election, and he lost big.
Representative John Boehner (R-OH), former Speaker of the House
Trump incited that bloody insurrection for nothing more than selfish reasons, perpetuated by the bullshit he’d been shoveling since he lost a fair election the previous November. He claimed voter fraud without any evidence, and repeated those claims, taking advantage of the trust placed in him by his supporters and ultimately betraying that trust.
Representative Liz Cheney (R-WY)
The president could have immediately and forcefully intervened to stop the violence. He did not. There has never been a greater betrayal by a president of the United States of his office and his oath to the Constitution.
Senator Mitch McConnell (R-KY), former Senate Majority Leader
Many politicians sometimes make overheated comments or use metaphors. ... That’s different from what we saw. This was an intensifying crescendo of conspiracy theories, orchestrated by an outgoing president who seemed determined to either overturn the voters’ decision or else torch our institutions on the way out.
Mick Mulvaney, former Chief of Staff
I am working hard to make sure that someone else is the nominee.
Anthony Scaramucci, former Director of Communication
Trump's going to make things rougher for people. He has already said he's going after his adversaries using the Department of Justice. When someone's telling you they're going to flex and be a dictator on day one and go after their adversaries, this is against the 200+ year experiment of America.
Open letter signed by 13 former Trump administration officials
Donald Trump's disdain for the American military and admiration for dictators like Hitler is rooted in his desire for absolute, unchecked power. This is a man who threw his own Vice President – Mike Pence – at a violent mob in a desperate bid to hold on to power. When Donald Trump says he wants to be a "dictator" on "day one" and deploy the military against American citizens he deems “the enemy from within" - he means it.
Open letter signed by 233 mental health professionals
Trump exhibits behavior that tracks with the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual’s (DSM V) diagnostic criteria for “narcissistic personality disorder,” “antisocial personality disorder,” and “paranoid personality disorder,” all made worse by his intense sadism, which is a symptom of malignant narcissism. This psychological type was first identified by German psychologist Erich Fromm to explain the psychology of history’s most “evil” dictators. … To make matters worse, Trump appears to be showing signs of cognitive decline that urgently cry out for a full neurological work-up, including an MRI and neuropsychological testing. These symptoms include: a dramatic decrease in verbal fluency, tangential thinking, diminished vocabulary, overuse of superlatives and filler words, perseveration, confabulation, phonemic paraphasia, semantic paraphasia, confusing people (not just names), as well as exhibiting deteriorating judgment, impulse control, and motor functioning (including a wide-based gait). We suspect the results of such an evaluation would be disqualifying.
Open letter signed by over 100 former national security officials (including ambassadors, admirals, generals, and civilian officials)
Mr. Trump threatens our democratic system; he has said so himself. He has called for the “termination” of parts of the Constitution. He said he wants to be a “dictator,” and his clarification that he would only be a dictator for a day is not reassuring. He has undermined faith in our elections by repeating lies, without evidence, of “millions” of fraudulent votes. He has shown no remorse for trying to overturn the 2020 election on January 6th, promises to pardon the convicted perpetrators, and has made clear he will not respect the results of the 2024 election should he lose again. That alone proves Mr. Trump is unfit to be Commander-in-Chief.
William T. Kelley, professor of Marketing at the Wharton School of Business, University of Pennsylvania
Donald Trump was the DUMBEST GODDAM student I EVER had.
The American Conservative Magazine
Trump has basically made himself into Putin’s prison bride.
Tara Setmayer, former Communications Director for Representative Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA)
He demonstrates daily how unfit he is to have the most powerful position in the world.
J. Michael Luttig, conservative former US Circuit Court of Appeals judge
Donald Trump and his allies and supporters are a clear and present danger to American democracy. They would attempt to overturn that 2024 election in the same way that they attempted to overturn the 2020 election, but succeed in 2024 where they failed in 2020. I don't speak those words lightly. I would have never spoken those words ever in my life, except that that's what the former president and his allies are telling us
Mary Trump, niece and a trained mental health professional
I don’t care what his cult says. I know him personally. And here’s the truth: My uncle is the only person I know without one redeeming quality. Not a single one.
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13 comments:
I certainly hope that you were able to copy and paste all of that. Even with your current level of passion on this subject, retyping all that would have been a bit much, even for you.
On a completely different note, having cast our ballots weeks ago, continuing to have to discard hundreds of political ads from our mailbox and sit through dozens of political ads on TV and YouTube has become extremely tedious. And that should probably win some kind of award for 'understatement of the century'.
Lucy
I was indeed able to copy and paste, although admittedly I was doing so from about a dozen different sources. It's a target-rich environment, looking for former Trump officials and conservatives who are screaming at Americans not to vote for the guy. This post could have easily been about five times longer without any serious work on my part.
Yeah, we're all voted here in our home (and unlike what happened in Portland OR no right-winger has burned our ballots) so we're hoping to ride this out for the next week.
Honestly, why anyone with more than seven working brain cells thinks that Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump should be allowed outside without adult supervision, let alone put into office, is a mystery for the ages.
I guess this is as good a place as any to vent a bit …
I remain optimistic, despite what happened the first time around with this convict, mostly because even though I live in one of the darkest of dark red sections in Nevada I have seen exactly two yard signs and I have yet to talk to anyone who has or is planning to vote for TFG. It should be noted, however, that one dares not badmouth that asshole in public, either.
The likelihood of this state flipping from purple to blue has even longer odds than my hitting the Mega Bucks Jackpot, but I can always dream.
Lucy
It's always worth dreaming, and Nevada did go blue in the not so distant past so there's that. The deep red areas tend to be sparsely populated after all (the dividing line is 800 people per square mile, by the way - less than that votes red, more than that votes blue) and therefore possibly outweighed.
The fact that people are afraid to say what is clearly on their mind and needs to be said is just further evidence that everyone understands the violence inherent in Fascism and how that not only can happen here but is happening here. David Frum, who once worked for George W. Bush, noted that the Washington Post and LA Times refused to publish endorsements for president because they feared retaliation from Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump - "We're withholding our endorsement because our billionaire owner is frightened of retaliation if Donald Trump wins" is a more forceful and eloquent statement than any newspaper editorial ever written," he wrote. It is indeed.
I'm from Philadelphia. Pessimism is my birthright. But I would be exceedingly happy to be wrong about that right now.
Officially, Nevada has only voted blue 50% of the time in six of the last twelve Presidential elections, however, we have gone Democratic in six of the last eight (is that a trend? One can hope …).
Although, right now our State Senate is blue (13(D) - 7(R)) and the State Assembly Is also blue (26(D) - 14(R)) and both of our US Senators and three of our four Representatives are Dems, so, technically our state is currently blue.
But the reason this state is considered purple and therefore a toss-up is that a majority of our registered voters are rethuglicans (718,625(R) - 673,828(D) as of Sept 30, 2024) and we have a surprisingly large contingent of Non-Partisan voters (825,179) of which I am one. I think the other reason is that in the past our votes for congress critters, and most state and local offices, have tended to run red (e.g., no Democrat has won office anywhere in Elko county in the last 40 years). Luckily, most of us who are Non-Partisan tend to have a very low tolerance for religious shenanigans, so when I and my fellow Non-Partisans show up to vote, we tend to vote with the Democrats in the major races.
Thankfully, anything resembling violence has been pretty much absent in this state so far; and I, for one, would really like to see it stay that way. This is one area where I truly hope to be in the majority.
Lucy
Low tolerance for rethuglican shenanigans, not religious. Although, now that I think about it, 'religious' kinda works, too.
Lucy
Shenanigans of religious and Republican kinds tend to be pretty indistinguishable these days, unfortunately. There's a reason why the fastest growing category of American religion is "none" after all - if someone tells me I have to hold vile and immoral political opinions in order to join their church, they can keep it.
I fully expect to see violence during and after this election - Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump has been encouraging it, his supporters are openly promising it, and they have an established track record of delivering it. And if Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump is installed into power I further expect that violence to continue into the indefinite future as Fascists do not tolerate dissent and have no ability to react in any other way to it. It's going to be a bumpy ride these next few months, regardless of where things stand on November 6.
I'm glad you have so many Non-Partisan voters. I'm not sure I qualify as one - I don't think of myself as a Democrat, but know for damned sure I'm not a Republican and I will vote for whoever has the best chance to defeat whatever GOP candidate is running (which usually means a Democrat, I suppose). I caucus with the Democrats, how's that.
I hope Nevadans vote for the republic and against the Fascists. It scares me how close it is.
I’ve said this before: I was born into and raised in a very conservative Republican household in a very conservative Republican state. And while I’ve become more progressive over the last few decades, I still think of myself as conservative (actually, a Republican) - but the rethuglicans have pulled the Republican Party so far to the right that I’m starting to look like a flaming liberal!
But my experience thus far in this election cycle (warning: sample size vanishingly small) is encouraging. For the last four years I’ve watched in fascination as most of my neighbors have become more circumspect and have been slowly but certainly putting their little flags, signs, and hateful paraphernalia away. There are still hard-core MAGAs in view, but not nearly as many as there were just a few weeks ago.
In over-the-fence discussions with a few of them, I’ve found that many are finally taking a peek behind the curtain and are realizing that they’ve been duped. They are right-leaning conservatives, not Fascists. Most of the people I’ve talked to in the last few weeks quite simply don’t understand how ‘the government’ works. These people are hard-core, deeply patriotic people who blame ‘this government’ for the fact that things are pretty fucked up in this country, not at all realizing that they’ve got the government that they voted for.
I’ve been selling very hard the principle that if you want a better government, you have to become a better citizen. Learn how the government works, don’t just take the word of some random political party - read The Constitution. Figure out how things are supposed to work. Then Get Involved. Find people that you believe you can trust to run the government the way you’d like it to be run, work to get them nominated, and VOTE for them. Don’t just sit on the sidelines and hope some random party’s candidate will do something different than that last guy from that party.
There is a very well-entrenched ‘Good Ol’ Boy’s’ network in this state. Until these people figure out that the rethuglcian party doesn’t have the citizens (or the nation's) best interests at heart things are not going to change much. We need a strong conservative party to keep excesses in check and to keep our government from running amok. More importantly, we desperately need a strong third ‘centrist’ party to provide more choices in these elections and give me and those like me a home. The two-party system is NOT working.
Sorry (not really) for running on so long …
Lucy
I grew up in a mixed household - my mom's first political experience was working on the Kennedy campaign in 1960; my dad voted for Goldwater. They taught me to look beyond the labels to see what people were actually doing.
I have no particular issues with conservatives. I disagree with them on a lot of things, but not everything. They're necessary to rein in the excesses of liberals, just as liberals are necessary to kick the conservatives out of their caves. But there is nothing conservative about the current GOP or its standard-bearer. The smarter ones have figured this out. The MAGA cult has not.
This is why there are so many current and former Republicans screaming at Americans not to vote for Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump. Military officers. Intelligence officers. Judges. Politicians. I never in my lifetime thought I'd end up on the same side as Dick Cheney or Michael Luttig but here I am. Liz Cheney is about as right-wing as you can get as far as policies go but she's got the spine to understand the threat to the republic and act on it and I respect her for it. The real conservatives are lining up behind Harris, not because they approve of her policies but because they understand that when Harris leaves office there will still be an American republic for them to steer in a conservative direction but when Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump is carried out of the Oval Office feet first - because that will be the ONLY way he will ever leave if he is installed into power - there will no longer be an American republic at all and there may not be much left of western civilization either depending on how badly he shatters Europe and turns the world over to his puppeteer Putin.
The American system is not designed to work with more than two parties and it never has. If we're going to have three strong parties one of two things will occur: either we will shift away from a "first-past-the-post" majority winner and Congress becomes more of a Parliamentary system, or one of the parties will disappear. The system is set up for two parties. If you don't like either of them your choices are either create a new party that will kill one of the original two or take over one of those two and change it how you like. It's surprisingly easy to do the latter - just start with local elections and party machinery and work up.
I hope that there are enough conservatives who have figured out that Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump doesn't speak for them either and abandon him. Whatever keeps that doddering neo-Fascist grifter out of office works for me.
Well, then. If I’ve ever learned anything in my life it is not to debate an expert in a subject I am not. I will therefore grant everything in your fourth paragraph. However, just to be certain that I understand your point, I will rephrase it a bit. What you are saying is that the reason a third party won’t work is that a three-party system works best with a Parliamentary system, which we don’t have (by design), and that we, as conservatives, need to figure out a way to discard the christian nationalist Republican party and build a completely new Conservative Party, stone by stone, brick by brick, from the foundation up, correct?
If that is correct, then let me see if I can address what I believe should be the core belief of such a Conservative Party by quoting the last Republican President who had the nation's best interest at heart, Dwight D. Eisenhower:
“In all those things which deal with people, be liberal, be human. In all those things which deal with people’s money, or their economy, or their form of government, be conservative”
Speaking as a conservative, when I say I want a 'smaller’ government, what I’m saying is a more efficient government. I want advances in meeting human needs - social security, housing, health care, etc., just stop wasting my money trying to get there. Many things can be done by private enterprise with efficient oversight that government tends to screw up. There are dozens of non-profits out there who meet basic human needs and do so with remarkably targeted and effective administration of their programs: Planned Parenthood, World Central Kitchens, and The Brigid Alliance are just three that come to mind because I donate to them consistently. I’d like to see the government working within a balanced budget, but the last time that happened was under Jimmy Carter.
The last Republican candidate that I voted for was Gerald Ford. After that, I voted against the rethuglicans that stole the Republican Party.
I know this is a long post, but this is important. A significant number of people who want a return to the fifties wouldn’t even recognize what it was that made the fifties such a wondrous time. When it comes down to it, I like Ike. He had the government firing on all cylinders. I can't emphasize enough how the GOP used to be the party of sanity and good politics... so very unlike today. Balanced budgets. Social programs. Expanding the middle class. Boosting union membership. And much more. In short, everything the current Democratic party aspires to be, with much less waste. Ike even warned us in his farewell address about the dangers of allowing the military-industrial complex to become the monster it is today.
I’ll close this with another direct (and favorite) quote of Eisenhower:
"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children."
To be clear, I voted FOR President Obama. I voted AGAINST Trump. I voted FOR President Biden. And I voted FOR (future) President Harris.
Mayhap, the word ‘conservative’ is the wrong word, or is being misused, or has even been misappropriated? After all is said and done ... Word Choice is Important.
Lucy
Yes, that’s exactly what I’m saying. Because the American system is based on 50%+1 majorities the math forces parties down to two. A parliamentary system would be much more open to multiple parties. And yes, if you want to get rid of the current neo-Fascist Christian-Dominionist white supremacist Republican Party that means you have to take it over from the inside.
That’s what the Goldwater people did after 1964, which brought us to Reagan in 1980. You start with local elections – school boards, county supervisors, city councilmen, mayors, and so on. Then you take over the party machinery, which is easy to do because nobody really wants to chair the committees and staff the rules boards and so on so getting your people in there is simple. It’s surprisingly easy for a group of committed partisans to take over an American party that way.
I draw a sharp contrast between the conservatism of Eisenhower and the right wingers who followed him. Eisenhower was a fiscal conservative – he balanced the budget multiple times, which wouldn’t happen again until Lyndon Johnson’s last fiscal year (1969) and wouldn’t happen after that until Bill Clinton did it four times in the 1990s (Carter never did). I once wrote an entire blog post on being a fiscal conservative and what that actually meant, and it lines up pretty neatly with what you are saying.
It doesn’t surprise me that you voted for Obama and Biden, since by an rational post-WWII standard they are moderate conservatives of the Eisenhower variety – throw an army uniform on either of them and there’s precious little daylight between them and Ike. The 1956 GOP platform that Eisenhower won with could be repurposed for Kamala Harris without much editing at all.
The GOP has lurched so far into right-wing extremism that anyone to the left of Adolf Eichmann gets accused of being a Marxist, and they’ve pulled the Democrats with them. There’s a thing called the Overton Window, which political scientists use to describe the range of acceptable discussion and positions on issues – that window is so far to the right of where it was in 1956 that we no longer have a left in this country. We have a center-right and a radical right. Bernie Sanders would have fit comfortably into the Republican Party in 1965, when I was born. Ronald Reagan could barely get elected as a Democrat today. How this happened is basically the story I tell in the last third of my US2 class.
My dad stopped voting for GOP candidates after 1992, when the last of the Eisenhower Republicans (Bush Sr.) was tossed out. “Those bastards stole my party,” he said.
I like the Eisenhower quotes you posted.
My favorites are:
“Don’t join the book burners. Don’t think you are going to conceal faults by concealing evidence that they ever existed. Don’t be afraid to go in your library and read every book.”
And, one that I do use in class when we discuss the difference between Ike and now:
“Should any political party attempt to abolish social security unemployment insurance and eliminate labor laws and farm programs you would not hear of that party again in our political history. There is a tiny splinter group of course that believes you can do these things. Among them are a few other Texas oil millionaires and an occasional politician or business man from other areas. Their number is negligible and they are stupid.”
They’re not negligible anymore. But they are still stupid.
It is apparent that I got my “C” Presidents mixed up. Sorry ‘bout that.
“They’re not negligible anymore. But they are still stupid.” Criminally so.
It would also appear that we are in mutual agreement in this area. Perhaps, just maybe, I should start thinking of myself as a Democrat, since that party has moved so far towards the center. Although, it would be a pretty tough pill to swallow, having been an independent centrist for all these years. 🧐
Love your Ike quotes as well. We could probably spend the rest of the month trading such quotations, but it would likely become tedious pretty quickly.
Lucy
You underestimate my nerdhood. ;)
Or maybe you don't. But point taken.
As I said, I don't really consider myself a Democrat. I just caucus with them, since at the moment our goals align and I tend to agree with many of their policies. That's a pretty good compromise!
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