A few days ago, I saw a list of talking points issued by the White House to supporters. At a time when we have 20% of the world’s COVID-19 deaths, new cases at a near record of 75,000 per day and hospitals on the brink with a 40% rise in hospitalizations over the past month, the main talking point was, “Decide your vote based on what’s best for your wallet,” citing a rise in the value of 401(k)s.
No wonder Donald Trump desperately wants to take the focus off his catastrophic mismanagement of the coronavirus crisis, which weighs most heavily on Americans' minds 10 days before the election. The failure by the president to take ownership of the crisis, marshal the resources of government at all levels, forge a battle plan as if we were facing World War III, follow the advice of experts, refrain from politicizing every aspect of the crisis and lead by example has caused the needless loss of thousands American lives and is the greatest failure of our government since the Vietnam War.
If Trump’s behavior were just a matter of style, I might be on his side. Americans could tolerate a lot of boorish behavior in a president if we believed he was fundamentally honest, decent, fair, sincere, trustworthy and trying to do the right thing for the country.
Trump is none of these. And I’m talking about a lot more than style. With Trump we have the worst of both worlds — atrocious personal behavior and to an unacceptable extent atrocious governing.
About that lead talking point: Your 401(k) tells you whom to vote for. Trump obviously wants to put the focus on the economy, where he can most easily obfuscate. He inherited a rising economy that continued on roughly the same positive trajectory it had been on since 2009. However, annual growth fell well short of the 4% to 6% Trump repeatedly promised voters. Instead, it stood at 2.3% in 2017, 3% in 2018 and 2.2% in 2019, as the economy continued its long crawl out of the Great Recession.
Then the pandemic hit and the bottom dropped out.
When the economy will come back, no one knows. What we do know is that job growth is stalling, layoffs are mounting again, furloughs are turning into permanent job losses, the manufacturing slump is deepening, and 850,000 small businesses have shut down permanently.
Against this backdrop, positive movement in 401(k)s is just a selective, misleading factoid.
The next White House talking point? Law and order. American towns are burning to the ground, they say.
First, America’s towns are not burning to the ground, except from wildfires that raise a different question about Trump’s environmental policies. That’s just typical Trump hysteria talk. Contrary to Trump’s claims, cities affected by violence during the summer were in states with both Democrat and Republican governors.
By the way, the talking points praise Trump as a hero for standing up to blue state governors. It’s the governor who stands up to Trump who is the hero, and thank goodness there are some of those.
Second, the specter of U.S. Army troops on street corners and clearing a path for Trump across Washington’s Lafayette Square so he could comically hold up a Bible he doesn’t read in front of a church he doesn’t attend makes us look more like a banana republic than the USA.
Rash use of Army troops, refusing to distinguish between peaceful and violent protesters, equivocating about wacko white supremacy groups and encouraging right-wing extremists to stand to “stand by” in case he announces that the election was unfair, he has been robbed of the presidency and somebody has to go in and straighten things out, make Trump more a part of the problem than a part of the solution.
There were more talking points, but I’ll conclude with my measure of our president’s fitness for the office.
Trump is an immoral and amoral sociopathic liar who functions from a core of insecure, malignant narcissism. He is so corrupt that he has lost track of the meaning of corruption and engages in it almost daily. He’s a perpetual disinformation machine. He is so disdainful of truth that in his public statements he spews a constant stream of falsehoods and half-truths and never feels the worse for it. He is a stain on the character of the nation and an embarrassment to us all.
He has sacrificed the reputation of the United States on the altar of his own self-aggrandizement and reduced us from the “city on a hill” spoken of by Ronald Reagan to the scorn of nations. He is squandering decades, even centuries, of sacrifices, including the ultimate sacrifice, made by generations of Americans to give the world a vision of America as a force for good, an engine of prosperity, an example to follow, and a hope for a better day.
In short, he is the greatest threat to our country from within since the Civil War and a destabilizing influence in the world. He is one in a succession of people each of whom mentored the next to be fundamentally, awfully, and fatally flawed: Joseph McCarthy, Roy Cohn, Fred Trump and now Donald Trump. The latter has become what he is today partly by social heredity and partly by his own design. Either way, he does not deserve and is unfit to be reelected. There is so little that appeals to our better natures and none of the true vision the country needs.
For the first time in my life, I voted for a Democrat for president. Voting for Joe Biden doesn’t make me happy, but it assuages my conscience and my soul.
Robert Gehrke | The Salt Lake Tribune Brent Ward, a former U.S. Attorney for Utah.
Brent Ward, Salt Lake City, is a lawyer, a former U.S. attorney for Utah and a lifelong registered Republican.
