updated 2022-01-12
. . . and all Republicans in congress!
Trump’s former secretary of State, Rex Tillerson, described him as a “fucking moron,” a fact that has been reported previously.
Chief of Staff John Kelly has called Trump an idiot and also crazy: “He’s an idiot. It’s pointless to try to convince him of anything. He’s gone off the rails. We’re in crazytown,”
After security officials tried fruitlessly to explain to Trump the importance of American defenses in South Korea, including a system that reduces the warning time of a North Korean missile attack from 15 minutes to seven seconds, Secretary of Defense James Mattis told associates that Trump “acted like — and had the understanding of — ‘a fifth- or sixth-grader.’ ”
Former National Economic Council director Gary Cohn: To prevent the president from signing a letter canceling a free-trade agreement with South Korea, he stole the letter from Trump’s desk. Trump “did not notice it was missing,” the Post reports.
Trump’s lawyer John Dowd has likewise called his client an idiot. Somewhat more audaciously, he has argued that Trump should not have to testify to Special Counsel Robert Mueller, because the transcript would leak, and foreign leaders would see that Trump is an idiot: Dowd then explained to Mueller and Quarles why he was trying to keep the president from testifying: “I’m not going to sit there and let him look like an idiot. And you publish that transcript, because everything leaks in Washington, and the guys overseas are going to say, ‘I told you he was an idiot. I told you he was a goddamn dumbbell. What are we dealing with this idiot for?’”
Another Trump lawyer, Jay Sekulow, tried to argue to Robert Mueller that Trump could not be asked to give an interview because he is a compulsive liar. They literally explained to Mueller how they conducted a mock interview with Trump, and he was so unable to tell the truth that they considered him mentally disqualified from testifying:
Jay Sekulow went to Mueller’s office and re-enacted the mock interview. Their goal: to argue that Trump couldn’t possibly testify because he was incapable of telling the truth.
“He just made something up. That’s his nature,” Dowd said to Mueller.
http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/09/woodward-book-fear-trump-staff-idiot-moron-liar.html?utm_source=fb
In September 2017, a Washington Post–ABC News poll asked people an open-ended question: “What one word best describes your impression of Trump? Just the one word that best describes him?” The first most common term to describe him was “incompetent.” Other related characterizations in the top 10 descriptors included “idiot,” “ignorant,” and “unqualified.”
Quinnipiac asked a similar question in December 2017: “What is the first word that comes to mind when you think of President Trump?” By far, the most frequent word that came to mind was “idiot.” Other common terms included “incompetent,” “moron,” “ignorant,” and “stupid.”
Trump’s mental failings are also painfully clear to foreign diplomats, who are professionally obligated to be frank and clear-eyed about him. Among themselves, diplomats early on shared tips on meeting with Trump: Don’t assume he knows anything about your country, flatter his ego, and be mindful of his extremely short attention span. It often appeared to aides that Trump didn’t even understand that other countries are in different time zones. He quickly became a “laughing stock,”
German Chancellor Angela Merkel was despondent at the 2017 G7 meeting, where Trump showed no awareness of climate change and rejected international cooperation to deal with it. According to Der Spiegel, “His speech was a break from centuries of Enlightenment and rationality. The president presented his political statement as a nationalist manifesto of the most imbecilic variety. It couldn’t have been any worse. His speech was packed with make-believe numbers from controversial or disproven studies. It was hypocritical and dishonest.”
On October 8, 2017, Republican Senator Bob Corker of Tennessee tweeted: “It’s a shame the White House has become an adult day care center.
“The reality is everybody knows Trump can’t talk without lying,” says Van Jones on CNN.
In 2007, Trump was caught lying 30 times during a deposition that was part of his lawsuit against Tim O’Brien, author of the book Trump Nation. Trump lost.
Trump’s lawyers are believed to be terrified that the president wouldn’t be able to not grandstand — and lie — in a Mueller interview while Trump is under oath, potentially opening him up to perjury charges.
According to Bob Woodward’s book Fear: Trump in the White House, Trump’s former personal lawyer John Dowd frequently pleaded with the president not to agree to be interviewed by Mueller. If he did sit down with Mueller, Dowd warned Trump, he would probably be charged with perjury and end up in an “orange jumpsuit,” Woodward wrote.
“I’ll be a real good witness,” the president insisted.
Van Jones, former special adviser to President Barack Obama, said Friday on CNN that the “reality is everybody knows that Trump can’t talk without lying. His lawyers are terrified that if he opens his mouth, he cannot tell the truth and would wind up going to jail.”
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/robert-mueller-interview-trump_us_5c147594e4b05d7e5d82235e
Trump also demeaned the wartime service of John McCain, stating “that the former Navy pilot had been a coward for taking early release from a prisoner-of-war camp in Vietnam because of his father’s military rank and leaving others behind.”
This is in fact the opposite of the truth. The whole point of what makes McCain’s imprisonment so heroic is that North Vietnam offered to give him early release on account of his father’s rank, believing it would demoralize other members of the military, and McCain refused, even withstanding torture rather than give in and accept freedom. This is the most important and well-known fact about McCain and Trump got it backward. It’s like attacking Harriet Tubman for her refusal to help escaped slaves.
All these people had two things in common. They were Trump loyalists. And they knew nothing whatsoever about the job they suddenly found themselves in.
Trump Is Spreading Incompetence Throughout the Federal Government
by Nancy LeTourneau, Washington Monthly, October 2, 2018
“The woman who ran the Obama department’s energy-policy analysis unit received a call from Department of Energy staff telling her that her office was now occupied by Eric Trump’s brother-in-law,” Lewis writes… “Why? No one knew.” Trump’s people, Lewis makes clear, are largely inept and animated by greed, anti-government ideology and a “commitment to scientific ignorance”.
Why are so many people Trump hires corrupt, incompetent and immoral?
We have never had a president who filled out his administration with such a collection of corrupt, incompetent and immoral aides, and we’ve certainly never had a president who was so eager to tell everyone that his own administration is a wretched hive of scum and villainy.
Trump would also like America to know that his attorney general is a complete failure. Trump’s displeasure comes from the fact that by recusing himself from the Russia investigation, Jeff Sessions has rendered himself unable to shut it down in order to protect him;
One of the rationales that businesspeople always offer when they run for office is that unlike career politicians, they can bring their hard-nosed business sense to government, including in hiring. This is what Trump himself said in 2016: “You need people that are truly, truly capable….”
The truth, however, is just the opposite: Public policy, which combines intricate practical challenges with unpredictable political situations, is often far more complex than anything a corporate CEO ever has to deal with.
And if the outsider in question is Trump, it’s much worse. Not only has he failed to find the best people; he attracts the most corrupt and incompetent people around, who see in Trump a vehicle to wet their own beaks or at the very least carry out a retrograde agenda in an environment where ethical behavior is actively discouraged.
Here’s a partial list:
Michael Flynn, national security adviser: In the job less than a month before resigning; has pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI over his contacts with Russia.
Reince Priebus, chief of staff: Resigned after six months, widely considered comically ineffectual.
Sean Spicer, press secretary: Terrible liar, resigned after six months on the job.
Anthony Scaramucci, communications director: Lasted 10 days after a series of exciting but unhelpful media appearances.
Rob Porter, staff secretary: Resigned after credible allegations of domestic abuse surfaced from two ex-wives.
Stephen K. Bannon, chief strategist: Pushed out after seven tumultuous months. Trump later said that Bannon “cried when he got fired and begged for his job. Now Sloppy Steve has been dumped like a dog by almost everyone.”
Ronny Jackson, White House physician: Nominated by Trump to be secretary of veterans affairs despite lack of qualifications; nomination withdrawn after allegations of unprofessional behavior surfaced.
Brenda Fitzgerald, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention: Resigned after she was caught trading tobacco stocks while leading the agency tasked with reducing tobacco use.
Scott Pruitt, EPA administrator: Resigned after too many scandals to count.
Tom Price, secretary of health and human services: Resigned after controversy about profligate use of government and private aircraft.
Ryan Zinke, secretary of interior: Caught up in multiple minor to midsize scandals, including one involving a questionable land deal with the chairman of Halliburton.
Betsy DeVos, secretary of education: Got the job despite knowing next to nothing about education; currently under fire because her $40 million yacht is registered in the Cayman Islands, allowing her to escape state taxes.
Ben Carson, secretary of housing and urban development: Had zero experience in housing. Was criticized for ordering $31,000 dining set for his office; his spokesperson claimed he knew nothing about it, which emails later proved was a lie.
Wilbur Ross, secretary of commerce: Accused of stealing $120 million from business associates.
Sebastian Gorka, deputy assistant to the president: Pushed out when he failed to get a security clearance and no one could figure out what he actually did. Last seen passing out fake Fox News business cards.
Those are just the well-known ones. There are plenty of lesser-known officials who have been fired or resigned for things such as making racist comments, having fishy finances that caused security clearances to be revoked, or being accused of domestic violence. That’s also not to mention the questionable characters Trump hired before becoming president, like Michael Cohen and Paul Manafort, or the fact that he hires members of his own family despite the fact that they obviously have no idea what they’re doing.
And what’s really remarkable is that all this turmoil, all this corruption, all this backstabbing and front-stabbing and paranoia, has piled up after only 19 months of the Trump presidency. Imagine what it’ll look like after four years.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/wp/2018/08/14/why-are-so-many-people-trump-hires-corrupt-incompetent-and-immoral/
Everyone in Trumpworld Knows He’s an Idiot
Jan. 4, 2018″
For most of the day, almost no one would know that he had decided to take matters into his own hands,” Wolff writes. “In presidential annals, the firing of F.B.I. director James Comey may be the most consequential move ever made by a modern president acting entirely on his own.” Now imagine Trump taking the same approach toward ordering the bombing of North Korea.
… his former chief strategist, Steve Bannon, told Wolff that the meeting Donald Trump Jr. brokered with Russians in the hope of getting dirt on Hillary Clinton was “treasonous” and “unpatriotic.”
… not just that Trump is entirely unfit for the presidency, but that everyone around him knows it. One thread running through “Fire and Fury” is the way relatives, opportunists and officials try to manipulate and manage the president, and how they often fail. As Wolff wrote in a Hollywood Reporter essay based on the book, over the past year, the people around Trump, “all — 100 percent — came to believe he was incapable of functioning in his job.”
According to Wolff, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and Reince Priebus, the former chief of staff, called Trump an “idiot.” (So did the media mogul Rupert Murdoch, owner of Fox News, though he used an obscenity first.) Trump’s chief economic adviser, Gary Cohn, compares his boss’s intelligence to excrement. The national security adviser, H. R. McMaster, thinks he’s a “dope.” It has already been reported that Secretary of State Rex Tillerson called Trump a “moron,” which he has pointedly refused to deny.
And yet these people continue to either prop up or defend this sick travesty of a presidency. Wolff takes a few stabs at the motives of Trump insiders. Ivanka Trump apparently nurtured the ghastly dream of following her father into the presidency. Others, Wolff writes, told themselves that they could help protect America from the president they serve: The “mess that might do serious damage to the nation, and, by association, to your own brand, might be transcended if you were seen as the person, by dint of competence and professional behavior, taking control of it.”
This is a delusion as wild, in its own way, as Trump’s claim that the “Access Hollywood” tape was faked. Some of the military men trying to steady American foreign policy amid Trump’s whims and tantrums might be doing something quietly decent, sacrificing their reputations for the greater good. But most members of Trump’s campaign and administration are simply traitors. They are willing, out of some complex mix of ambition, resentment, cynicism and rationalization, to endanger all of our lives — all of our children’s lives — by refusing to tell the country what they know about the senescent fool who boasts of the size of his “nuclear button” on Twitter.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/04/opinion/fire-fury-wolff-trump-book.html