Since his plain-spoken censure of Donald Trump, I like Mitt Romney better now than I ever did before. Still, though, South Carolina’s Republican Gov. Nikki Haley earns top honors for saying, “Donald Trump is everything we hear and teach our kids not to do in kindergarten.”
Think about it: Did your mom or dad ever teach you, don’t be a schoolyard bully? Don’t call kids bad names, don’t threaten others with violence, don’t brag at others’ expense, don’t mock people for their shortcomings?
Mine did, not that I always deferred to their advice … but then I grew up and knew they were right. If Trump’s parents ever told him how to act, either he tuned them out or he just never grew up. I’m beginning to think it’s the latter.
It wouldn’t matter if Trump had just stayed where he was for most of his life, as a hard-driving developer, where anyone who didn’t want to do business with a man whose behavior could be crude and confrontational didn’t have to. Or even as a reality-TV star, where everyone to whom he said with his sadistic sneer, “You’re fired,” had all but asked for it.
But it does matter if someone like that moves on to the White House.
Nothing in the Constitution says a president has to be a role model for a whole nation’s behavior. But if the president isn’t, who is?
That’s why, while life was pretty good in the years that Bill Clinton served, I’ll never look back and call it a great presidency. His sexual liaisons — not to mention his semantically distorted denials — were a disgrace.
Now, as Trump’s steamroller keeps moving, we could be looking at a new kind of bad role model in the Oval Office: a tough guy, a vengeful thug, a leader who believes it’s as suitable to strong-arm an opponent as it is to shake his hand and search for common ground.
We’re not talking here about policy conflicts. Candidates have always taken tough stands against their opponents’ political positions and public contradictions. That’s healthy.
But we’re talking now about a presidential prospect who makes everything personal. Marco Rubio is “a low-life,” Ted Cruz a “soft, weak, little baby.” Who knows, maybe he’s right. And anyone who mentions anything about Trump’s many Achilles’ heels is “a liar.” To say nothing of Trump’s repellent response after Fox News’ Megyn Kelly asked in the first debate about his characterizations of women as “fat pigs,” “dogs” and “disgusting animals.”
Schools across this country are trying to build anti-bullying programs and reduce abuse that some kids suffer. But now we have a whole new phenomenon that threatens all that: the role model as a bully himself. Trump’s notion of role modeling is saying, when a protester interrupts a rally, that he wants to “punch him in the face.” Or uttering of another, “Maybe he should have been roughed up.”
That’s not healthy. It’s sick.
But if Trump goes the distance, that’s what we’re looking at while he claims he can “make America great again.” And it’s gone on so long, we can’t just blame Trump; we’ve got to blame every gullible American who thinks he’s the way out of our nation’s woes.
A recent news report quotes a memo written by two veteran Republican advisers, saying, “We want voters to imagine Donald Trump in the Big Chair in the Oval Office, with responsibilities for worldwide confrontation at his fingertips.” It’s not inconceivable that the worldwide confrontation they’re talking about would be of Trump’s own making. That’s what we’re looking at, too.
There are honest differences among presidential candidates about how they’d run this country. With his outsized ego, his uncontrollable insolence, and his inclination to attack anyone he doesn’t like, Trump would run it straight into the dump.
Greg Dobbs of Evergreen was a correspondent for ABC News for 23 years, then for HDNet television’s “World Report.”
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