New Republic Editor-in-Chief Win McCormack says President Donald Trump’s power was bound to collapse. He came into the business world and political office with a set of “misguided and inflexible beliefs and habits, instilled in him first by a stern and un-loving father.” But his unwillingness to learn new things shot him down the path of failure.
McCormack cites the words of Trump’s niece, Mary L. Trump, who said Trump was raised by a “cold, ruthless, mercenary father and a largely absent and sickly mother.” And that absence of love in the household is the defining characteristic Trump’s upbringing. This, in turn, was fortified by the “ruthless and unprincipled” Roy Cohn, former chief counsel to Sen. Joseph McCarthy.
“The essence of Cohn’s tutelage of Donald: No matter what, no matter how wrong you might be or turn out to be about a given matter or issue, you must never bend, never give up your adherence to a position, no matter how misguided it might turn out to be,” said McCormack.
And Trump stuck with it. The resulting self-absorption created a man who does “not brook advice from other people as to what he should or should not do in a given circumstance,” said McCormack.
Trump allegedly hated when smarter people than him, like retired Marine Gen. John Kelly, would offer advice contrary to his own inclination. So, in his second term, McCormack said “he stacked his Cabinet with pliant, mediocre individuals who would never dare challenge his inclinations, no matter how wayward or bizarre they might be.”
If Trump believes tariffs are paid by businesses exporting goods rather than by the U.S. consumers who buy them, he’s going to stick to that delusion no matter how many smart people try to correct him.
Similarly, after successfully kidnapping the president of Venezuela, Trump fantasized that he could subdue the “vastly larger nation of Iran, with its estimated population of 93.4 million and approximately 610,000 military personnel, including its notoriously brutal Revolutionary Guard,” said McCormack.
But instead, Trump’s attack killed the nation’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, as well as many of the country’s more moderate leaders who U.S. analysts believed would have been willing to strike a deal with the U.S. over Trump’s purported issue of nuclear weapons.
Marching forth, heedless of the advice of more intelligent people leads most idiot to calamity — and McCormack suggests the midterm election results speak for themselves.
So how does a mediocre and self-absorbed president crawl from that kind of wreckage?
“It appears that he may content himself with pursuing his various construction projects during the rest of his second term. Which is not to say that he won’t get up to some forms of mischief,” McCormack said. “His top priority, clearly — and one doomed to failure — is and has been trying to turn the United States back into an overwhelmingly white country; hence his attacks on all programs involving affirmative action and his relentless efforts to deport as many noncitizen residents of color in the country as possible as rapidly as possible (which may well amp up with Stephen Miller now elevated to chief of staff).”
“Beyond that, I think he aspires to reduce every aspect of excellence in the country to a level of mediocrity, which is to say, down to his very own level,” McCormack added. “And at this, I confidently predict, he will woefully fail, as he has failed so often at his major endeavors throughout his miserable life.”
