From the mouth of a monomaniac

That the man who has attained the greatest achievement in the history of politics in this nation, in his own modest assessment, was able to make those snide and belittling remarks about the Muslim American parents of a soldier who lost his life fighting for his country certainly showed the gaping moral vacuum in what passes for the soul of the Republican candidate.

(Trump said that Khizir Khan, who spoke movingly last week at the Democratic Convention about his son's sacrifice and his family's love for America, seemed "very emotional" and probably had his words written "by Hilary Clinton's scriptwriters"; asked specifically about Mr. Khan's remark that Trump had never made a similar sacrifice, Trump boasted, "I’ve made a lot of sacrifices. I work very, very hard. I’ve created thousands and thousands of jobs, tens of thousands of jobs. . . . I think my popularity with the vets is through the roof.")

That Trump felt compelled to make those remarks, however, shows the deeper behavioral malady that grips his psyche — namely, his apparently uncontrollable need to justify himself and establish his superiority over any who dare to oppose or criticize him. "Setting the Record Straight" was the title Trump placed atop the statement he released yesterday — in which he allowed for the first time that the Khans deserved sympathy for the loss of their son but in the same sentence woundedly complained that Mr. Khan "has no right to stand in front of millions of people and claim I have never read the Constitution."

Today he kept at it, refusing to let go of the idea that it was Donald Trump who was being treated so unfairly in all of this. "I was viciously attacked by Mr. Khan at the Democratic Convention," Trump tweeted. "Am I not allowed to respond?"

This is not an idle point. It is a symptom of a profound mental and behavioral disorder that everything for the man is a contest of personal one-upsmanship, that no criticism can be left unanswered, that no fault can ever be acknowledged, that no apology can ever be uttered, that no one else's accomplishments or hardships can ever equal his own, that no one else is so misunderstood, so much the victim of lies and wounding untruths, yet no one else more truly loved, than is Donald J. Trump.

Someone else served in the military, and Donald Trump didn't? Well, "I felt that I was in the military in the true sense," Trump responded, since he had attended a military-themed prep school, for a year.

Someone else lost a son fighting as a soldier serving the United States? Well, having dodged the draft, received a million bucks from his father, and run a sleazy real estate business, Donald Trump must have made just as great a sacrifice to the nation.

Incidents like this speak for themselves. But the normal reporting of political campaigns fails to capture the fact that Trump's words and speech patterns, day in and day out, are just as astonishingly those of a seriously unbalanced man. One of the few media outlets that is doing the hard work of following and reporting in detail the words Trump utters at his rallies is Talking Points Memo, and here is just a sample of some of the bizarre, incoherent, defensive, obsessively repetitive, disassociative, and paranoid ravings that regularly proceed from his mouth. Both examples come from the rally he held in Colorado on Friday.

Regarding Hillary Clinton's speech at the Democratic convention:

"I was curious to see whether she'd do a class act and not mention my name. Or mention it with respect, like, say, 'I'd like to congratulate my Republican opponent for having done something that nobody has ever done in the history of politics in this nation.' Every time I mention her, everyone screams 'lock her up, lock her up.' And you know what I do? I've been nice. But after watching that performance last night, such lies, I don't have to be so nice anymore. I'm taking the gloves off, right? Yes? Take the gloves off. Take the gloves off. Right? Taking the gloves off. Just remember this, Trump is going to be no more Mr. Nice guy."

And complaining about the local fire marshal for having enforced the completely ordinary laws that limit in every community, for obvious safety reasons, the number of people who can occupy a public space:

"So I have to tell you this. This is why our country doesn’t work. We have plenty of space here. We have thousands of people outside trying to get in. And we have a fire marshal that said, 'Oh we can’t allow more people.' The reason they won't let them in is because they don't know what the hell they're doing. That's why, okay? Too bad. That's why our country has — hey, maybe they're a Hillary person. Could that be possible? Probably. I don't think there are too many of them. I don't think there are too many of them. This is the kind of thing we have in federal government also, by the way, folks. Then you wonder why we're going to hell. That's why we're going to hell. You know what it is? It's a thought process, right."

 Right.

"The lunatic fringe that has taken over the Republican Party"

The words in the headline above come from David Brooks, one of the principled conservatives horrified by what is happening to his party — and who is actually willing to utter the fact out loud.

I've been at a loss for months to understand how anyone can fail to see Trump for what he so plainly is. Former New York mayor Michael Bloomberg spoke for all of us with Bronx blood in our veins (only by inheritance in my case, but it's there), when he said at the Democratic convention this week, "I'm a New Yorker, and New Yorkers know a con when we see one."

But much more, I have been sick at heart by the moral equivocations of Republican leaders who cannot even offer the excuse of gullibility for their temporizing. By their private comments, GOP leaders like John McCain, Paul Ryan, and many others have made it clear they are fully aware  how unprincipled, unqualified, unstable, and dangerous Trump is; yet they have lacked the ability to summon even one ounce of moral courage to break with him publicly or rescind their endorsements.

Is there anything that will finally force them to say "enough"? Most are clearly betting that Trump will lose, and that they will then be able to emerge, unscathed, from behind the trees where they have been cowering while others fight the battle. And I suspect if they have made it this far, they are simply beyond the reach of shame, much less reason.

Mostly as an exercise in clinging to reason at a time when insanity has become the norm for a frightening segment of the polity, I have been thinking about what to say to Republicans still trying to pretend that Trump is a normal candidate, or a valid representative of a principled conservatism.


1. First and foremost, the man is — literally — mentally unbalanced. And it goes well beyond his textbook symptoms of narcissistic personality disorder. His megalomania frequently erupts in a grandiosity of expression that is not normally encountered outside of a mental institution: "I alone can fix" what is wrong with America; "Now it was the summer of Trump, it was the autumn of Trump, it was the Christmas of Trump. It was everything"; "People are saying Donald Trump is a genius."

His embrace of dozens of lunatic-fringe conspiracy theories reflects a frighteningly untethered relationship with reality that in any normal moment would be the instant end of a political career. Trump's barrage of conspiratorial tweets and statements have accused President Obama of secretly siding with ISIS; claimed that government scientists hid the truth about the Ebola virus; insisted that "thousand and thousands" of Muslim Americans in New Jersey "cheered" when the Twin Towers fell on 9/11; declared that doctors "lied" in "fudged up reports" regarding the safety of childhood vaccines; said that Ted Cruz's father was involved in the assassination of President Kennedy; that the Clintons may have murdered Vince Foster; that Antonin Scalia's death may not have been natural.

When challenged on some of these more unhinged assertions, Trump has defended them by citing as his sources articles in the National Enquirer or right-wing-conspiracy-theory, white-supremacist, and neo-Nazi websites (including one that claims the 9/11 attacks was "an inside job") — or even, in the case of those "thousands and thousands" of cheering Muslims, by insisting that he himself saw it on TV, even though nothing of the kind ever happened.

Even after being confronted with a video of Donald J. Trump expressing his support for the Iraq War, Trump has continued to insist repeatedly that he always opposed the war.

Last fall, on national television, he bragged of having met Russian leader Vladimir Putin: “I got to know him very well because we were both on ‘60 Minutes,’ we were stablemates, and we did very well that night.” Last week he said, "I never met Putin. I don’t know who Putin is."

That any responsible political leader of any major political party could think of entrusting the most powerful office in the world to a man who has manifested so little attachment to reality is something we just could not have conceived of before now.

These are not the normal equivocations or shading of truth that we all engage in, politicians perhaps more than others: Trump's ability to lie without batting an eye falls in the realm of psychopathology.

One of the most truly bizarre manifestations of this was an obviously forged letter he produced last December, supposedly from his doctor, attesting to the candidate's "extraordinary" health. Written in  language that no doctor would use, but full of the childish superlatives that Trump always uses, the letter praised Trump's "astonishingly excellent" lab test results and declared that "he will be the healthiest individual ever elected to the presidency."

This alone ought to be enough to convince anyone that far from being "extraordinarily" healthy, the man is "extraordinarily" sick.


2. His business dealings and personal life demonstrate a moral depravity that disqualifies him from any public trust. Trump has repeatedly broken the promises he made to local officials to secure approval for his building and casino projects, defaulted on loans that he obtained through misrepresentation and exaggeration, defrauded small contractors and suppliers by the dozens, bragged of committing adultery with numerous "seemingly happily married women," took his businesses into bankruptcy four times, scammed thousands of trusting believers of as much as $60,000 apiece with his fraudulent "Trump University," ran a bogus multilevel vitamin marketing scheme that quickly failed as did a series of other self-promoting "businesses" (Trump vodka, steaks, magazine, airline, mortgage company).

He has never shown any remorse for those he hurt, lied to, stole from, or ruined. At no time in his entire life has he placed a principle above self-interest. He has reneged on his (apparently already meager) charitable contributions; he has threatened to use the power of the presidency to punish those who have criticized him in the press; he has gleefully inflamed the worst unreasoning passions of hatred, fear, and prejudice for his own gain; he has glorified violence and domination while deriding the weak and vulnerable including even those suffering from physical disabilities; he has routinely mocked women who fail to meet his adolescent picture of female pulchritude (referring once to "guys who have 400-pound wives at home who are jealous of me").

"He is a morally untethered, spiritually vacuous man," wrote David Brooks this week.

Peter Wehner, an evangelical Christian and conservative who served in three Republican administrations, went further, describing his dismay that any of his fellow evangelicals would swallow the moral degeneracy of "a man whose words and actions are so at odds with the central teachings of our faith . . . integrity, compassion and reasoned convictions, wisdom and prudence, trustworthiness, a commitment to the moral good."

These personal traits matter, Wehner emphasized, because a man lacking in basic compassion and empathy is fundamentally unfit to hold power over others, especially in a nation built on the democratic values of liberty, respect for the equal worth of all men, and shared participation in the job of governance:

"Trump’s entire approach to politics rests on dehumanization. If you disagree with him or oppose him, you are not merely wrong. You are worthless, stripped of dignity, the object of derision. This attitude is central to who Mr. Trump is and explains why it pervades and guides his campaign. If he is elected president, that might-makes-right perspective would infect his entire administration."

3. Trump's ignorance and reckless positions threaten the security of the nation — and the world. The most astonishing contradiction in Trump's rhetorical attacks has been his simultaneous insistence that America "should stop apologizing" and show "strength" and his almost casual calls for abandoning the very pillars of American foreign policy that have for 70 years upheld America's strength, leadership, and security throughout the world.

He has proposed that the United States not honor its commitment to its allies unless they "pay"; might not bother to defend the Baltic nations if they were attacked by Russia; and should consider recognizing Putin's unilateral annexation of Crimea, carried out by force and in violation of international law.

He said the the U.S. had "no right to lecture" Turkey about the rule of law because we have problems "in our own country."

His suggestion this week that Russia should hack Hilary Clinton's emails and release them was so mind-boggling that members of the Republican foreign policy establishment were literally left speechless. To state the obvious, what would have been the reaction from the Rush Limbaugh crowd had a Democrat uttered such a treasonous suggestion as to invite a hostile foreign power to meddle in an American presidential election?

Trump has repeatedly boasted that he has no need for foreign policy consultants: he consults himself, he explained, because "I have a very good brain." He never reads books; he apparently does not read policy papers; he regularly shows a massive ignorance of Constitutional powers, the most basic facts of America's treaties, and the most cursory lessons of US military and diplomatic history.

Former Republican state department official Eliot Cohen summed up the despair he and his colleagues feel about Trump's reckless willingness to destroy the successful two-generation consensus on foreign policy that "American interests were ineluctably intertwined with American values, and that when possible, each should reinforce the other, as when the promotion of liberty and human rights helped to weaken the Soviet Union."

Trump's "temperament, his proclivity for insult and deceit and his advocacy of unpredictability would make him a presidential disaster — especially in the conduct of foreign policy, where clarity and consistency matter," Cohen wrote.



A final thought: I have told several of my Republican friends that were the shoe on the other foot — were the Democrats ever to nominate for the presidency a person so obviously unfit by character, demagoguery, and mental instability to hold office — I would not hesitate to vote for any non-insane candidate of the opposing party. It would not be a matter of the "lesser of two evils"; it would not be "holding my nose in the voting booth": it would be saving the American dream of democratic government that George Washington, and Abraham Lincoln, and FDR, and millions of ordinary Americans lived and died fighting to protect.

One final quote this week from a horrified former Republican presidential campaign manager:

"Hillary has some baggage, but Trump is crazy. And you can’t fix crazy."

"Code Warriors" in the news

A review and interview on Christos Military and Intelligence site (a leading Web resource on the history of cryptology)

A timeline of NSA's highs and lows in the Cold War drawn from my book, in Random House's newsletter Signature (your author is not responsible for the headline)

A review in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram

Decency in the face of violence

In a year that has brought to American society some of the vilest, calculated appeals to the worst instincts of mankind, I suppose it's too much to ask for moral clarity and decency in times of crisis.

Should it even necessary to point out all decent Americans are grieving and horrified by the assassination-like killings of five Dallas police officers last night?

That President Obama expressed his immediate horror at "a vicious, calculated and despicable attack on law enforcement" and condemned the "twisted motives" of those responsible, reiterating that there can be "no possible justification" for violence against police?

And that not one—not one—leader of the Black Lives Matter movement has ever called for violent action in the course of their campaign against the excessive use of lethal force by police against unarmed African American citizens?

No of course not. 

But in the very ugly state of moral depravity that passes for politics in our country these days, it took the usual right-wing bloviators no time at all to make hay while the blood flowed. The winner was Joe Walsh, a former Republican congressman from Illinois, who sent out a message to his fans in the midst of the horrific news stating, "10 Cops shot. You did this Obama. You did this liberals. You did this BLM."

No, they did not. They asked that police enforce the laws fairly and with respect for human life, in accordance with our most cherished and noble American values. Not once did they suggest that the solution to excessive force by police was violence by citizens.

Not once did they put out "wanted" posters with pictures of police on them—as has the anti-abortion movement regularly done in its campaign of fomenting wilful violence against doctors who provide abortion services.

Not once did they justify violence in retaliation for the shootings by police of unarmed African Americans—in notable contrast to the unspeakable statement of Republican congressman Steve King of Iowa a few years back after a fine upstanding citizen, galvanized by years of inflammatory anti-government rhetoric from King and his comrades, flew a light plane into an IRS building in Texas, killing a dedicated federal employee and military veteran: King declared he felt "empathy" for the kamikaze taxpayer, saying he too was "frustrated" by the IRS, and opining that if only we replaced the income tax with a national sales tax, these things wouldn't happen.

Not once have they invoked the kind of crude, violent imagery that has become the stock in trade of the "angry" right for years now, legitimized so spectacularly by the rise of the brutal, hate-ridden speech of the Republican Party's nominee-apparent—I've lost count of the number of references from right-wing commentators and politicians I've noted over the last decade advocating "second amendment solutions" if Republicans fail to prevail at the polls, telling supporters they should be "armed and dangerous" to "oppose tyranny" (defined as, among other things, health care, a carbon tax, and other liberal policies), or routinely depicting their opponents in the cross-hairs of a sniper rifle.

Not once have they gloried in the death of a police officer, or made a disgusting joke about the loss of an officer's life—as conservative media star Ann Coulter did over the assassination of an abortion doctor, when she wittily remarked, "I don't really like to think of it as murder. It was terminating [the doctor] in the 203rd trimester."

The same crowd of conservatives ready to wink at or even condone the idea of violence when directed against suitable targets of course howled in fury if there was ever a suggestion made anywhere at any time that they bore even a hint of moral culpability for the actual killings that ensued—of a respected federal judge killed by the gunman who shot Arizona congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, for example, or a policeman slain at a Colorado abortion clinic, or other instances when those they had branded "enemies," or "traitors," or "criminals" were killed by their own twisted followers: no, those were merely "tragedies"; there was apparently no need even to condemn them.

As I noted at the time of the Giffords shooting, political leaders in a democracy have a special moral obligation to speak out against and resist extremism in their own camps: no democracy can survive when violence or incitement is left unchecked on any side. But it's not surprising that those who have shown no shame in inciting extremism and violent talk are always the first to try to reap its benefits.

Violence is a monster that feeds on itself, eventually consuming societies where it has got a foothold.

People with a scrap of moral decency know that at times like these, those who place love of country above hunger for power need to step back quickly.