By Edwin Cooney
When I was growing up, I was a chronic worrier. It didn’t matter whether I had any control of events in my life — kids after all seldom do. Adults largely controlled what occurred or didn’t occur in my personal domain, but I still worried which did me little good.
Over the years, I’ve reached the conclusion that worrying is more destructive than it is instructive. Hence, for the most part, I’ve tempered my worries by downgrading them to concerns with the large assistance of perspective — especially historical perspective. There’s more to this personal analysis, but since it has to do with me more than it does you, I’ll generously give the reader a break and go on to make this week’s point!
Writing in the Washington Post this last week, Dana Milbank demonstrates that what’s ultimately most significant in President Trump’s administration isn’t either the truth or falsity of events or, more importantly, the proper analysis of laws or proposals of future laws, as much as what President Trump believes to be the truth about all matters great and small. Whatever the president believes, Mr. Milbank concludes, encompasses both truth and reality.
Whether or not former President Obama ordered a tap on his phones during “the sacred election campaign,” no matter how large or small the crowd was attending his inauguration, no matter whether it rained or stopped raining, it is what the president believes which must be the supreme factor in Americans’ assessment of our national reality!
Any objective study of history is bedecked with instances in which a willful leader’s personal beliefs have dangerously affected national security. Here are a few examples:
(1.) King Henry VIII believed that God was punishing him for marrying his late brother Arthur’s bride, Catherine of Aragon, by not allowing the couple to produce a male heir. This was the basis for Henry’s abandonment of the Catholic faith, the deluge of executions, and both legal and illegal murders for almost two centuries to come.
(2.) Martin Luther’s anti-Catholicism and anti-Judaism beliefs brought forth on the European continent the same holocaust as King Henry’s personal beliefs and insecurity did in England.
(3.) President Andrew Jackson’s anti-Indian prejudices fueled the “Manifest Destiny” attitude that ultimately resulted in the 1846 war with Mexico and the Civil War fifteen years later. (Note: both Congressman Abraham Lincoln and Ulysses Grant regarded the war with Mexico as immoral even though Congressman Lincoln supported funding for the soldiers of that war and Major Grant fought in the war.)
(4.) Adolf Hitler’s belief that Germany had been “stabbed in the back by a gang of Jewish-led November criminals” of 1918 was the main springboard for Hitler’s political triumph in 1933 and Germany’s defeat in disgrace of 1945.
(5.) President Lyndon B. Johnson’s determination not to be blamed for losing JFK’s Vietnam venture was a large part of the reason that LBJ pursued the Vietnam War throughout the mid 1960s.
(6.) Richard M. Nixon’s personal resentment of the Kennedys along with his belief that antiwar demonstrators, journalists, academicians and politicians were becoming national heroes while breaking the law, justified the illegalities he used thus creating the Watergate scandal and his subsequent resignation as President of the United States of America.
(7.) The fact that President Carter was only elected for a single term, I believe, had more to do with his genuine dislike of congressional politics than it had to do with any single policy failure. I’m convinced that President Carter believed he had to be above politics — especially congressional politics which he saw as driven more by special interests than by genuine principles.
Of course anyone who possesses presidential ambitions must possess a set of beliefs about him or herself, as well as about the political climate at home and abroad. That’s a given! What’s disturbing about President Trump’s beliefs and actions is that they’re so parochial, self-serving and even contradictory. For example:
(1.) During the recent presidential election campaign, candidate Trump openly asserted that he was ready to claim the result invalid depending on the outcome. The campaign’s legitimacy depended on the fate of Hillary Clinton more than it did anything else. However, in his tweet in which he insisted that Obama had tapped his phone, he characterized the campaign as “sacred.”
(2.) During the interim between election and inauguration, President-elect Trump was openly critical of the intelligence community as it gave credence to concerns regarding his relations and connections with Putin’s Russia. The day after his inauguration, President Trump paid a visit to the CIA building to proudly associate himself with its legitimacy.
(3.) Throughout most of the interim, President-elect Trump was warm in his praise of President Obama for his cooperation in the transfer of power. Now, he’s willing to equate Barack Obama with Richard Nixon.
(4.) President Trump apparently is convinced that Hillary Clinton’s popular vote victory was largely provided by corrupt voting procedures and by illegal voters.
(5.) President Trump believes that a free press is a dishonest press and clearly an enemy of the people.
(6.) Not so long ago, candidate Trump used to contemptuously downgrade the monthly report of the Labor Department -- especially when it reflected downward unemployment figures during the Obama administration. Just last Friday when the Labor Department announced that during the month of February the economy had created 235,000 jobs causing the unemployment figure to drop from 4.8% to 4.7%, both President Trump and the acerbically conservative Drudge Report suddenly found real credibility in Labor Department statistics. Both Trump and Matthew Drudge became real devotees of the Labor Department’s veracity! SURPRISE!!!
(7.) Finally, and this is what lies at the center of my new worry, President Donald John Trump appears to believe in his own personal infallibility. Even more to the point, through the use of "alternative facts” and political dominance over the party of Abraham Lincoln, the president expects to be sustained as a legitimate national leader.
Like the humblest citizen, the president is entitled (and even required) to possess both a healthy ego and a set of principles based on experience and judgment. It’s in our national interest that he possesses both. What he hasn’t earned via either the popular or electoral vote is the status of a deity.
Neither you nor I should have to worry about a presidential deification, but it may become unpatriotic should we fail to worry about exactly that!
Ah! Worrying may, more times than not, be nonproductive. However, the book of Ecclesiastes tells us that there is a time for every purpose under heaven!! Wow, really scary!
RESPECTFULLY SUBMITTED,
EDWIN COONEY
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