It’s fine to blast former Trump press secretary Stephanie Grisham for hypocritically dishing dirt on the former first couple after helping them smear others for five years. But that’s no excuse for ignoring the substance of Grisham’s new book.
When report after report from former Trump aides all confirm the same basic picture of a sociopathic man-child utterly unfit for any public office, much less the presidency, it’s time to start working to block him from a return to the Oval Office. The reality of Grisham’s hypocrisy doesn’t make Trump any less of a menace.
In truth, Grisham’s hypocrisy matches many once-respectable conservatives who covered for Trump no matter how maliciously or dangerously he acted. Consider one of the disturbing things Grisham reported involving an exchange between Trump and murderous Russian dictator Vladimir Putin.
Trump, of course, was often and rightly criticized for obsequious verbal kowtows to Putin, and that criticism obviously stuck in Trump’s craw. Grisham writes that in Japan, before a 90-minute private meeting whose details remain unreported, Trump quietly said to Putin, “OK, I’m going to act a little tougher with you for a few minutes. But it’s for the cameras, and after they leave, we’ll talk. You understand.”
In short, Trump would effectively lie in public while sucking up to Putin in private.
President Barack Obama did something quite similar. He was caught in a hot-mic moment telling Russian then-president Dmitry Medvedev while talking about missile defense: “This is my last election. After my election, I have more flexibility.”
The conservative media world verged on apoplexy. This, conservatives said, was a horrid betrayal to one of this nation’s greatest global adversaries.
Yet, many of the same conservatives have convinced themselves that when it comes to Trump’s Russian fetish, there’s nothing there. The same ones furious at Obama’s private “flexibility” have nothing to say — not a word — about Grisham adding more evidence that Trump was Russia’s lapdog.
In addition to Trump’s numerous verbal encomia to Putin, Trump destabilized NATO by threatening to abandon its central mutual-defense agreement. He needlessly abandoned an airfield in Syria to Russian troops, effectively sided with pro-Russian oligarchs in Ukraine, and undermined U.S. law by suspending security assistance to Ukraine and insisting that Javelin missiles provided to Ukraine be stored, unused, far from the front against Russian separatists.
The Putin anecdote is, of course, just one of many Grisham tales that make Trump look awful. Can anyone really doubt that most or all of them are true? When book after book after book by former Trump officials or by chroniclers with access to those officials (and their contemporaneous notes and records) portray the former president in precisely the same way, eventually, one must come to believe the portrayal.
No rational, honest person can doubt by now that Trump’s narcissism is so extreme that he is functionally unable to distinguish between his own ego needs and the nation’s good — with the former typically subsuming the latter. Nobody can doubt that Trump’s administration fostered what Grisham called “a culture of abuse” or that it set out to “destroy” innocents merely for opposing Trump. And suppose Trump somehow gets into office again. In that case, his worst character traits will hold even more sway because, without the possibility of subsequent reelection, Trump will feel even less constrained by behavioral norms. As Grisham said on CNN, “There will be no guardrails.”
Even if Grisham’s motives are questionable, the substance of her book rings entirely true. With Trump still on the political loose, those essentials should terrify us all.
