Charlatan

A foreign diplomat from a friendly country said yesterday that if Trump is elected, foreign officials will refuse to see American ambassadors, non-Americans will see the choice as confirming the worst critiques of America as an insensitive and militaristic imperialist, and willingness abroad to cooperate with the United States will decline precipitously.

That is an understatement.

A lot of us have laughed at Trump’s bluster and lying. It is funny. He reminds me of the bullies we all learned to defy in childhood. Who can take someone seriously when he claims to own the largest vineyard on the East Coast and it turns out it is not the largest and he doesn’t own it? When he flogs Trump steaks that are no longer sold? When he not only says but repeats, repeatedly, that he is going to make the Mexicans, whom he has insulted unsparingly, pay for a wall on the border? When he vows to block Muslims from entering the US? You have to begin to take it all seriously because it gives extremists a rallying cry and endangers Americans both here and abroad.

I don’t really expect Trump supporters to care. They like him because he is one of them. Identity politics work here as well as in Bosnia. But everyone else should worry. Bluster and prevarication is common enough in diplomacy. President Putin does it regularly: his troops aren’t in Ukraine, he has no plans to deploy forces to Syria, he intends to keep them there until the Islamic State is defeated. He is a serial liar, like his American political doppelgänger. It is no surprise that Trump admires Putin, or that Putin thinks well of Trump. The question is whether we want our country to be in this company.

I’ve been through quite a few transitions from one US administration to another. Some were personally painful to me: a big program on renewable energy sources I had negotiated with Italy under Carter got canned when Ronald Reagan came to power in 1981. Others were painful in bigger ways: the hanging chads of the 2000 election will long be remembered. Re-election of George W. in 2004, after it had become clear the Iraq invasion was based on false premises, was a low point. But the election of Trump would trump them all.

It would tell me that I had misunderstood my fellow Americans profoundly. I’ve always known that there is a third of them who would never vote for Barack Hussein Obama, whom they regard as foreign because he is black. But they were outvoted, twice. The question now is whether I can be confident now that they will choose a woman who carries a lot of baggage over a guy who will do serious damage. Just imagine what a mass casualty terrorist attack between now and November would do to voter preferences.

I’m not moving to Canada. I didn’t do that during the Vietnam war and I won’t let anyone chase me out of the country now. Fact is, I’d gain with his fat tax cut. And it makes me proud that our democracy is open enough to allow dramatic differences of political perspective. Foreigners should not see that as a weakness, even if it makes us difficult to predict. But a guy who can’t even bring himself to tell his supporters to stop beating protesters doesn’t merit “Hail to the chief.” It would be more like hail to the thief. Which reminds me, when will he make his tax returns public? I’d like to see him lose 50 states, but I’ll settle for less. His defeat would send a clear and unequivocal message to the rest of the world that America can be relied on to know a charlatan when it sees one.