The incontinent former president sprung another leak
Timothy P. Carney
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The federal indictment of Donald Trump is shocking in some ways, including the brazenness with which he allegedly confessed to breaking the law in the act of breaking the law.
At the same time, there’s nothing at all surprising about this. We have all known, since long before he became president, that Trump was utterly unfit for the job in precisely this way.
REPUBLICAN PRIMARY: BIG TENT OR BIG TOP
I say this as someone who supported the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, who is immensely grateful for his judicial appointments who overturned Roe v. Wade, and who believes Trump was the best foreign policy president since the end of the Cold War.
The problem with Trump was always that he lacks the personal virtues it would take to be a good president and he possesses all the vices that are especially dangerous for a president to have.
Back in April 2016, I wrote this:
“Trump,” as president “would be an incontinent windbag whose ignorance, self-regard, and lack of self-restraint would produce a daily string of embarrassments. Some of these would be destructive and dangerous to the country and the world. That’s the real reason good people should fear a President Trump.”
I concluded: “Ultimately, Congress could impeach Trump, convict him, and remove him from office. But Congress cannot keep Trump from shooting off his mouth and causing national or international disasters.”
Four months into his presidency, I wrote this about Trump:
“Incontinence is the inability to hold in that which one ought to hold in. It is the tendency to spill forth, thoughtlessly, accidentally, what and when one doesn’t intend.
“Trump’s verbal incontinence has caused mockery and mirth among his enemies, and distress in those among us who wish him well in the White House. His irrelevant, self-aggrandizing asides when he speaks make us cringe and ask, ‘can he not control himself?’”
What was the occasion for this somewhat vulgar piece? Trump had apparently passed along to Russia’s foreign minister and ambassador some intelligence, obtained from Israel.
While the Left’s conspiracy theorists assumed Trump was trying to help Russia for some deep dark reason, I wrote: “the most likely story is that Trump blurted out the classified information. Was he bragging about the intelligence he gets? Did he figure in the spur in the moment that this was good intelligence collaboration? Did he ‘figure’ anything?”
This illustrated why we should worry about a Trump presidency:
“Trump’s incontinence, not some underhanded intent, is the most likely explanation for this disclosure. And that’s upsetting.
“Blurting out classified information can compromise our intelligence sources, maybe getting them killed. Passing along a foreign partner’s intelligence can make them less likely to share with us — it could cause all of our allies to cut us off from anything they don’t want Trump blabbing to Russia, or Turkey, or China. Trump’s incontinence could trigger a crisis of authority as top U.S. intelligence officials will be tempted to withhold sensitive information from the president. And that is not a recipe for a functional administration.”
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I don’t think Trump’s most-recently-alleged breaches of confidentiality endanger U.S. lives or interests, but they again show how unfit he is for the job.
This is why the primary reaction to this indictment, from all Republicans, ought to be, if these facts are true, it shows us that the GOP needs a different nominee for president.