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Is Trump Presidential?
I heard on a recent podcast Fred Barnes criticize Trump for not being presidential. Let’s examine the post-WW2 Democratic presidents:
1. Truman: Threatened to punch a critic who gave a poor review of his daughter’s singing.
2. JFK: Many affairs including one with Judith Exner who was also associated with Sam Giancana. Became president by stealing Texas and Illinois.
3. LBJ: Financial corruption on a massive scale and many affairs.
4. Carter: Terrible economic policies.
5. Clinton: Many affairs.
6. Obama: Lied about ObamaCare. Spied on enemies. Called Tea Partiers an obscenity.
Perhaps Fred could inform us how Trump is not being presidential.
Published in Politics
Nothing, they just got tired of being forgotten that year and then everything went back to normal in 2015.
Thad Cochran
Okay, I’m not from Mississippi, and although the name sounds familiar, I have no idea what you’re talking about.
It involved a run-off election between Cochran and Chris(?) McDaniel who was the Tea Party candidate. There was rumored to be some underhanded tactics that tipped the election to Cochran. I suppose I could look it up, but it’s water under the bridge as far as I’m concerned. The incident was reported as the GOPe against the Tea Party, and took place about the time that McConnell said, “We’ll crush them”, where “them” was the Tea Party.
I became more forgiving of Nixon for this, after reading Dick Rumsfeld’s autobiography. It was a messy political situation.
Nixon was stuck with an already inflationary policy, both from LBJ’s deficit spending and the actions of the Fed, and then the first oil crisis hit. The Democrats in Congress authorized the President to create wage and price controls, which is a terrible idea, but left Nixon in a political pickle. If he did nothing, the Democrats would claim that they authorized action that would have solved the problem — it wouldn’t have, but they would have claimed this — but Nixon failed to act.
As I recall correctly, Nixon put Rumsfeld in charge of implementing wage and price controls in a way that would cause minimal damage.
I’ll answer the question in the OP.
President Trump is often not Presidential. He can be rude, boorish, and obnoxious. Sometimes I enjoy this, as his targets are often quite well selected.
It is also true that many prior Presidents have not been Presidential, and that many of the criticisms leveled at President Trump apply equally to a number of his predecessors. Victor Davis Hanson’s recent book is particularly instructive on this issue.
On the moral issue in particular, I have been quite pleased that, as far as we know, President Trump has not engaged in adultery while in office. This is better performance than many of his predecessors, including (I think) Clinton, JFK, Eisenhower, and FDR.
As far as I know, President Obama was also admirable in this regard, as were both Bushes, Reagan, Carter, Ford, and Nixon.
“Presidential” is a false concept that means only that someone doesn’t like the president. We have a democratic republic, not an autocracy. There is no noblesse oblige. We get what we vote for, and that is what being presidential means, if it means anything. Being a blue blood bend over buddy to billionaires and bolsheviks brings bupkis. I want a president that speaks and acts to protect American interests and American rights and freedoms. We’ve not had a president do that since Reagan.