Donald Trump is proud of the slogan “Make America Great Again.” As a master marketer he was smart enough to adopt it and have it embroidered on a baseball cap. Many wear the caps. It’s a fair bet that a sizeable number of them don’t know it’s a phrase borrowed/stolen/adapted from Ronald Reagan — a fair bet since 33 percent still believe the birther lie that President Barack Obama wasn’t born in the United States, though Trump himself has finally dropped it after five years of proof that he was sponsoring a falsehood.
Reagan’s 1980 bid for the presidency featured campaign buttons and posters of Reagan and running mate George H.W. Bush and the slogan “Let’s Make America Great Again.” Trump recognized that the “Let’s” was redundant; the slogan was stronger as a simple imperative. He claimed to have trademarked it. While this exemplifies a characteristic skill, it also again reminds us of another capacity of Trump’s, one for stretching the truth, sometimes known as lying. In 2015, asked about the slogan, he said, “I was the first [to use it] by a longshot.” And again in a dispute with Cruz he said, “The line of ‘Make America great again,’ the phrase, that was mine, I came up with it about a year ago, and I kept using it, and everybody’s now using it, they are all loving it.”
[OPINION: Clinton Would Set America on the Right Track]
Well, never mind. I’d be more prepared to forgive and forget if Trump would doff his baseball cap to the progenitor of the phrase, and seriously study and embrace his policies on national security. Fat chance. The thousands who keep showing up at the Trump circus rallies seem to pay no heed to the grave warnings from people who really do know what they are talking about. The Trumpkins have ingested his magical thinking on every issue, including the contradictions. They take him at his word that he can deal with everything all as easily as building a continental wall and removing 11 million immigrants or closing Trump casinos. And for the faith in his magic the Trumpkins are unfazed, it seems, by the corruption of other values, hypnotized enough to tolerate the cruel mockery of the disabled, the concealment of his taxes, insults to anyone who gets under his skin, the misogyny; by the invocations to violence, the narcissism, the paranoia they share with him, the ability to dazzle and con the naive. Still, it is disconcerting to realize the crowds in the baseball caps have forgotten the qualities that originally went with the originator of the great slogan, forgotten the knowledge, temperament and moral character that kept America safe in a dangerous world.
After Trump’s hot-headed outburst in the first astounding debate with a cool, well-informed Hillary Clinton, it is even harder to imagine Trump as commander-in-chief. This is a man who claimed, “I also have a much better temperament than she has,” which was greeted by laughter in the audience. In the many different dimensions by which voters measure the man for that job — or should! — Donald Trump falls short. Former Defense Secretary Robert Gates who served both Republican and Democratic presidents and has written about them with candor and authority, is a patriot with no skin in the game and this is what he says: Trump is “stubbornly uninformed about the world and how to lead our country and government, and temperamentally unsuited to lead our men and women in uniform.” Fifty Republican national security experts joined together to say the United States’ moral authority would be in jeopardy if Trump were elected and they questioned his knowledge of and belief in the Constitution. They wrote that he has “demonstrated repeatedly that he has little understanding” of the nation’s “vital national interests, its complex diplomatic challenges, its indispensable alliances and the democratic values” on which American policy should be based, according to The New York Times. And they lamented that “Mr. Trump has shown no interest in educating himself. Retired Gen. John Allen said he felt compelled to show up at the Democratic National Convention because he was horrified that Trump’s vows to resume torture and kill the families of terrorists put us on a potential track for “a civil-military crisis the like of which we’ve not seen in this country.”
Trump does have a lead among military families and cites the support of 88 retired admirals and generals. They are men who have served our country honorably, but none has been the head of a service or led a major combat command. Piquantly, they have been countered by a retired three-star general whose views will be the ultimate test of Trump’s temperament. She is a woman, and she will vote for Hillary Clinton. Claudia Kennedy, the first female three-star general in the Army, is an expert in intelligence. She says Trump “desecrates the memory of our fallen soldiers, insults our families, and actively undermines the values that have made our military a stronger, more inclusive and fairer fighting force.”
[SEE: Editorial Cartoons on Donald Trump]
Today’s global order, the rules-based system established in 1945 after World War II and expanded after the end of the Cold War, is under extraordinary pressure and strain. We live at a time when the world has been buffeted by upheaval and many crises. Russia is trying to re-draw the borders of Europe, the Middle East is in flames, European unity is unraveling, jihadi terrorism is spreading alarmingly, authoritarianism is growing, China is contesting the status quo in the South China Sea, forcing its neighbors to re-arm. What is Trump’s reaction? He wants America to retreat and build walls. He questions the U.S. security umbrella in the Pacific, as if we would be comfortable with Japan and South Korea getting their own nuclear weapons. At the same time, he undercuts the credibility of NATO’s defenses in Europe. In the Cold War, Reagan stood in Berlin and challenged “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” And he did, a good man who was wise enough to know the futility of trying to match America militarily. And Trump? Amazingly, he publicly suggests that the U.S. might stand by if Russian troops marched into the Balkan States.
What we are talking about is an unraveling of our long-standing alliances and the lifting of the international order. Neither America nor the world can afford to absorb the isolationism proposed by Trump. He seems to create his own facts when he needs them, as if they can become credible through repetition. As Michael Gerson wrote in The Washington Post, “what made the first presidential debate extraordinary — really, unprecedented — was not the charges that Trump denied but the ones he confirmed.” The Republican nominee looked and sounded frighteningly unprepared. Screen shots showed him shifting his weight, rolling his eyes and appearing impatient. He makes matters worse with rambling, self-centered responses that often trail into incoherence. Now prominent U.S. generals are sharing a quip, according to Philip Stephens, that before handing over the so-called nuclear football they would remove the circuit boards.
Hillary Clinton’s debate performance provoked Trump to underscore that he is a reckless, prickly, ignorant and petty person who is also tone-deaf, self-absorbed, unable to make coherent arguments most of the time. When presented with his claim that global warming was a hoax perpetrated by the Chinese, Trump replied “I did not [say it].” But he did. And the beat goes on. Rather than affirming the importance of NATO or reassuring our Pacific partners (and business leaders), he reduces the United States’ global role to a protection racket run by seedy executives.
And he concluded his performance by praising himself for his own grace and restraint during an evening that showed him to be something much less than that, Gerson writes.
An actual giant. It is doubly painful to move from criticism of the Republican contender for the White House to contemplating the life and work of a great leader: Shimon Peres. He had a vision for peace he was not able to achieve — it takes two to tango — but he shared a Nobel Prize for his efforts and importantly he was key to keeping Israel secure and strong enough to try over decades.
Peres placed his faith in the promise of Israeli techno-economics, typified as much by its many innovative companies as by the nuclear reactor at Dimona. He believed Israeli brainpower could conquer the Middle East and offer a new direction, and that this would be that Israel could contribute much to humanity.
[PHOTOS: The Big Picture — September 2016]
The world lost a giant, a great statesman, a natural leader, an exceptional Israeli ambassador, a man who was irrepressibly optimistic. The true political legacy of Peres is “an Israel that is esteemed, liked, accepted and supported to the extent it needs; an Israel that is a real and vital part of the international community; a Western Israel with its view trained on the future, on cooperation, on prosperity and on the peaceful resolution of conflicts,” Raanan Shaked wrote in Yedioth Ahronoth. This is the Israel that inspires respect around the world and brought the world leaders to his graveside, including the Palestinian leader, Mahmoud Abbas. Their attendance is a signal that Peres’ ideas of a better, more tranquil and more prosperous Israeli life can still be realized.
Peres lost a number of elections and “what did [he] do after each one of those losses? He got up on his feet and moved on from the very same spot until he achieved his goals,” Shaked wrote. He was not somebody who gave up. “He always turned his gaze onto tomorrow; the path that lay ahead; the next victory, no matter how long it took to arrive,” he wrote. For all the political defeats that he had, he remains a winner, perhaps the greatest Israeli winner in its history, for Peres was a man of the world and for hundreds of millions of people his face was the face of Israel. May he rest in peace.
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Stark Contrast: Donald Trump and Shimon Peres originally appeared on usnews.com
