Trump's Latest Interview Highlights Four of His Greatest Flaws
“Now Donald Trump has finally done it” is a sentence many people have said or written, but which has never yet proven true. As Trump gained momentum during the campaign season, errors that on their own would have stopped or badly damaged previous candidates bounced right off.
These ranged from mocking John McCain as a loser (because “I like people who weren’t captured”), to being stumped by the term “nuclear triad” (the weapons of mass destruction that he as U.S. president now controls), to “when you’re a star ... you can grab ‘em by the pussy” (my onetime employer Jimmy Carter had to spend days in the 1976 campaign explaining away his admission to Playboy that he had sometimes felt “lust in the heart”), to being labelled by an in-party opponent a “pathological liar,” “utterly amoral,” and “a narcissist at a level I don't think this country's ever seen” (the words of his now-supporter Ted Cruz). I kept my list of 152 such moments in the Time Capsule series as the campaign went on.
In office, Trump has of course continued his pattern of blasting through past norms, and his electoral and congressional supporters have continued their pattern of ignoring, misinterpreting, condoning, or outright embracing whatever he says or does. According to a poll this week, fewer than half of Trump supporters believe that Donald Trump Jr. even met with Russian representatives during the campaign, although Trump Jr. himself released the emails confirming that he did.
Thus we’ll probably know only in retrospect when Donald Trump has finally gone too far. But we can note in real time when he goes further than he has before—and he did that again yesterday.
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The vehicle was Trump’s astonishing on-the-record interview . The 7,500-word transcript is . The says these passages are mere “excerpts,” but they are plenty, and are completely worth reading end-to-end.
