Dr. Ben Carson is famous for his book and film Gifted Hands. The neurosurgeon featured many “these hands” commercials that were some of the best of the campaign. They represented the beautiful side of Lincoln’s Party and the reason so many millions supported Dr. Carson.
I thought he was not the best choice for the nomination, that he was harmed by the Christian celebrity complex that warped his story, and that he often lost the train of an argument. He was, however, fundamentally a decent man who has done significant things to help people. He had a hard time leaving the celebrity bubble where everyone gives the celebrity praise. Trump implied he was mentally unstable and the Cruz campaign sandbagged him in Iowa.
By that time, however, his moment had passed, done in by Trump.
Ben Carson’s hands will sadly not be what anyone remembers in this campaign. We will be discussing Donald J. Trump’s hands.
Why?
In the 1990’s Trump got into a celebrity war with Spy magazine where he was called a “short fingered vulgarian.” Trump got very mad and has never forgotten the slight. He has brought it up for decades. His claim last night and today that he had never heard it before now is a lie. Several media commentators noted months ago that if you wanted to get under Trump’s skin that you could bring up his hands.
Rubio tried it out and the insult worked. Trump cannot let it go . . . to his harm. Why? He is the frontrunner and by his account fabulously wealthy and successful. Why can’t he drop it? He could laugh it off like Reagan and it would end, but he was discussing it on the trail today.
Leave aside the debasing of our political rhetoric, which he began early with unconscionable mocking of the disabled, minorities, and undocumented workers. Rubio also has gone too far at times with his push back (“wet himself”). We don’t need it, but we have always had gross out politicians. The main change is that our older politicians had other people do the dirt and now Trump takes the job himself.
Blaine was not going to bring up Cleveland’s love child, but his followers surely did. Andrew Jackson’s wife may have been killed by dirty tricks against her honor. Donald J. Trump has just pushed it into our face by doing it himself in polite company.
This has made our culture coarser and worse, but the Republic will survive.
A bigger difficulty is how easily Trump was played by an insult.
Every celebrity has a healthy ego. They tend to hear what they want to hear because people are attracted to fame. Even bad fame attracts a weird curiosity: OJ can still sell his autograph and has his band of dwindling fans.
Very wealthy people also live in a cocoon where everyone loves them because everyone works for them or wishes to work for them.
Politics combines this problem with power: the power to harm the planet.
Trump is a rich, celebrity, politician: the triple threat of pride.
Character counts in the White House. We want the President to deal with some of the toughest people in the world. Bankrupt a business and your overall success rate will pull your company through. Mess up with Putin and millions of people might fall into slavery.
You face tougher foes in government. Business guys don’t have control of intelligence agencies spending funds to understand how to mess with you. Every day the opposition party in our nation will try to rattle you. Social media will contain millions who will attack anything you do.
“Small fingered vulgarian” and attacks on your manhood are not the toughest thing you will face.
This brings us to a disturbing feature of the Donald J. Trump campaign: a tendency to authoritarianism. “I will hire the best people” combined with “I will lead” simply will not work in our system of divided government.
Many of the best people are in the other party or are bad at taking orders (they give them!). This is a chief difference between having a middle-sized international realty company and a personal brand and being chief executive of a nation. In his little world, the CEO is King. . . he can take advice, but his word is the last word. This is not true of the President. He is limited by the Constitution, treaties, and the traditions of the Republic.
Donald J Trump has spent months advocating torture and war crimes. Why?
It cannot be a negotiating ploy. You cannot negotiate the Geneva Convention.
I have opposed all forms of “enhanced interrogation” during the Bush and Obama years because (as almost every Christian ethicist would say) they are incompatible with Christian virtue. Yet there was a case to be made for waterboarding. The defenders said that it was not torture. Americans do not (or should not) torture. Orders from the President are no defense. Trump wants to do more than the barely defensible and he has not changed that tune.
This has been true since we rejected the “I was obeying orders” from Nazis in war crimes trials at Nuremburg.
When asked last night at the debate about an illegal order, Trump said: “I say it, they will do it.”
This statement made it impossible for any Christian or Constitutionalist to vote for Donald Trump. The reaction was building.
His campaign “backed down” today and said Trump would not ask his troops to do anything illegal, but this is not enough. The problem with the statement is simple: the President will make the initial determination of what is legal. If he gives a bad order, and the troops obey it, Trump can pardon himself, but the troops are doomed if the courts (national and international) decide they did an act opposed to the Geneva Convention.
After his written “back down,” Trump was back to whipping up a crowd with bully boy rhetoric.
His defenders say this is his “art of the deal.” He is staking out an extreme positon to get half of what he wants. Sadly, this fails. You cannot “deal” with the Geneva Convention. It is not up for negotiation. Nor is “more than waterboarding” but less than beheading ok. Beheading our foes is not the opening move in a negation. It is a war crime. Lesser forms of torture are not wins, but a betrayal of Christian ethics. They are evil, if less evil.
We cannot out brutalize Daesh and should not even wish to do so. This would summon demons we dare not unleash in the Republic.
We are not electing a President to negotiate the most evil we can do. His statement on torture was disqualifying. It is the moral equivalent of supporting abortion in all three trimesters. He “walked it back” while whipping his supporters up today with discussion of torture and accusing Ted Crux (!) of political correctness on torture. Watch the video. (The full rally is here.) It is not just disturbing, and it certainly isn’t funny, whipping up a crowd on waterboarding and more, this is bad.
Somebody will say: “John Mark, you go to a church where people are being murdered.” Yes. I am. I am a proud member of a Church based in Syria. What are our leaders doing? They are calling for forgiveness and mercy. They oppose torture. They want American help to defend their lives, but they do not wish to see their civilization descend even further into barbarism.
They don’t need America matching ISIS, but refusing to match ISIS and standing for moral values.
This brings us back to Trump’s thirty year obsession with his hands. I knew the attack was coming from social media. Trump must have known it and he could not stop himself from responding. (I will not consider the possibility that this billionaire is so insulated that he doesn’t read National Review or have people who do.)
We learned over the last few days that Trump has an exceedingly fragile ego, unable to control his anger when upset. He cannot even do so when he is “winning.” He is willing to argue for in months, openly, for acts as bad as abortion: killing the non-combatant families of accused terrorists. Trump backed down when military and intelligence people began to make an open stink today, but his response was written by the campaign. He did not deliver it himself.
He doesn’t like being wrong. He hates having his manhood challenged more than any Presidential candidate I have seen. We have a candidate for President so sensitive about his hand size that he cannot drop it. He is willing to be “the tough guy” and order torture or threaten it. The threat, if he had been in office, would have put some overly eager officer in peril. The tendency to give orders and repent later always devastates the poor people working for the leader.
A King of England, also with a prickly ego, once shouted out that he wished to have an enemy “removed.” A group of knights did it. Their victim became a saint. The King repented and kept reigning. The killers ended up exiled, wandering Europe, excommunicated, and miserable. Thus it always is when powerful men blow a fuse and imprudent followers trust them enough to obey.
The situation would be even worse in our Republic. We are not a monarchy and we cannot have a President with strong monarchial tendencies. We cannot afford a Constitution crisis that an outburst provoked by wounded proud would produce. Other branches would react. People’s lives would be ruined with the law suits that would follow.
This vulgar “hands campaign” revealed two things: Ben Carson had hands of healing. Donald J. Trump has hands that are unsteady and insecure. Someone’s hands will soon be on the nuclear button.
Better small hands with a humble heart than monstrous hands in service to a shriveled soul.
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