By Quin Hillyer at the Washington Examiner;
I’ve been away from almost all news for about two weeks handling some family matters, so I have just a fuzzy awareness of headlines and opening paragraphs…. [but] I missed nothing by paying little attention for two weeks and needed no journalistically iffy new book to explain our president’s multitudinous deficiencies. I already knew — all of us, if we are honest with ourselves, already knew — that Trump is and always has been unfit for office. Not just unfit in a 25th Amendment “mental capacity” way (although he may well be that, too), but emotionally and temperamentally unfit, experientially unfit, and morally unfit as well.
We already knew Trump was a dishonest businessman, shortchanging contractors as a matter of course and deliberately using bankruptcy laws multiple times to walk away from debts to literally tens of thousands of small-business contractors, vendors, and workers — people he never even tried to “make whole” after he recovered his financial footing enough to boast a (supposed) $10 billion fortune.
We know Trump oversaw a bogus “university” that bilked participants of thousands of dollars each. We know Trump failed at an airline business, a steak business, the casino business, at vodka sales and necktie sales and a mortgage brokerage and pro football team ownership. We know he used illegal workers at big construction projects and then lost numerous court rounds for years in a lawsuit quite credibly alleging that he shorted worker pay and benefits.
We know that Trump is a serial adulterer. We know from his own admission (or boasts) and the highly believable accounts of numerous others that he has ogled teenage girls and insulted, harassed, and even assaulted numerous women. We know that he has made bigoted comments about blacks, Jews, Hispanics, and Native Americans….
[Later in the column:] Against all those major defects, some conservatives are busy crediting Trump for accomplishments in his first year in office. The praise is misguided. Almost everything Trump has done to make me and other longtime conservatives happy so far was the equivalent of plucking low-hanging fruit — fruit any Republican president with bicameral Republican legislative majorities and a “nuked” judicial filibuster should be able to handle with relative ease….
