Republicans are less unified on Trump’s fitness for office than you might think. While virtually all House and Senate Republicans have fallen into line to endorse Donald Trump, the four-time-indicted former president who is now the GOP’s presumptive presidential nominee, the high-level advisers who served alongside him day in and day out have overwhelmingly refused to do so.
This unprecedented rebuff, from everyone from former vice President Mike Pence to former defense secretary Mark T. Esper to former attorney general William P. Barr to former chief of staff John F. Kelly, speaks to Trump’s manifest flaws and how they are visible to those who know him best.
Even more stunning, these former advisers have shared hair-raising observations of Trump’s outbursts, mind-set and personal depravity. Kelly recalled Trump’s favorable comments about Hitler (“some good things”), which Kelly believes is part of Trump’s idolatry of dictators, whose power Trump envies.
Esper warned, “He wanted to deploy active-duty troops on the street of Washington, D.C., and suggested actually that we shoot Americans in the street. That’s kind of more of what you’ll see.” Esper further cautioned that Trump is not “fit for office because he puts himself first and I think anybody running for office should put the country first.”
Some former advisers have gone so far as to warn that Trump is mentally unfit to serve. Barr explained that “he is a consummate narcissist. And he constantly engages in reckless conduct. … He’s a very petty individual who will always put his interests ahead of the country’s. … But our country can’t, you know, can’t be a therapy session for, you know, a troubled man like this.”
“It’s not the personality that’s the problem. He doesn’t understand the job, particularly in the national security space,” former national security adviser John Bolton said on CNN. (He also advised, “I mean, if Trump is elected, there will be celebrations in the Kremlin, there’s no doubt about it, because [Vladimir] Putin thinks that he is an easy mark.”)
The Guardian reported, “Donald Trump’s White House chief of staff [John Kelly] secretly bought a book in which 27 mental health professionals warned that the president was psychologically unfit for the job, then used it as a guide in his attempts to cope with Trump’s irrational behavior.” Beyond revealing Trump’s praise for Hitler, Kelly has described Trump in shockingly candid terms:
A person that has no idea what America stands for and has no idea what America is all about. A person who cavalierly suggests that a selfless warrior who has served his country for 40 years in peacetime and war should lose his life for treason — in expectation that someone will take action. A person who admires autocrats and murderous dictators.
Though these Republicans regrettably have not had the wherewithal to endorse President Biden, the only candidate capable of preventing the manifestly unfit former president from returning to power, they can still serve their country by preventing their old boss from regaining power — power, this time, without the guardrails they provided in his first term.
Here’s how: The “duty to warn” is a concept associated with mental health professionals who must alert authorities or a potential victim if their patient appears to be a threat to others. In a non-medical context, those who once took the oath of office (and in Kelly’s and Esper’s cases, served in the military as well) also have a “duty to warn” the country of the fundamental threat to national security and democratic institutions that Trump represents.
To date, the former Trump advisers’ messages have been sporadic and uncoordinated. Though their individual statements have gotten some coverage, the sheer number of defections and the gravity of their warnings have not become a staple of news headlines, nor have they garnered serious TV coverage. That need not continue.
A “duty to warn” group of former Trump advisers with eyewitness accounts of his rhetoric, conduct, intellectual limitations and emotional state during his presidency should band together, travel the country, submit op-eds, make media appearances and cut ads that argue against his election. Even if they decline to endorse Biden, their dire warnings about Trump collectively should make clear that his mental and emotional defects make him a danger to the country.
Their observations, not well known to most voters, would be powerful and frightening because they go to the heart of his capacity to govern in a democracy. “He’s already saying it’s going to be about retribution,” Barr has warned. “And he’s, you know, he’s a very petty man. And it’s all about him. And he has a very fragile ego and you know, something happened to him as a kid and I’m not going to spend time psychoanalyzing it but, you know, every encounter he has to come out showing the other guy that he’s better.” He added, “It’s all about, you know, the assertion of his ego, and I think he will be self-indulgent in a new administration and won’t be as effective as he could otherwise be and probably things would start moving toward chaos.”
Trump no doubt will continue to rage against his former advisers, despite his boast that he hired only the “best people.” But a unified and consistent effort from a substantial number of former high-ranking officials to educate the American people, especially “soft” Republicans who continue to hold these former Trump aides in high esteem, could act as a powerful counterweight to the false equivalence that afflicts too much campaign coverage.
Whether speaking up sooner might have slowed Trump’s march to the nomination is debatable. However, with the country’s attention turning to the general election, it is more imperative than ever that credible eyewitnesses take their “duty to warn” seriously. Our democracy could depend upon it.
