BY MATTHEW HERBERT

Last week the Trump administration warned federal employees they weren’t allowed to bad mouth the president while on duty because it would violate the Hatch Act. The Hatch Act is a 1939 law that bars government workers from campaigning for a candidate while on the job.

It’s a sensible law. Of course civil servants should not draw wages to do anything other than the job they were hired to do.

This week’s memo, though, is an obvious attempt by the president to abuse executive power. People do talk, including civil servants. Trump’s desire to police their conversations is based on the childishly stupid premise that he is already running for office and therefore off limits as a topic of discussion.

Every first-term president since the Hatch Act was passed could have made this argument but didn’t. Why not? One can only speculate. One glaring reason might be that it would take a catastrophically insecure and narcissistic personality to imagine one might benefit from this kind of curb on free speech. And although we have had many deeply flawed presidents since 1939, we have had none who could match Trump for insecurity and narcissism.

Well, in any case, I’m off the clock at the moment, and so I thought I would share a few choice words about Trump’s garish stupidity and thuggishness. They aren’t my words. I could certainly come up with some, but I thought I would let a few of my favorite authors do the talking instead.

So, without further ado, enjoy these observations on Trump.

Trump is a massive fraud, the evil sum of his deficiencies, devoid of everything but the hollow ideology of a megalomaniac. . . . [He] is: ignorant of government, of history, of science, of philosophy, of art, incapable of expressing or recognizing subtlety or nuance, destitute of all decency, and wielding a vocabulary of 77 words that is better called Jerkish than English.

Philip Roth, novelist

 

He still has not visited U.S. troops deployed to a war zone — although he has spent 72 days at Mar-a-Lago and 58 days at his Bedminster, N.J., golf club. . . . So much for Trump’s conceit that he is pro-military. . . . He has no understanding of what soldiers do or the honor code by which they live. His idea of military service is marching in a parade — and he is peeved he couldn’t have one in Washington this Veterans Day. Through his words and deeds, the commander in chief shows his contempt for the men and women in uniform.

Max Boot, military historian, Republican strategist

 

And the basis of democracy is that everyone can be criticized — particularly our leaders. We don’t have a monarch, a supreme leader, a dictator for life. We’ve got a person who is temporarily in charge of the government, and when he makes an error it is mandatory for a free press to call it out. To try to delegitimize the press whenever it criticizes the president, it’s really the reflex of an autocrat, of a tin-pot dictator in some banana republic, and not worthy of a democracy like the United States, where the president serves at our pleasure and can be criticized just like anyone else.

Steven Pinker, linguist, psychologist

 

Trump is what he is, a floundering, inarticulate jumble of gnawing insecurities and not-at-all compensating vanities, which is pathetic.

George Will, conservative commentator

 

He’s a jackass.

Bill Kristol, conservative commentator, editor, The Weekly Standard

 

I join my family for Thanksgiving and have a great screaming fight with my Republican father, who yells at one point, “Donald Trump is not an asshole!” I find this funny but at the same time surprising. Regardless of whether or not you voted for him, I thought the president-elect’s identity as a despicable human being was something we could all agree on. I mean, he pretty much ran on it.

David Sedaris, writer

 

Trump bluster[s] incoherently like the ignorant, fact-disdaining, vainglorious bully he is.

Richard Dawkins, biologist

 

Donald Trump says a lot of things that aren’t true, often shamelessly so, and it’s tempting to call him a liar.

But that’s not quite right. As the Princeton University philosophy professor Harry Frankfurt put it in a famous essay, to lie presumes a kind of awareness of and interest in the truth — and the goal is to convince the audience that the false thing you are saying is in fact true. Trump, more often than not, isn’t interested in convincing anyone of anything. He’s a bullshitter who simply doesn’t care.

Trumpian bullshit serves not only as a test of elite loyalty, but as a signifier of belonging to a mass audience. The big, beautiful wall that Mexico will allegedly pay for, the war on the “fake news” media, Barack Obama’s forged birth certificate, and now the secret tape recording that will destroy James Comey are not genuine articles of faith meant to be believed in. Their invocation is a formalism or a symbol; a sign of compliance and belonging. The content is bullshit.

Matthew Yglesias, journalist

 

Comparisons between Trump and Hitler are wrong, Amis argues, because the US president actually resembles a different fascist: Hitler’s ally Mussolini.  . . .[Amis] recalled seeing the slogan “Mussolini Is Always Right” on Italian bridges in the 1970s. 

“Trump is that crazy, and that boastful, and that deluded,” Amis said. “Even Mussolini had a few good years before he lost it. But people like Hitler and Stalin wanted to change human nature. That’s what totalitarianism is. Trump doesn’t want to make a total claim on you as an individual. He wants to stay in power, and that’s about it.”

From an interview with Martin Amis, English novelist

 

Trump is the first president to have served in no public capacity before ascending to his perch. But more telling, Trump is also the first president to have publicly affirmed that his daughter is a “piece of ass.”

Ta Nehisi Coates, journalist

 

Trumpism is not just the usual mendacious special pleading for the super-rich. In fact, Trump cares little about policy or policy ideas or, for that matter, any ideas at all, even bogus or illusory ones. He only cares about self-gratification and self-glorification. His towering ego is his only ideal. But his megalomania is about more than his narcissism – for his fortune and his family riches, and his criteria for powerful leadership, have long-standing links to organized crime. Donald Trump is a racketeer, loyal neither to principles nor persons.

Sean Wilentz, presidential historian

Well, off to work.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Well, off to work.