In an overnight editorial entitled Donald Trump and the Judge, the New York Times Editorial Board has torn into Trump’s recent diatribe attacks against the judge overseeing the case filed by plaintiffs seeking damages for high pressure sales tactics and empty promises from Trump University and the news media.
As content goes, the Times holds back very little in its criticism of Trump’s language, his tactics and his demeanor:
Mr. Trump has said so many irresponsible or dangerous things so often and in so many settings that there is a real risk that many voters will simply tune out and his campaign will somehow be normalized.
So it is particularly important to note when Mr. Trump’s statements go beyond the merely provocative or absurd and instead represent a threat to America’s carefully balanced political system. This is such a moment. It is not too late for Republicans who revere that system to question how they can embrace a nominee who has so little regard for it.
The Times also called Trump to task for his attacks on the media and for his failure to recognize the separation of powers inherent in the U.S. Constitution
One would think Mr. Trump, whose sister is a federal appellate judge, would know how self-destructive it is for any litigant anywhere to attack the judge hearing his or her case. But Mr. Trump is not any litigant; he is running to be president of the United States — a job that requires at least a glancing understanding of the American system of government, in particular a respect for the separation of powers.
The editorial writers make it clear they understand the risks in using their platform to continually criticize someone like Trump (something Maureen Dowd apparently has never been able to grasp when it comes to writing about the Clintons.)
Donald Trump’s presidential candidacy presents decent people everywhere with a dilemma: Sprayed with an open fire hose of schoolyard insults, locker-room vulgarities and bizarre policy pitches by the presumptive Republican nominee, they must make hard choices. Is this latest comment so outrageous, so much worse than all the others, as to require its own response?
Speak up too often and you risk sounding like a car alarm, so urgent and yet so familiar that residents no longer hear it. But don’t speak up often enough and you risk turning the unacceptable into the unremarkable.
Maybe it is just me, but I am sensing that this latest round of vitriol from Mr. Trump may have opened some new cracks in his game plan. By baselessly attacking Judge Gonzolo Curiel based on his ethnicity (he is Hispanic, but was born in the U.S. and has served honorably in handling difficult cases in the federal system) and by calling reporters “sleazy” for having the temerity to question where the money went after his highly publicized fund-raiser for veterans months ago, Mr. Trump has (A) further alienated and energized the growing Hispanic voting bloc, and (B) awakened the press to the realization that if elected President, he would have no qualms about making their profession and their lives extremely difficult if they dared to criticize him.
It is also increasingly clear that Trump is incapable of the so-called “pivot” to being Presidential that his backers and his campaign team claim can and will happen any time.
Calling his own press conference and then using nearly a quarter of it to engage in a rambling, vitriolic, and fact-free assault on the legal system that is challenging his business practices and the media that is finally beginning to ask him hard questions, is not a good sign for Trump or his supporters.
His narcissism, his racism and sexism, his constant need to be the center of attention, to control the narrative, and to attack anyone who criticizes or questions him, may finally be the factors that bring him low. He is steadily creating more enemies, and some of them, like reporters and editorial boards, may finally be awakening to the fact that pushing back isn’t an option….it is a necessity.
It was a press FOI request, for example, that led to Judge Curiel’s ordering the opening of Trump University “playbooks”, spelling out the high-pressure sales tactics University sales staff were encouraged to use to “sell up” the packages offered to prospective “students.”
One sales manager for Trump University, Ronald Schnackenberg, recounted how he was reprimanded for not pushing a financially struggling couple hard enough to sign up for a $35,000 real estate class, despite his conclusion that it would endanger their economic future. He watched with disgust, he said, as a fellow Trump University salesman persuaded the couple to purchase the class anyway.
“I believe that Trump University was a fraudulent scheme,” Mr. Schnackenberg wrote in his testimony, “and that it preyed upon the elderly and uneducated to separate them from their money.”
Strangely, Trump owes Judge Curiel a high five because the judge agreed to delay trial on the charges until after the November elections. But Trump has elected to ignore that fact and launch another of his familiar attacks with the usual claims of weakness, bias, membership in groups and organizations that hate him, and claims that this is all a political ploy instead of a legitimate lawsuit.
As Joseph Welch famously said, in response to Sen. Joe McCarthy’s attacks, “At long last sir, have you no sense of decency?”
Clearly, the answer is no, and we can only hope that for Trump the response of the legal system, the media and the majority of voters is to reject him and his tactics firmly and clearly.