Davis Merritt: Why Trump doesn’t think he’s dishonest

Donald Trump’s baleful influence on Americans’ feelings and speech grows by the day, apparently invulnerable to either truth or reason.

As the possibility of a Trump major-party nomination or even, heaven forbid, presidency draws closer, when will the majority of Americans who tell pollsters that they reject and fear him be heard?

And how much damage will Trump do to our public life before that reckoning occurs?

Conservative columnist David Brooks last week best summed up the Trump danger: “Donald Trump is epically unprepared to be president. He has no realistic policies, no advisers, no capacity to learn. His vast narcissism makes him a closed fortress. He doesn’t know what he doesn’t know and he’s uninterested in finding out.... Trump is perhaps the most dishonest person to run for high office in our lifetimes,” citing a fact-check of 4.6 hours of Trump speeches finding more than 60 flat-out untruths.

The problem that Brooks didn’t mention is that Trump doesn’t know he is dishonest, and wouldn’t care if he did realize it, because everything for the self-proclaimed greatest dealmaker in the history of the world is negotiable. To him, every human encounter begins with a negotiating position that can and probably will be modified.

Therefore, it’s appropriate to embellish facts, to promise or threaten far beyond one’s capacity to deliver, to ridicule and insult anyone with an opposing view; after all, it’s only an opening position that no savvy person would take seriously.

But his approach assumes that he is dealing with rational people who understand the nuances of high finance and self-promotion, and that is a dangerous and disqualifying assumption for a would-be president – think Kim Jong Un or the guy in North Carolina who sucker-punched a protester; think Osama bin Laden or the Wichita biker who allegedly shouted racial epithets and “Trump, Trump, Trump.”

Last week, Trump once again violated the rules and norms of American political civility when he predicted that if he’s denied the Republican nomination, “I think you’d have riots.... I think you would have problems like you’ve never seen before. I think bad things would happen.” Cynically, he quickly added, “I wouldn’t lead it,” but he was clearly giving permission and justification to his rightfully angry and disillusioned followers.

What might a 2016 riot by Americans armed with military-style “hunting rifles” look like? What would be the response of other Americans and the nation’s law enforcement and military? Does “problems like you’ve never seen before” mean more than burned cities like Detroit, Chicago and Los Angeles in the ’60s or the Branch Davidian disaster in the ’90s? You can be sure that candidate Trump has given no more thought to those questions of ramification than a 14-year-old on the way to his first keg party.

And that trip to the first keg party is actually an apt metaphor for the Trump campaign. Only a true case of arrested development could produce a candidacy so bereft of reason and mature intellect, so motivated by self-absorption and unclarified motives beyond simply getting there.

It is – maybe, mostly, sorta – true when we tell our kids “anyone can grow up to be president.” What they also need to hear is that to be president, you have to grow up.

This story was originally published March 21, 2016 at 7:04 PM with the headline "Davis Merritt: Why Trump doesn’t think he’s dishonest."