During a presidential campaign, we often act as if our job is to uncover the secret selves the candidates are trying to hide from us, to decode their words and actions in order to discern the truth of who they'll be as president. But it's almost always the case that the future president is more than evident in the candidate. Think about the presidents in your lifetime, both those you admired and those you despised. Did they take office and surprise everyone, becoming someone completely different from who you thought they'd be?
They did not. And there may never have been a candidate more clear about who he really was than Donald Trump.
We didn't need to see his tax returns to understand him, even if they would surely reveal a great deal. We didn't need to subject him to more questioning or more investigations, though that would have given us even more evidence of what was apparent. But when it comes to the "real" Trump, we knew it all, down to his poisoned core. Because he told us.
After the first week of the Trump presidency, a week that was alternately ridiculous and horrifying, there's one thing we can say for sure: This is just what we liberals warned you about.
It was quite a week. Here's just some of what Trump did:
- Gave a dark, mean inauguration speech in which he spoke of ending "American carnage" and didn't bother offering a friendly word to the majority of voters who selected someone else.
- Went to the CIA and, standing in front of a memorial to agents who had given their lives in the line of duty, gave a rambling speech about how the media are lying about how big his inaugural crowd was.
- Called the head of the National Park Service and ordered him to produce photographs of the inaugural crowd in the hopes they would prove its massive size, when in fact such photos only show how much bigger Barack Obama's inaugural was.
- Sent out his press secretary to insist that his inaugural crowd was indeed the largest in history.
- Not only reinstated the "global gag rule" which forbids U.S. overseas family planning aid from going to any organization that even mentions abortion to women (like referring sex trafficking victims to doctors who will perform abortions), but expanded it to include all recipients of U.S. health aid, no matter what that aid is going for.
- In a meeting with congressional leaders, went on at some length about how enormous his election victory was, claiming that he only lost the popular vote because of millions of imaginary fraudulent votes. He then repeated this lie in media interviews.
- Got in a squabble with the president of Mexico over his border wall, which he now says Mexico will pay for in some form, eventually, maybe. Then his administration suggested the payment could come in the form of a 20 percent tariff on Mexican-made goods, which would not only be paid by American consumers, but would probably touch off a trade war.
- Withdrew funding for already-booked ads to encourage the uninsured to sign up for health insurance before the end of open enrollment on January 31.
- Announced a federal hiring freeze, which is not only inefficient but has actually cost more money when it has been tried in the past.
- To top it off, issued an executive order barring refugees from coming to America and forbidding anyone from seven majority-Muslim countries from entering the United States at all.
A brief word about the refugee ban. This may not be the first time we have let our darkest and most cowardly impulses dictate our treatment of immigrants, or slammed our doors in the faces of the world's most desperate people. But this particular order is almost the entirety of Trumpism in a nutshell: based on bigotry, built on lies, offensive to core American values, meant to address a problem that barely exists, and almost guaranteed to be counterproductive.
And of course, there was the lying, not only from the president himself but from those who work for him-or as Kellyanne Conway said, ignoring actual facts when you can just spread "alternative facts."
The Trump White House managed this frenzy of malevolence with all the overconfident bumbling you'd expect from a group of people with no government experience-infighting, announcements made and then walked back, executive orders written without even consulting the departments responsible for implementing them-much of it leaked to reporters by Trump staffers in ways that portray their boss as an infantile fool.
So what did we learn of Trump in his first chaotic, absurd, comical, frightening, ghastly week? We learned that he's insecure and petty, that he's cruel and shallow, that his contempt for people he sees as beneath him is bottomless, that his power is built on hate and fear. In other words: We learned nothing new. He is now who he always was. Becoming president has not changed him yet, and it never will.
Yet somehow we keep expecting that it might. In one of the most absurd moments of a completely bonkers interview he conducted with ABC News, David Muir asked Trump, "Has it changed you?" Trump responded by saying, "I can be the most presidential person ever, other than possibly the great Abe Lincoln, all right? But I can be the most presidential person, but I may not be able to do the job nearly as well if I do that." Whatever Donald Trump thinks it means to be "presidential," even he admits it's not what he's doing.
And that too was something we knew before the election ended-every now and again he'd threaten to start acting "presidential" yet could never bring himself to do so. He is who he is, and we knew it. Now we have to live with it for four years.
