President Donald Trump speaks during a campaign rally Tuesday at MotorSports Management Co. in West Salem.
Was it a deliberate joke, irony wrapped around satire? Or was President Trump serious when he proclaimed last week “National Character Counts Week”? The presidential proclamation hailed the virtues of personal responsibility, integrity, honor and virtue. Indeed, these are the traits we all hope we can pass on to our children, and which we all want to see in our friends. We should demand them in our leaders.
I worked for former Vice President Joe Biden back when he was a U.S. Senator and chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee. He is a man who is devoted to his wife and children; he is compassionate, understanding of his staff’s needs, and honest to a fault. As a senator, he must have received information which would have enabled him to play the stock market with above average success. Instead, he put all his federal Thrift Savings Plan — like a 401(k) plan — into government bonds. That way, he told me, he could never be accused of profiting from his office. His major investment was his house in Wilmington, Delaware.
And then there is Donald Trump. We have a good idea of his moral character from his two divorces, three marriages, the two women we know his lawyers have paid off, and the many who have accused him of everything from sexual harassment to outright rape. The Washington Post has carefully tracked the lies our president tells; in its latest tally, the newspaper reports 22,247 verified lies as of Aug. 27, 1,316 days into his term. That’s 17 lies a day, but in the first four weeks of August, he averaged 56 per day.
Most of Trump’s untruths could be written off as fairly minor campaign propaganda: Did Joe Biden claim he would stop fracking? Did the U.S. enjoy the greatest economy “in history” before the pandemic hit, and is the president now rebuilding it? But some of those falsehoods have killed people.
How many mistakenly thought you could drink bleach or shoot disinfectant into your veins to cure COVID-19? How many Americans expect that we are “rounding the corner” and that a vaccine will be ready any day now? Before the “very special day” in Trump’s life, Nov. 3?
Americans have died by the hundreds of thousands since Mr. Trump decided in February to downplay the seriousness of this pandemic even when, as he admitted to Washington Post associate editor Bob Woodward, Trump knew the situation was dire, and that the disease was airborne and far more lethal than the flu. Trump calls out responsibility as a virtue. But when asked, said he took no responsibility for the severity of the COVID-19 pandemic. He is our leader. The buck, as President Harry Truman said long ago, stops on the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office.
He bragged in the books that “he” wrote that when he was engaged in a construction project, he found ways to criticize contractors’ work so he could get away with paying them less than was promised. He almost surely stretches the truth about his income and net worth when talking to the tax collector and to the officers of banks to which he owes (at least) millions.
Integrity? He allows others to rubber stamp his name on shoddy products and offers courses of dubious value in “Trump University.” And yet his “Character Counts” proclamation stresses the need for integrity.
His proclamation praises “the brave men and women of our armed forces who risk their lives to defend the cherished blessings of liberty.” And yet he asks Gold Star father, Gen. John Kelly, “what was in it for them” while touring Arlington Cemetery. He calls those members of the military who died “suckers” and “losers.” The proclamation calls for acts of kindness; when has he ever shown kindness to anybody, including the children separated from their parents on our southern border?
Character does count, and the American people know it. They have had four years to study Donald Trump’s character and four-and-a-half decades to observe that of Joseph R. Biden, Jr. And based on character alone, Joe Biden deserves to win the 2020 election.
Peter D. Zimmerman was chief scientist of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee when Joseph R. Biden, Jr. was the chairman. He is a nuclear physicist, a retired university professor and a 1953 graduate of Madison's Randall Elementary School.
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October 30, 2020
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Peter D. Zimmerman: Was it a deliberate bad joke? - Madison.com
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