INDIANAPOLIS – His defense is that he’s incompetent.
That he doesn’t know how to do his job.
That is the big takeaway from the strident protests President Donald Trump and his defenders have offered regarding reports that Russia offered bounties on the lives of U.S. soldiers. The president and his amen corner say Trump had no knowledge of the bounties, even though reports of them had bubbled and boiled in intelligence analyses for more than a year before they became public – including in daily briefing reports the president is supposed to read.
The president never read them.
No one told him about them.
Like Sgt. Schultz in the old TV show “Hogan’s Heroes,” he knew nothing – NOTHING!
Ignorance was bliss.
Except, of course, for the three U.S. soldiers killed in Afghanistan last year whose deaths may have been part of the bounty program.
And their families.
The sad thing about this Trump line of defense is that it’s believable, even likely. When he came into office, he boasted that he didn’t need the daily national security and intelligence briefings that have been an essential part of every other president’s duties, because he already knew it all.
Since then, this president has made it clear that he doesn’t want anyone – not aides, not members of Congress, not journalists – presenting any facts that undermine or contradict his elaborately constructed and carefully preserved fantasies about the world and the way it works.
This has been the case especially with information that might undercut his perceptions of his one-sided bromance with Russian thug-in-chief Vladimir Putin.
More broadly, it’s also fits with Trump’s world view – that ignorance is just as good, if not better, than knowledge. The number of things that this president knows for sure that just aren’t so is staggering.
This explains a great deal about his approach to governing.
Because he prefers not to be warned about the train barreling down the tracks toward him – and us – his first indication that trouble is near is when that train hits him.
And us.
He didn’t want to believe that the coronavirus would be a problem, so he waved off and disregarded all the early warnings that might have allowed us to prepare better and save lives.
That bit of willful presidential obliviousness already has racked up a body count of around 130,000 Americans, cost millions of Americans their jobs and done damage to the U.S. economy that will take years to undo.
We have less than 5% of the world’s population.
We’ve racked up more than 25% of the world’s reported cases of coronavirus and deaths due to the disease.
But that’s Trump.
He’s never hidden who or what he is – the braggart who thinks he can bluff his way through any situation.
What continues to puzzle and amaze are the people who support and enable him.
This is not a partisan or ideological observation.
In one capacity or another, I’ve been a close observer of the political world for more than four decades. In that time, I’ve never seen or known another president who would have felt anything other than shame if he’d had to say, “I didn’t know,” when confronted about existing threats to American soldiers.
Not Obama. Not either of the Bushes. Not Clinton. Not Reagan. Not Carter.
That’s because it’s the president’s job to know.
Rather than berating staffers for bringing them bad news, all those presidents would have disciplined or fired any subordinate who didn’t bring threats to the United States to their attention.
Even now, when the reports have become common knowledge, this president’s instinct is not to determine whether they might be valid and take steps to defend our servicepeople but to protect himself and his chances for re-election.
That’s why he thinks that saying he didn’t know our men and women in uniform may have been placed in greater risk by Putin, the man Trump wants to bring to the White House, somehow makes things better for him.
Donald Trump is wrong about that.
Ignorance is not bliss.
It’s just ignorance.
John Krull is director of Franklin College’s Pulliam School of Journalism and publisher of TheStatehouseFile.com, a news website powered by Franklin College journalism students.
