Trump has many flaws, but this one could destroy us

Donald Trump is many things: con man, narcissist, pathological liar. He’s selfish, inept and clueless. But there’s one character flaw that threatens to destroy us as a nation, and it’s none of these things.

Late in the 2016 presidential campaign, Trump went on national TV and did something he never does. He apologized. “I said it, I was wrong, and I apologize,” Trump said about lewd, abusive comments on an unaired portion of a 2005 Access Hollywood tape.

Even that apology was qualified by an attack on Bill Clinton designed to paint Trump in a more favorable light. But at least he admitted he was wrong. He’s seldom, if ever, done that since.

Media outlets have attached the word “defiant” to Trump’s responses so often it’s become a cliché. There are plenty of synonyms: “Stubborn,” “pigheaded,” “intractable.” Trump is all of them. When faced with criticism, he routinely “doubles down” — another media cliché that’s been used so often it’s easy to forget what it means. It’s a gambling term, used when a blackjack player looks at the hand that’s been dealt, then doubles the initial bet and draws another card.

If you win, you win big, but if you lose ...

Losing bet

The potential consequences of doubling down seldom make it into the media’s shorthand narratives, but that’s where the focus belongs. Trump has repeatedly doubled down, but he’s gambling with house money — the lives of our citizens, the reputation of our country — and he’s losing. Bigly. Not because he’s a narcissist or a liar or a con man. But because he refuses to ever admit he’s wrong.

He described a phone call with the Ukrainian president as “perfect,” even though it was flagged by the inspector general as an “urgent concern” and ultimately resulted in Trump becoming just the third president to be impeached. He’s called himself a “very stable genius” who knows more than the experts about science, warfare, the economy, you name it. He’s bragged that his administration’s “great response” to the coronavirus pandemic, even as more people caught the virus and died here than anywhere else.

In a way, he is stable: He refuses to change course, even when it makes sense to do so.

Trump’s unwillingness to accept blame for anything is a problem because, if you don’t admit you’ve made mistakes, you’ll never learn from them. And if the mistakes are big enough, that comes with a cost — as in one of Trump’s failed casinos, the cost gets higher every time you “double down.”

But Trump has never had to pay the price. When one of his companies failed, he simply declared bankruptcy and washed his hands of it. His aforementioned casinos filed for bankruptcy four times, and last one closed in 2016, just days before he won the presidency.

As president, he has shifted the blame (and the cost) to someone else: Rex Tillerson, Michael Cohen, Jeff Sessions, and so on. That was bad enough. But now, it’s the American people who are paying the price.

Deadly price

Trump now finds himself in the middle of a nearly unprecedented confluence of disasters: the worst health crisis in a century, the worst rioting since the Rodney King case — perhaps even since the race riots of the 1960s — and unemployment figures that rival those of the Great Depression. A responsible leader would ask, “What did I do wrong?” and look for a new approach. But Trump doesn’t think he’s done anything wrong, and he’s not a responsible leader. Indeed, he refuses to take responsibility for anything.

It’s blatantly obvious that Trump’s friendly attitude toward white supremacists created a powder keg of racial tensions that exploded after George Floyd died with a police officer kneeling on his neck. What if Trump hadn’t said there were “very fine people” in a group of neo-Nazis and white supremacists in Charlottesville? What if, instead of attacking Colin Kaepernick’s decision to kneel during the national anthem, he had listened to the message Kaepernick was trying to send: that police violence against people of color is unacceptable? Maybe Floyd would still be alive.

Whether or not you’re offended by Kaepernick’s decision to kneel, it’s no excuse to ignore the deadly problem he was trying to highlight. But ignoring things is one of the things Trump does best: Deflect, distract and deny are the “Three D’s” in his political playbook.

Just as Trump won’t accept any responsibility for Floyd’s death, he refuses to admit he played any role in the thousands of deaths caused by COVID-19. But the fact is, a lot more people would be alive if Trump hadn’t dismantled the National Security Council unit designed to prepare for a pandemic. Or if he had listened to repeated early warnings about the threat of the virus, instead of burying his head in the sand and insisting it would just “go away.” Or if he didn’t insist on modeling stupidity by refusing to wear a mask.

Fatal flaw

At any point, Trump could simply admit he’s made mistakes and chart a new course. He could start wearing a mask. He could stop encouraging protesters who have been defying his own government’s guidance on safe behavior during the pandemic. He could call for an end to police violence against black people, and insist upon reform. He could stop enabling white supremacists. But he hasn’t done any of that, and he won’t, because he refuses to learn from his mistakes — or even admit that he’s made any.

“Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results,” or so the saying goes. By that definition, Trump would qualify as insane. That’s scary.

But what’s even scarier is that he is, at least in part, a product of the society we live in. We’ve become so polarized that neither side thinks it can learn anything from the other, because we couldn’t possibly be wrong about anything, and they couldn’t possibly be right. In a climate suffused with stubbornness, arrogance and an unwillingness to look beyond our own entrenched opinions, is it any wonder we’ve elected a leader who shares those traits?

And reinforces them.

And lets people die in the process, because, to him, clinging to the illusion that he’s right is more important than a human life. Or 100,000 of them.