Editor’s Note: Please see a counter perspective, courtesy of Dimitri K. Simes, President and CEO of the Center for the National Interest and Publisher of The National Interest, as part of a two-part debate on the 2020 Election and Donald Trump. You can read the essay here. 

FOR TOO long, many Donald Trump supporters have argued that however debased his character might be, his policies—notably his support for “values” (read: “Christian values”), his pushback against illegal immigrants, and his nomination of conservative judges—suffice to command support. On the other hand, many Republicans who, unlike Trump, actually have been lifelong party members and support both values and conservative judges, argue that whatever the merits of his policies, character matters—indeed, it outweighs other considerations. While there is little debate about the man’s character, it is arguable that far too many of his policies undermine both America’s cohesion and prosperity at home and its leadership abroad.

There is really little to add about Trump’s character that has not been repeated ad nauseam not only by his political opponents, but by both principled Republicans and the many officials who were part of the revolving door that is the Trump administration. Since he has not been subject to a formal mental evaluation, he cannot be called a narcissist. But he has consistently exhibited narcissistic tendencies. How else to describe someone who, at one time or another, publicly and repeatedly has described himself as the leading expert on any subject he has addressed, be it politics, taxes, trade, foreign policy, the military, and just about anything else?

ONE CANNOT call Trump a racist; after all, he insists that he “does not have a racist bone in his body.” Yet his own statements—whether to the media, or in his innumerable tweets, belie his self-proclaimed innocence. A central theme of his presidential campaign, and a primary objective once he took office, was to build a wall to keep out Mexican “rapists.”

Trump virtually opened his presidential term by banning residents of seven Muslim majority countries from entering the United States; he later added six more countries, five of which were similarly predominantly Muslim. He made it clear that he preferred immigrants from what he assumed was lily-white Norway, while terming Haiti and African states “shithole countries.” He did not condemn the Charlottesville marchers in the 2017 Unite the Right rally who assaulted a Black man and chanted anti-Black and anti-Semitic slogans such as “Jews will not replace us.” Instead, Trump asserted that there were “very fine people on both sides.” Gary Cohn, Trump’s most senior economic advisor, clearly was unhappy with Trump’s response; he nearly resigned and did in fact leave the administration eight months later.

Trump’s tweets and retweets have included slurs against minority groups. He has railed against efforts to remove Confederate symbols of all kinds. In one notorious case, he retweeted a video of a man shouting “white power.” He has tweeted that Black Lives Matter is a “symbol of hate.” His appeals to his base increasingly echo those of George Wallace. If Trump is not a racist, he certainly has given America’s bigots a triumphalist sense that they have not had since the Ku Klux Klan marched down Pennsylvania Avenue nearly a century ago.

Trump appears indifferent to the role of the military in a free society and has seriously damaged civil-military relations. He has employed the military, and the defense funds needed for other programs, to build his border wall on the highly questionable grounds that there is a national security threat emanating from Mexico. He misused the National Guard, having troops clear a path from the White House so that he could hold a photo-op with a Bible that he never opened before a church he never entered. He intervened in a court martial of a Navy SEAL. He made it clear that he opposed the Pentagon’s awarding a major contract to Amazon for developing a cloud-based enterprise system due to his personal animosity toward its owner. And he has threatened to veto the National Defense Authorization Act that is certain to include a bipartisan provision to begin a process of renaming bases currently carrying the names of Confederate generals.

One can debate whether Trump is corrupt in the precise legal sense of the term. But he certainly exhibits corrupt behavior. How else to describe someone who appoints his unqualified son-in-law and daughter as senior advisors? Whose daughter subsequently receives special trademark treatment from China if not because of her influence in the White House? Who maintains a constant watch over the fortunes of his business despite his having to divest himself from its activities? Who encourages visiting officials to hold meetings at his country club? Who reportedly had the American ambassador to London request the government to move the British Open to a Trump-owned golf course? And, most troubling, who publicly (not to say privately) coddles dictators such as Russia’s Vladimir Putin and Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who happen to have the final say on whether his companies can open resorts or hotels in their countries?

TRUMP’S CHARACTER bleeds into his policies, which supposedly constitute the basis for the more rational of his supporters. In the realm of national security, the combustible combination of character and policy is leading the nation down an abyss from which it could take years to recover.

One might begin where the aforementioned discussion of character left off: the president’s relationship with Putin and Erdogan. No one can fathom why the president of the United States has gone so far out on a limb to support the Russian autocrat. His statement that he believed Putin more than his own intelligence community regarding Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election was simply stunning. He has displayed studied indifference to Putin’s annexation of Crimea and incursion into Ukraine. Indeed, it was only with the greatest reluctance that he imposed Congressionally-mandated sanctions on Russia.

Trump has continued to lobby for Russia’s re-inclusion in the G7, though Russia fails to meet either the political or economic standards of that group of the world’s wealthiest nations. Finally, whether or not he was aware of the alleged Russian offers of bounties to Taliban militiamen to kill American troops—perhaps in revenge for their killing the “Little Green Men” of the Wagner Group in a Syrian firefight—Trump’s lack of concern, indeed, his assertion that the possibility of a Russian bounty is a “hoax,” speaks of his ardent desire not to aggravate what already is serious Congressional and, indeed, popular hostility toward Russia in general and Putin in particular.

Actually, Putin’s behavior is characteristic of most Russian leaders since Ivan the Terrible named himself tsar; sadly, Trump is playing into his hands. What George Kennan postulated in his Long Telegram about the Soviets applies equally well to Putin:

At bottom of Kremlin’s neurotic view of world affairs is traditional and instinctive Russian sense of insecurity ... Russian rulers have invariably sensed that their rule was ... unable to stand comparison or contact with political systems of western countries. … Efforts will be made ... to disrupt [Western] national self confidence, to hamstring measures of national defense, to increase social and industrial unrest, to stimulate all forms of disunity … poor will be set against rich, black against white, young against old, newcomers against established residents.

It is hardly to be expected that Trump is familiar with Russian history, with the Long Telegram, or for that matter, with Kennan. Some observers speculate that Trump is motivated by his business interests, as has been noted. Whatever his motives, there is no denying that Trump creates the impression that he is little more than Putin’s poodle whenever he encounters the Russian leader.

Trump’s close relationship with Erdogan is equally puzzling. The Turkish leader, like his Russian counterpart, has both brutally crushed dissent at home and relentlessly pursued the resuscitation of the country’s empire manqué. Trump has never expressed any concern about Erdogan’s human rights violations, even when Turkish government thugs beat peaceful protesters on the streets of Washington. Additionally, Trump has ignored the Turkish leader’s close ties to Hamas, which the president’s own administration labels a terrorist organization. Nor has Trump troubled himself about pulling the rug from under the Syrian Kurds, a major Erdogan objective, despite their fighting and dying alongside American and coalition forces fighting the Assad regime. But then again, the president has little use for allies of any sort.

Trump’s hostility toward immigrants has likewise merged with, and guided, his policy priorities. He has deployed troops to the Mexican border, diverting them from other critical missions elsewhere in the world. And he has ordered the reallocation of defense funds intended for important military construction and for deterring Russian adventurism in Eastern Europe instead to pay for his so-called “beautiful” wall.

Trump has railed against NATO ostensibly because members do not “pay their way,” and has announced his intention to draw down troops in Germany, whose mission is as much to preserve American interests in the Middle East as it is to deter Russian aggression. He has had nothing good to say about the European Union that, with its predecessor organizations, since the early 1950s has fostered peace in Europe through the expansion of trade and the partial disintegration of borders. Indeed, it was over a relationship with the democratic EU that the Ukrainian crisis exploded, and ultimately led to Russian intervention. Trump has so alienated his European allies that they have actively resisted Washington’s efforts to maintain crushing sanctions against Iran, thus demonstrating the waning of American influence in Europe after leading the West for over seven decades.

One of Trump’s first decisions upon taking office was to withdraw from the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), a trading arrangement that would have bound much of East Asia ever more tightly to the United States. Instead, it is China that has negotiated agreements with many of the countries that were slated to join TPP. Even now, with China supposedly in Trump’s crosshairs as the cause of what he derisively calls the “Kung Flu,” at least insofar as it has enabled him to attack Joe Biden and the Democrats, he has studiously withheld criticism of Xi Jinping, whose untrammeled authority over China makes Putin pale by comparison. Whether or not John Bolton is accurate when he asserts that Trump has asked Xi for help in his reelection campaign, there is no denying that, whatever steps his administration might take against China, Trump’s own tweets have been noticeably silent on the subject of Uighur concentration camps or on the violation of Hong Kong’s autonomy.

Trump has long salivated over the prospect of winning a Nobel Peace Prize. He prides himself on his meetings with North Korea’s Kim Jong-un, although they have accomplished nothing material other than enabling Kim to portray himself as the equal of the American president. Pyongyang has intensified its rhetoric against the South and continues to threaten to resume its testing of delivery systems for its nuclear arsenal. Yet Trump has been noticeably reluctant to criticize Kim, whom he has called his “friend.”

Trump’s other great peace project is the Middle East; his son-in-law Jared Kushner has produced what Trump has called “the deal of the century.” The problem with the deal is that one of the parties, the Palestinians, will have none of it, while the other, Israel, proceeds toward annexation that threatens to undermine both Middle Eastern stability and its own long-term economic security.

OF ALL his shortcomings, perhaps the greatest, and for which the American people may punish him in the November elections, is his ham-fisted and incompetent mismanagement of the administration’s response to the COVID-19 crisis. In January, when the disease first made its appearance in the United States, Trump announced that “we have it totally under control. It’s one person coming in from China. We have it under control. It’s going to be just fine.” A month later, he insisted that, “We have it very much under control in this country.” In March, when asked about the emergence of the virus in the Washington, dc area, he replied, “No, I’m not concerned at all. No, we've done a great job with it.” In early April, with over 273,000 confirmed cases in the United States, Trump asserted, "I said it was going away—and it is going away." In May, he reiterated that “this is going to go away without a vaccine.” And in June, he further insisted that “this is going to go away without a vaccine.” He long defied medical insistence that all Americans wear masks. He insisted on speaking at rallies for which no social distancing is required. He continues to challenge the findings of America’s leading health professionals. In the meantime, the United States now leads the world in the number of coronavirus cases and has lost some 150,000 people to COVID-19 at the time of writing, leading the world in that category as well. Both numbers may be underestimates. With the death toll continuing to rise, the economy continuing to crater, and his electoral prospects continuing to fade, a terrified Trump has mused about postponing the election. Top Republicans, like their Democratic counterparts, have flatly rejected his panicked proposal.

In light of the foregoing, it may not be too much to assert that Donald Trump ranks among the worst presidents in American history. Perhaps, by the time his term reaches its unhappy conclusion, he may well have overtaken Andrew Johnson as undoubtedly the most dangerous chief executive ever to occupy the Executive Mansion.

Dov S. Zakheim served as the undersecretary of defense (comptroller) and chief financial officer for the U.S. Department of Defense from 2001–2004 and as the deputy undersecretary of defense (planning and resources) from 1985–1987. He also served as the DoD’s civilian coordinator for Afghan reconstruction from 2002–2004. He is vice chairman of the Center for the National Interest.