The New York Times lists 51 of Trump’s ‘More Egregious’ Failures

“Donald Trump’s guide to presidential etiquette

By Samuel Warde 

Aptly titled “Donald Trump’s Guide to Presidential Etiquette, the Editorial Board explained that:

[Trump] is violating Americans’ expectations of how presidents should behave — even of how adults should behave, particularly when children are watching. 

Yes, Mr. Trump has now been compared to Joseph Stalin by one senior senator from his party, and, yes, he has been pre-emptively disinvited to the prospective funeral of another. But most Republican leaders, usually such vigilant guardians of Oval Office decorum, have remained strangely silent.

So, for the fourth time in a year, we’ve compiled a list of Mr. Trump’s more egregious transgressions. 

These items don’t represent disputes about policy, over which reasonable people may disagree. They simply serve to catalog what Paul Ryan, Mitch McConnell and all the other Trump-supporting Republicans in Congress and across America, through their silence, have now blessed as behavior befitting a president of the United States.

We find this guide a helpful way to avoid growing numb to what is so abnormal about this presidency, and to remind ourselves that a day may yet come when dignity and decency will matter again, even, perhaps, to Mr. McConnell and his fellow hypocrites

Liberals Unite took the time to count the list of “egregious transgressions,” coming up with a total of 51, but be sure to go to The New York Times article to read the full list.

The list itself is prefaced with the following words:

IF YOU ARE PRESIDENT, YOU MAY NOW:

• Fire your veterans affairs secretary by tweet, then pick as his replacement the White House doctor, who turns out to have a disqualifying history of alcohol abuse and handing out strong drugs.
• Hold a meeting with top Justice Department officials about a continuing criminal investigation into your campaign, seeking to force them to act in your personal legal interest.
• Make more than 3,000 false or misleading claims in less than 16 months in office.
• Keep an alleged domestic abuser on the White House staff and promote him, even after the F.B.I. denied him full security clearance because of the allegations, and then after he is gone, talk about your hopes of bringing him back on staff.
• Blame a high school gun massacre on the F.B.I. because it is “spending too much time” investigating your campaign’s possible collusion with a foreign power.
• Lie about having no knowledge of a $130,000 hush payment that your lawyer made, in the weeks before your election, to a porn actress who claims she had sex with you while your wife was at home caring for your newborn son, then later admit that you paid the money back in full, even though you omitted it on your financial disclosure form, possibly violating federal law — and even though you also didn’t sign the nondisclosure agreement that you now are trying to invoke in order to keep the porn actress silent.

The Editorial Board didn’t stop there, however. They posted an additional 112 points taken from incidents prior to their list of indiscretions of the past four months.

A few favorites included:

• Ask, in a meeting with lawmakers on immigration policy, “Why are we having all these people from shithole countries come here?,” referring to Africa, and “Why do we want people from Haiti here? Take them out.”
• Continue to call for a criminal investigation of your former political opponent, whom you call the “worst (and biggest) loser of all time” a year after the election.
• Tell reporters that “It’s frankly disgusting the way the press is able to write whatever they want to write, and people should look into it.”
• After helping to negotiate the release of college athletes arrested in China, say “I should have left them in jail” after the father of one of them — whom you call “the poor man’s version of Don King” — doesn’t express proper gratitude.
• Spend the weekend golfing at your private club while the mayor of an American city wades through sewage-filled water to help citizens after a catastrophic hurricane, then accuse that mayor of “poor leadership” when she criticizes your administration’s slow response to the storm.
• Review and discuss highly sensitive intelligence in a restaurant, and allow the Army officer carrying the “nuclear football” to be photographed and identified by name.
• Display complete ignorance about international relations, your own administration’s policies, American history and the basic structure of our system of government.

Samuel Warde is a writer, social and political activist, and all-around troublemaker.