Trump’s references don’t check out

Voters should listen to them

• “He will always put his own interests and gratifying his own ego ahead of everything else…”

• “His behavior had grown increasingly erratic and unnerving.”

• “A person who admires autocrats and murderous dictators.”

If you read those quotes about Donald Trump, you might think, well, politics is a rough-and-tumble business, and every politician has opponents who will criticize them.

But the quotes are not from the mouths of Democrats or political opponents. They’re direct quotes from people in Trump’s own orbit. People Trump hired. People who worked inside the Trump White House. People with first-hand knowledge of Trump’s job performance.

The first quote is from his own Attorney General Bill Barr. The second is from Betsy DeVos, Trump’s Education Secretary. And the third from a guy who had the closest opportunity to observe Trump’s performance in the oval office, his chief of staff John Kelly.

Photo collage from Canva

These “references”, and nearly 100 more like them, were compiled this week by the editorial board of the New York Times. They are from Trump White House insiders, fellow Republicans, long-time conservatives and members of his own family. There isn’t a single quote from someone considered your usual political opponent. It’s a full set of references for anyone who wants to check before “hiring” the next president of the United States.

I have no idea how many people I hired in 30 years in newsroom management, but it must be somewhere in the hundreds. And that means I conducted thousands of job interviews, looked at tens of thousands of resumes and made thousands of reference calls.

I always put a lot of weight on reference checks. I called the references listed on an applicant’s resume. I called people who weren’t even on the resume, sometimes just placing a call into another newsroom and talking to whoever answered the phone. I’d say, “Tell me about this person. Is he a team player? Does she get along with everybody? Any problems I should know about?”  At times I learned startling things about a candidate – things the applicant never mentioned to me, like being investigated for harassing a female co-worker, or having been fired from the job that their resume said they still had.

Experience taught me one lesson that proved valuable over the years. Whenever a reference call revealed a red flag about a candidate, even if it was described to me as a minor issue in an otherwise stellar skill set, that red flag issue would always be a much bigger problem once the applicant joined our staff. I learned to listen to those little red flag comments that references told me about. They almost always proved to be true.

Let’s check Trump’s references

That brings us back to our reference check on Donald Trump, one month before Americans decide whether to hire him for another four years, courtesy of the Times.

Let’s place a call to Dan Coates, a former Republican member of Congress and Trump’s director of national intelligence: “He doesn’t know the difference between the truth and a lie.”

Hey, Mick Mulvaney, you were acting chief of staff to Trump. What do you think of him? “I think he’s a terrible human being.”

Our commander in chief should be a person respected by our military forces. I wonder what Richard Spencer, Trump’s Secretary of the Navy says about him. “The president has very little understanding of what it means to be in the military, to fight ethically or to be governed by a uniform set of rules and practices.”

Red flags abound

These are not “little red flag comments in an otherwise stellar skill set.” They are bright, flashing red lights warning of danger ahead. They are blaring as loud as a tornado siren during an Iowa spring. They are as loud as a blast from a speeding freight train approaching an intersection.

We ignore them at our own peril.

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