(Dobbs) There Is Nothing This President Says That You Can Take To The Bank

Trump often tells us, “... if you want to know the truth.” But we never do.

With a mercurial man like Donald Trump, I never really know where to even start.

Should I start with what happened after all the Democrats voted last week against his big bomb of a budget bill and he said, “They hate Trump. But I hate them, too?”

Or should it be when he talked about the Ukraine war during his televised Cabinet meeting on Tuesday and said of Russia’s president, “We get a lot of bullshit thrown at us by Putin?”

Or maybe it should be his answer during a discussion at the same meeting about the Texas flash flood tragedy, when a reporter asked him about gutting FEMA and his response was, “FEMA is something we can talk about later?”

Here’s the thing: there is nothing this president says, nothing, that you can take to the bank.

Think about the hatred that spewed from his mouth like vomit after every Democrat in the House, then every Democrat in the Senate, gave Trump’s budget bill thumbs down— they called it his “big beautiful betrayal.” The longer quote from the president was, “They hate Trump. But I hate them, too. You know that? I really do, I hate them. I cannot stand them, because I really believe they hate our country, if you want to know the truth.”

Well yes, from time to time Mr. President, we would like to know the truth, but when you’re the story, nuggets of truth appear few and far between. So which is the truth: that you “hate” the Democrats, or as you assured us during your victory speech back in 2016, "I pledge to every citizen of our land that I will be president for all Americans?” Maybe nobody told you, but you can’t be president for all of us if you hate half of us.

Then there’s Trump’s stupefying naiveté about Vladimir Putin.

He has long put more trust in the president of Russia than he has put in the leadership of his own country. He has openly taken the word of President Putin over the word of his own intelligence chiefs. And once again, just a few months ago, he fell into the same gullible trap. Trump said, “I believe he wants peace. I mean, I know him very well. Yeah, I think he wants peace. I think he would tell me if he didn’t. I trust him on this subject.”

Naiveté doesn’t even begin to describe it. Ineptitude comes closer. Putin has played Trump for a sucker since the get-go. He has never been a man anyone could trust. He has never sent a believable signal that he wants peace in Ukraine. What he wants is Ukraine itself, all of it because he believes Russia has an historical claim on the country. Now, he’s more out in the open than ever, just yesterday sending a record number of missiles and drones into Ukraine— since the war started, a record for a single night— to kill innocent citizens and force the government to surrender.

I am surprised by Trump’s confessional candor when he roasted Putin two days ago, but I am not the least bit surprised by his brainlessness. “We get a lot of bullshit thrown at us by Putin,” he told his cabinet, “if you want to know the truth.” There’s that truth thing once again. He went on, “He’s very nice all of the time, but it turns out to be meaningless.”

You’re about the last guy on earth, President Trump, to figure that out.

And FEMA? When the president’s full response to the question about gutting FEMA was, “Well, FEMA is something we can talk about later but, right now, they’re busy working so, we’ll leave it at that,” my mind turned to the tired throwback we’ve heard from him and from most Republicans in Congress after mass shootings. Democrats offer some kind of meaningful gun reform legislation. All they offer are meaningless, and often disingenuous, “thoughts and prayers.” They never offer anything that might actually help their prayers come true. They say, in effect, “we’ll talk about it later.” But they never do.

Kristi Noem, the Homeland Security Secretary who oversees FEMA and is dismantling it with discernible delight, took the “thoughts and prayers” thing even further after the deaths in Texas. She’s charged with taking down this government agency with a proven record of helping citizens devastated by disasters and said two days ago the nation will have to depend more on grass roots assistance. She declared, “God created us to take care of each other.” At risk of apostasy, when it comes to rescuing people and feeding them and medicating them and housing them after they’ve lost everything, sorry, but God doesn’t hold a candle to FEMA.

Finally, the tariffs. When I assert there is nothing this president says that you can take to the bank, his tariffs are the poster boy for that. Just ask virtually every nation he’s trying to suffocate. The tariffs have been on again, off again, set higher, set lower, more times now than we can count. No one is immune, not our best friends any more than our adversaries. But the epitome of this insanity came yesterday when he announced a 50% tariff on everything from Brazil, not to rectify a trade imbalance— last year the U.S. had a $7 billion+ surplus in the relationship— but “to rectify the grave injustices of the current regime.”

“The way that Brazil has treated former President Bolsonaro, a Highly Respected Leader throughout the World during his Term, including by the United States,” Trump wrote to the current president, Lula da Silva, “is an international disgrace.” That would be how a man with a record like Donald Trump’s would see it. Jair Bolsonaro is on trial for attempting to overthrow the government. Trump knows a thing or two about that. “He is not guilty of anything,” our own insurrectionist wrote on his website, “except having fought for THE PEOPLE.”

The Brazilians courts might reach a different conclusion.

This is how we’re choosing which nations to penalize and which ones to palliate.

We have a president we can’t respect, we can’t trust, we can’t believe. We have a president who peppers his pronouncements with the phrase, “…. if you want to know the truth.” But with him, it’s an empty offer. We never do.

Over more than five decades Greg Dobbs has been a correspondent for two television networks including ABC News, a political columnist for The Denver Post and syndicated columnist for Scripps newspapers, a moderator on Rocky Mountain PBS, and author of two books, including one about the life of a foreign correspondent called “Life in the Wrong Lane.” He also co-authored a book about the seminal year for baby boomers, called “1969: Are You Still Listening?” He has covered presidencies, politics, and the U.S. space program at home, and wars, natural disasters, and other crises around the globe, from Afghanistan to South Africa, from Iran to Egypt, from the Soviet Union to Saudi Arabia, from Nicaragua to Namibia, from Vietnam to Venezuela, from Libya to Liberia, from Panama to Poland. Dobbs has won three Emmys, the Distinguished Service Award from the Society of Professional Journalists, and as a 39-year resident of Colorado, a place in the Denver Press Club Hall of Fame.

You can learn more at GregDobbs.net