Is Donald Trump a Good Judge of Character?

By Ravenne Reid on August 31, 2017

Well into the 2016 election, Donald Trump had enthralled his base with promises that he would run the country like he had run his mostly-successful business (excluding the six bankruptcies, of course). His supporters were led to believe that, as a businessman, he could handle the arduous, yet necessary task of choosing the right employees to tackle the administrative departments that help make America great.

In one of my previous articles, I discuss the reasons why Michael Flynn, Sean Spicer, Reince Priebus, and Anthony Scaramucci all had to leave their easily attained positions at the White House. While some were forced out, others still lingered in the president’s thoughts as he tried to explain to the public that so and so was “treated unfairly” by the press and that they were “good people.”

To sum up these departures, Flynn lied, Spicer felt ignored, Priebus was threatened, and Scaramucci was a mini-Trump who mistakenly projected a narrative that suggested he controlled the reins. After a while, it became quite clear that Trump’s nominees were going to be the first indication of a long list of broken promises and disappointments from this administration. A man who claimed that he would “drain the swamp” actually added more unwanted creatures to the mix when he filled his cabinet, and among them was Steve Bannon.

The former chief strategist, who worked as a media executive, drew criticism when he was appointed to the newly created position. For one, he had no background in politics, which called into question why the president would make up a title for someone who was not familiar with the inner-workings of government.

Second, and most importantly, he was a chairman of Breitbart News, a far-right website that became a platform for the alt-right, which accounts for neo-Nazis, white supremacists, and the Ku Klux Klan. After the events at a “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia that cost one woman her life, people called upon Trump to fire Bannon since he stood as a representative for these nationalists.

In addition to that, most Trump officials were convinced that Bannon was the White House leaker, and that theory was only proved further when he gave a scathing interview to a liberal journalist who challenged the president’s position on North Korea.

Despite the fact that Bannon was already on the path to losing his job, he claimed that there is no “military solution” to Kim Jong-un’s threats and that “they got us.” His departure drew the most approval from Trump critics who knew that he had influenced most of the president’s controversial decisions, including his most recent choice to call out “both sides” in his response to Charlottesville.

Since then, there have been heated discussions on news networks that focus on the chances that the president may be racist or may heavily rely on racial biases. One key moment from his past that served as evidence for these accusations was Trump’s $85,000 ads in New York City newspapers that called for the death of the Central Park Five.

Back in 1989, five black and Latino adolescents were charged with the rape and murder of a white female who had been jogging in Central Park. These teens admitted to the crime due to intense police interrogation, not because they did it. When DNA testing came out sometime later, none of the young men matched the hair strand that was found on her body

After all of these years, Donald Trump has never apologized for making a case against these boys who already had the whole world against them. And it is my opinion that he would still believe that the Five had something to do with the death of this young woman, even with stacks of DNA evidence against him.

As we all know by now, the president has a problem with lying and taking accountability when situations go south. More importantly, we have also grown accustomed to the fact that the president does not — or simply cannot — let things go, and the birther movement of President Barack Obama comes to mind.

Donald Trump began his political career by alleging that the then Democratic candidate was not born in the United States. While Obama’s mother was a white woman born in Kansas, his father was born in Kenya, and there were multiple investigations out to prove that that was the former president’s country of origin. One of these probes was actually led by Sheriff Joe Arpaio, who is an extremely controversial figure among the Latino community.

The 85-year-old sheriff was charged with criminal contempt for violating a judge’s order to stop racially profiling Latinos with the intent to target illegal immigrants. Although it was his job to enforce this crackdown on immigration, Arpaio detained Latinos on the suspicion that they were here illegally instead of the notion that they had committed a crime.

He was supposed to serve six months in jail for ignoring a court order (although his age and military service to the country would have probably reduced that time significantly), but Arpaio received a presidential pardon from the man who once praised him on Twitter for taking the birther investigation into his own hands back in 2012.

Trump may have been a successful businessman before he began his contentious presidency, but as leader of the free world, he has not demonstrated sound decision-making in the employees that he hires or in the people — or in this case, the person — who he pardons. So, he is not a good judge of character.

If he was, he would not have hired a National Security Advisor who the previous president warned him about. He would not have accepted the resignation of an employee who warned him about another. And lastly, he would not have pardoned a person who abused his power to discriminate against a group of people he deemed inferior to have rights in this country.

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