Burke: In case you lost count, what real presidents don’t do

By Tom Burke

There have been 45 presidents since George Washington took the first oath of office at New York City’s Federal Hall on April 30, 1789. Since then we’ve had good presidents (Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, TR, FDR, Truman); bad presidents (Grant, Harding, Hoover, Buchanan, Nixon, Tyler); and adequate-enough presidents (most all the rest).

But we’ve never had a fake president, until now.

Donald J. Trump is our first fake president. How do I know? Simple. Real presidents don’t do what he does.

Real presidents don’t:

Endlessly Tweet their random thoughts, which some aides tell us just to ignore and others say are official policy;

Put totally unqualified family members in positions of great responsibility;

Rip affordable health care away from 23 million Americans;

Seek to shut down an FBI investigation;

Demand personal “loyalty” from the FBI director

Fire the FBI director to stop an investigation;

Instruct the vice president and other spokespeople to lie about firing the FBI director;

Label the press “the enemy of the American people” and call their work “fake news;”

Brag about abusing women;

Return espionage centers to our enemies;

Ignore the attorney general’s repeated warnings the national security adviser was compromised by the Russians;

Fire the national security adviser 25 days after hiring him;

Tell two Russian diplomats the FBI director is a “real nut job”;

Disclose sensitive, top-secret intelligence to our enemies;

Compare the country’s intelligence community to Nazi Germany;

Say they “stand by nothing” they ever said;

Surreptitiously attempt to lift sanctions against the Russians;

Encourage violence against women, minorities, immigrants and political opponents;

Withhold their tax returns;

Tell federal agencies to ignore legitimate information requests from members of Congress;

Use the budget to target the poor to fund tax breaks for the rich;

Propose cutting Medicaid to the needy by $800 billion to bankroll additional tax breaks for those earning more than $250,000 a year;

Score political points by opting out of a voluntary agreement to reduce global warming;

Use presidential power to increase air and water pollution;

Insult foreign leaders on Twitter; elbow them aside for a photo op; ignore the outstretched hand of the German chancellor; and uber-macho a handshake with the French president;

Frighten our NATO allies by refusing to endorse its key provision (Article V, the mutual defense provision);

Fail to appoint key agency leaders to NOAA and FEMA at the start of the hurricane season;

Cut budgets for: the National Institutes of Health, the Puget Sound and all other national estuary programs, the Parks Service, PBS, the Endowments for the Arts and Humanities, the Coast Guard, food assistance to the poor and elderly, nursing home care for the elderly, teacher training, and college aid like Pell grants;

Whine about … everything, and

Lie, lie about almost everything as to:

Why he opted out of the Paris Accord;

How many people attended his inauguration;

The size of his Electoral College win;

How many jobs he created;

NATO funding;

China’s coal;

America’s coal;

Voter fraud;

An MIT climate study;

How well his tax reform bill is doing in Congress when there is no tax reform bill in Congress;

Obama’s citizenship;

Obama’s bugging Trump Tower;

Campaign/transition team contacts with the Russians;

Mexico paying for “The Wall;”

Providing “really great health care” for all;

Saving $600 million on the F-35 program;

China being a currency manipulator;

The murder rate being the highest in forty-seven years;

How he got Ford not to build a new plant in Mexico;

The Mayor of London after the terror incident, and

Supporting the Iraq war (he did, on tape, but now says he didn’t)

For me, whenever Mr. Trump says, “fake news;” I hear “fake president.”

The news reported by the New York Times, the Washington Post, AP, Reuters, CNN, and others isn’t fake, isn’t a lie, and they prove it every day.

On the other hand President Trump has been caught in so many bald-faced lies; so many deliberate misrepresentations of the facts; so many denials of things he’s said when there’s video of him actually saying them, that his people invented a new phrase describing his fantasies — alternative facts — making it crystal clear he’s no more a real president than his fake facts.

Presidents like Truman, TR or George Washington didn’t need fake facts.

They were real men, not perfect men and not perfect presidents, but they were honorable men who toiled and sacrificed and fought for their country, not sulked and bullied and bleated petty foolishness in the small hours of the morning.

They were the men who made America great. And Donald Trump, a mean little man compared to them, is not the man to make anything great again, least of all a country that was great, once, between April 30, 1789 and Jan. 20, 2017.

Tom Burke’s email address is t.burke.column@gmail.com.