The past is prologue.
What a person does in his private life is usually reflected in what he does in his business life and his public life.
I have written before about how Mr. Trump’s distain for giving money to Hospitals, Universities, Cultural Institutions, Charitable Organizations and The Arts mirrors how he views the Federal Government giving money to foreign countries, The Arts, the homeless or the helpless. No ROI, no money.
I would like to expand this analysis with how he treats contracts and agreements.
Multiple sources have found that Mr. Trump has been involved in more than 3,500 lawsuits over the past three decades that involve ordinary Americans who say Trump, or his companies have refused to pay them.
Many individuals who have dealt with him directly in business have confirmed that he regularly violated and cancelled contracts with other companies and with “partners” and investors if that would benefit him.
That is one reason that New York banks refused to lend him any money, forcing him to go to the private wing of Deutsche Bank. It is also one reason that he has never been asked to join any of the Builders Groups in NYC or asked to serve on the Boards of any public companies.
The construction and building associations understood that there was no contract that Mr. Trump signed that he wouldn’t break. And he would hold the other parties to the contract through extended litigation designed to make it more expensive to sue, than to settle.
In the first term of his Presidency, we saw the same behavior. He withdrew from the Paris Accords; he unilaterally cancelled the JCPOA, allowing Iran the legal permission to develop their nuclear capabilities. He cancelled NAFTA and renegotiated the USMCA, which he called (during the signing ceremony) “The largest, fairest, most balanced, and modern trade agreement ever achieved. There’s never been anything like it.”
Now, he has unilaterally violated that agreement, simply ignoring the main section that prohibits all three parties from imposing tariffs on each other for hundreds of listed items.
He has chosen to ignore the Budapest Memorandum on Security Assurances.
Since President John F Kennedy signed an executive order giving collective bargaining rights to federal employees, the federal government has never negated a contract signed between a union and the federal government. Donald Trump broke that precedent when he made the decision to rip up TSA workers’ contract this past Friday.
Trump’s Administration cancelled contracts involving follow up care for veterans who are cancer patients. 200 cancelled contracts that involve hospital care for veterans have been cancelled. Contracts as simple as those involving equipment sterilization. Contracts that involve preventing infection.
He has fired people for whom the law requires advance notice and a listing of reasons, without doing either.
For Mr. Trump, the NATO agreement only obliges the US to respond if it chooses to and if it chooses not to, it will find some tricked-up reason to abstain.
He said last month that “He who saves the country violates no law.”
If he can’t do something legally, he declares a “national emergency”, like he did with the “national energy emergency”. What energy emergency? It is just a hook to provide powers that he would not have without the declaration.
Tariffs are on, now they are off, now they are on again, this time larger than before, but maybe not today, maybe next month, and if we don’t do it next month maybe we will do it the next week. Business executives have no idea on how to plan. The market is reflecting their insecurity.
My issue here is not that Trump can or cannot be trusted to abide by his word or his signature.
My issue is that these actions tell the world that the United States form of government cannot be trusted to abide by treaties or agreements signed by a US President, because any one of them could be thrown aside by the next Administration. Without a firm belief in the strength of an American agreement, with a sense that the entire structure of the US Government implicitly cannot be trusted for more than a few years, international relations will suffer irreparable damage.