Even `Land of 100,000 Welcomes' has its limits -- Nov. 1, 2018 column

By MARSHA MERCER

Scores of angry emails and letters bombarded Irish Prime Minister Leo Varadkar after the White House made a surprise announcement last August President Donald Trump would visit Ireland.

Trump planned to stop at his golf resort in Doonbeg and in Dublin on his way to Paris for the 100^th anniversary of the armistice that ended World War I on Nov. 11.

Protesters began to mobilize, saying they’d use the 20-foot tall “Trump Baby” balloon that floated over London in July when Trump met with British Prime Minister Theresa May. More than 60 furious letter-writers urged Varadkar to withdraw Trump’s invitation.

The letters, released under a Freedom of Information Act request by the Irish Times and reported on Tuesday, provide a glimpse into Trump’s unpopularity in a country that traditionally has welcomed U.S. presidents.

“For all that is holy, please do not let Trump into Ireland,” one correspondent emailed, the Times reported.

“Seriously, every time you come out in support of Trump you experience a massive backlash,” another wrote Varadkar. “Why do you keep putting your hand back on the hot stove?” 

Noting Trump’s record on immigration, trade, climate change and human rights, he or she signed the letter “a thoroughly disgusted and disappointed citizen.”

Varadkar was sympathetic to the outcry but, like other leading Irish politicians, he called for respect.

“I know a lot of people dislike him,” he said Sept. 2 on Irish radio. “A lot of people object to him, a lot of people disagree with a lot of his policies -- just as I do, in fact -- but he is the president of America.”

After 11 days of turmoil, the Irish government said Trump wouldn’t visit after all. The White House cited “scheduling reasons.”

In the United States, about one in 10 people claimed Irish ancestry in 2016, the Census Bureau reports, and many presidents, most recently Barack Obama, play up their Irish roots.

Obama was an Illinois state senator in 2007 when Ancestry.com discovered his great-great-great grandfather came from Ireland.

As president, Obama enjoyed a warm Irish welcome in 2011 when he and Michelle Obama visited the village of Moneygall and met several of his distant relatives. An eighth cousin named Henry instantly became known as Henry the Eighth.

In Dublin, Obama told a crowd described as “rapturous” by a British newspaper, “My name is Barack Obama, of the Moneygall Obamas, and I’ve come home to find the apostrophe we lost somewhere along the way.”

As a tourist in Ireland last month, I met many people eager to talk about Obama’s and even President John F. Kennedy’s visit. Galway honored JFK’s 1963 visit with a bust in Eyre Square, also sometimes called JFK Park, and a mosaic in Galway Cathedral.

No one brought up Trump – or another American president who got a cold shoulder.

Protesters marked President Ronald Reagan’s visit in 1984. A leader of demonstrations against Reagan and U.S. policy in El Salvador and Nicaragua was an Irish senator named Michael D. Higgins.

Higgins had an American connection, having earned a master’s degree in sociology from Indiana University. Decades later, the 77-year-old poet, writer, former minister of culture and socialist is still involved in politics.

Higgins was re-elected president of Ireland last week. He is head of state, a largely ceremonial post, but it does give him a platform. He has been an outspoken critic of Trump and this country’s direction.  

“Today we are witnessing a worrying surge of unapologetic sexism and the undermining of women’s rights in one of the world’s most advanced democracies,” Higgins said in April in New York.

Trump may own a fancy golf resort on the west coast of Ireland, but he has much to learn about the country. Last summer, he raised hackles when he said Ireland is in the United Kingdom.

Rep. Brendan Boyle, D-Pa., son of an immigrant from Donegal, Ireland, fired back: “Ireland is not a part of the UK. It’s been an independent country for about 100 years … Please stop embarrassing us on the international stage.”

That’s a tall order for this president, but at least he won’t embarrass us in Ireland this month.  

©2018 Marsha Mercer. All rights reserved.

Teflon Don's sanity draws more scrutiny -- Nov. 30, 2017 column

By MARSHA MERCER   

     

You’d have to be crazy to run for president.

That’s what people often say, meaning it takes a certain kind of person, with a supersized ego and laser determination, to put oneself through the political wringer.

President Donald Trump proved he had the moxie to win the White House. Now his performance in the Oval Office is drawing new questions about his sanity.

When the 2005 “Access Hollywood” tape surfaced last year, Trump admitted saying the vulgarities about women. He apologized and called it “locker room talk.”

But recently he changed his tune, telling a senator the voice on the tape wasn’t his and he didn’t say those words, The New York Times reported.

More than a dozen women have come forward to accuse Trump of inappropriate behavior. The charges have rolled off his back, even as many powerful men in the entertainment and media industries have lost their jobs.

He’s Teflon Don, one of Trump’s accusers said. The White House position is that every one of the women is lying.

Trump endorsed Senate candidate Roy Moore and seems to admire the way the Alabama Republican has steadfastly denied all allegations of sexual impropriety.

Trump reportedly has returned to a favorite conspiracy theory of old, strangely reiterating his claim that Barack Obama was born in Kenya – after acknowledging last year that the former president was born in the United States.

Trump clings to the notion that he lost the popular vote only because there was widespread voter fraud, although no proof of it has been found.

At a White House ceremony Tuesday honoring the Navajo code talkers, he showed his impulsiveness and lack of filter when he made a crack about Pocahontas, his nickname for Sen. Elizabeth Warren, Democrat of Massachusetts.

And his sharing three inflammatory, unverified, anti-Muslim videos on Twitter Wednesday was so far outside the norms of presidential behavior as to be inconceivable. Except that for Trump, tacit endorsement of the far-right, racist Britain First group was sadly par for the course.

“It was wrong for the president to have done this,” said a spokesman for British Prime Minister Theresa May, who added that Britain First uses “hate-filled narratives to peddle lies and stoke tensions.”

But Trump won praise from David Duke, former Ku Klux Klan leader, who tweeted: “Thank God for Trump! That’s why we love him.”

Thumbing his nose at an ally, Trump tweeted to May to mind her own business.

During the campaign, Trump’s many GOP competitors as well as the news media, Obama and Hillary Clinton questioned his mental stability and warned of his unfitness for office.  

Senator Ted Cruz, Republican of Texas, called Trump a “pathological liar,” “narcissist” and “utterly amoral,” after Trump attacked Cruz’s wife and father. Cruz later endorsed Trump anyway, and most other prominent Republicans also fell in line.

This isn’t the first time a president’s mental health has come under scrutiny. Richard Nixon was prescribed uppers and downers in an attempt to control his moodiness. 

Richard N. Goodwin, an aide to John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson, wrote that he studied medical books trying to understand LBJ’s paranoid behavior. 

Those interested in Trump’s mental health can skip the medical texts. “The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President,” a book of essays, was published in October.

The authors concede no definitive diagnosis is possible, but they say Trump exhibits signs of being a malignant narcissist, a sociopath, paranoid and of having a delusional detachment from reality, among other things.

“Anyone as mentally unstable as Mr. Trump should not be entrusted with the life-and-death powers of the presidency,” the authors write in the prologue.

Trump’s fans dismiss such talk as politics as usual.

“Trump is NOT crazy despite the claims of some mental health professionals” read the headline on an op-ed by Andrew Snyder, a psychotherapist, on foxnews.com. Shrinks are calling Trump crazy simply because they disagree with his policies, he said.

But you don’t have to think Trump is crazy to find him reckless and rash. Not that Teflon Don is about to change.  

In Missouri Wednesday, he was talking about taxes but could have been referring to his approach to the highest office in the land.

“Hey look, I’m president. I don’t care anymore,” he said.

©2017 Marsha Mercer. All rights reserved. 30