Those are the concluding words of a column in today’s Washington Post. Written by the inimitable Eugene Robinson, it is titled Donald Trump’s raging egomania and as you can imagine, it is in large part a reaction to the Commander in Chief forum earlier this week.
Robinson begins with Trump’s favorable remarks about Vladimir Putin, in the full context in which they were made in the forum, ending with the “saying great things” remark. Then he write
There you have it, folks, the distilled essence of Trump’s disgraceful campaign. It’s not about immigration or foreign policy or making America “great again,” whatever that means. It’s entirely about Trump and his raging egomania.
Trump is sincere when he expresses preening self-regard. All the rest is just verbiage tossed with a light vinaigrette.
In a sense, one could probably simply stop right there — the two sentences of the latter paragraph above is a perfect summary of Donald Trump.
Robinson does take an excursus, examining Hillary Clinton’s participation, having already pointed out that she was the only one on stage with anything meaningful to say.
But then he returns to Trump by writing
But the evening was really about Trump, and the stakes are far too high for him to be graded on a curve. No, he did not rant and rave like a crazy man or threaten to nuke anybody. But neither did he give the slightest indication he knew anything about the issues he was supposed to be talking about.
There are zingers that are far more biting than anything Trump is likely to offer in the debates, for example, after rightly noting that Trump seems to be promising a purge at the Pentagon commenting that
Maybe his friend Vladimir can give him pointers.
After the remarks on how we should have taken the Iraqi oil on the grounds that to the victors belong the spoils, Robinson goes into a bit more detail in his response:
Yes, that was true in the time of Genghis Khan. Today, under international law, plunder is a war crime — and not the only one Trump wants our military to commit. He has said in the past that our forces also should practice torture “worse than waterboarding” against suspected terrorists. He would ask our service members to dishonor the uniform and all it represents.
It is in such an overall context that Robinson’s final words appear.
Allow me to share them more completely than in my title:
Face the truth: Trump has to be the most dangerously ignorant major-party presidential candidate in history.
Indeed.