[News] Trump's evident character flaws leave him unable to meet the historic moment

[Kayal]

"In a president, character is everything," wrote the renowned speechwriter Peggy Noonan. And therein lies President Donald Trump's inability to meet this American moment.

Noonan referred, in an essay commemorating her old boss Ronald Reagan, to the human qualities behind successful leadership in the White House. Empathy, courage, vision, decency, candor -- these traits have yielded the presidential moments that resonate through history.

The evident absence of those qualities in Trump leaves him uniquely ill-equipped to handle the intertwined challenges of a public health pandemic, economic collapse and racial conflict that the nation now faces. The results have inflamed enmity, division and hardship across the nation.

Consider some of the signature events that helped define chief executives over the last century. They etch an unflattering contrast with today's incumbent.

Trump invokes George Floyd's name while taking economic victory lap

After Pearl Harbor, Franklin Roosevelt girded Americans for the struggle ahead by leveling with them: "It will not only be a long war, it will be a hard war." Trump has misled Americans about many aspects of the current crisis -- downplaying the coronavirus threat, exaggerating chances for rapid economic recovery, distorting the nature of protests by describing participants as "arsonists, looters, criminals and anarchists wanting to destroy ... our country.

Harry Truman demonstrated presidential accountability by avowing "The buck stops here." Trump dodges the buck, insisting in the White House Rose Garden that, "I don't take responsibility at all" for coronavirus failures.

Dwight Eisenhower used the extraordinary powers of his office for paramount national purposes by sending federal troops to protect black students integrating Arkansas schools. Trump sent federal officers to forcibly disperse Americans peacefully protesting the police killing of an unarmed black man.

John F. Kennedy summoned the nation to shared purposes: "Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country." When the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba on his watch turned into a fiasco, Kennedy accepted personal responsibility.