Loathsome POTUS: This Is No Person for This Job

Jeff Robbins on Dec 23, 2025

"The presidency," former President Franklin Roosevelt observed, "is not merely an administrative office. That is the least part of it. It is preeminently a place of moral leadership." We learn as children to respect the office of the president and to pay attention to the conduct and the words of its inhabitant. Most of us were taught that moral fitness was an important qualification to be president, or at least that moral unfitness was a disqualifier. The Oval Office is assuredly a "bully pulpit," a supremely powerful platform from which decency can be modeled -- as long as a decent human being occupies it.

There's a problem, as America has painfully learned. If it's occupied by a deplorable president, the effect will be deplorable.

We have a president who doesn't simply remind us of his lack of class daily. He rubs our faces in it. Here's some of the latest fare from the convicted felon and adjudicated abuser of women for whom "Hail to the Chief" is played by a military band whenever he enters the room.

When filmmaker Rob Reiner, a fervent critic of President Donald Trump, had his throat slit by a son with profound mental and substance abuse problems, 99.99% of Trump's fellow humans would either express sympathy for Reiner's surviving family members and friends or stay silent. There are plenty of truly wretched people who know you don't celebrate murder, let alone gloat about it.

Not this guy.

We have in that preeminent place of moral leadership that Roosevelt talked about a president so morally deficient that he went out of his way to mock Reiner's murder, and blame Reiner's murder on ... Reiner, for being critical of Trump. Calling the widely beloved and highly successful Reiner "a tortured and struggling but once very talented movie director," Trump posted that Reiner's vicious slaying was "reportedly due to the anger he caused others through his massive, unyielding and incurable affliction with a mind crippling disease known as TRUMP DERANGEMENT SYNDROME."

As is so frequently the case with anything Trump says, this was all made-up, yet more fabrications by the President of the United States of the kind that will keep psychiatric practitioners engaged for years. Reiner "was known to have driven people CRAZY by his raging obsession of President Donald J. Trump," read the message posted by President Donald J. Trump.

In another move guaranteed to win him induction into the Narcissism Hall of Fame, Trump just had the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts re-named ... for himself. Trump has proclaimed that it shall hereafter be called "The Donald J. Trump and the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts," and had the words "The Donald J. Trump and" placed on top of "John F. Kennedy" on the front of the building. Passing by the fact that Congressional legislation is necessary to change the Center's name, it was an act so pathetically self-aggrandizing as to demand its own chapter in psychotherapy textbooks. Here is the cringeworthy statement that Trump had his press secretary issue for the occasion, referencing the Center's Board of Directors whom Trump had appointed: "I have just been informed that the highly respected Board of the Kennedy Center, some of the most successful people from all parts of the world, have just voted unanimously to rename the Kennedy Center to the Trump-Kennedy Center, because of the unbelievable work President Trump has done over the past year."

This is the kind of stuff that Saddam Hussein himself would have been too embarrassed to do. It was of a piece with Trump's addition of a Presidential Walk of Fame to the White House's exterior, with portraits of every president -- except that of the man who defeated him in the election, which Trump fraudulently claimed he had won, former President Joe Biden. Where Biden's portrait belonged, Trump hung a photo of an auto-pen -- a sub-childish representation of Trump's oft-repeated nonsense that Biden was incompetent while president.

It's not mean. It's not petty. It's loathsome. It's time to face it: we have a loathsome president. We elected him. And we have him for three more years.

Lord help us.

Jeff Robbins' latest book, "Notes From the Brink: A Collection of Columns about Policy at Home and Abroad," is available now on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Apple Books and Google Play. Robbins, a former assistant United States attorney and United States delegate to the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva, was chief counsel for the minority of the United States Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. An attorney specializing in the First Amendment and a longtime columnist, he writes on politics, national security, human rights and the Middle East.