Randi Kreiss

Who are you? Tell me about your friends.

Posted

I hope people judge me by my friends. There isn’t a clinker among them. Everyone brings something to the table. If I have matured into a better, kinder or more considerate person, it is only by association with my friends. I try to let their good stuff rub off on me. I try to let the less admirable qualities go, and I hope they return the favor.

I’ve been thinking about friends, and how our associations reflect on us as we consider the coming presidential election. The idea coalesced for me in late April, when I heard the speech that Bobby Knight gave endorsing Donald Trump just before the Indiana primary. Knight, the legendary and infamous basketball coach, had reached out to Trump months before, and Trump called on him to make a public endorsement before the pivotal primary.

Knight was a winning coach, but not always a winning human being. He was fired from Indiana in 2000 for various infractions, including throwing a chair and choking a player. (Another intemperate man in the Trump circle?) In an interview back in 1988, Coach Knight suggested to correspondent Connie Chung that if “rape is inevitable, relax and enjoy it.”

It didn’t seem as if the two men had been buddies before the endorsement, but Trump clearly beamed with approval as Knight told a pre-primary crowd that Trump would “drop the A-bomb just like Truman did.”

Trump has also cozied up to America’s longtime enemy and major evil-doer Vladimir Putin of Russia. After Putin praised Trump as “bright and talented” and “the absolute leader of the presidential race,” Trump characterized Putin’s praise as a “great honor” and even dismissed widespread allegations that the Russian president has ordered the killing of journalists and dissidents.

“He’s running his country, and at least he’s a leader, unlike what we have in this country,” Trump said on MSNBC. “I think our country does plenty of killing also.”

Trump has boasted that he would get along fine with Putin, and the Russian strongman, possibly sensing the possibility of an inexperienced and hot-tempered leader of the free world, has responded in kind.

Of course, in the Discussion of Inappropriate Friends, we must include the bromance between the Donald and the little strongman Kim Jong-un. Trump seemed to grudgingly praise the dictator of North Korea recently when he said, “It’s incredible” how Kim was able to dispatch his political opponents.

Trump did call him a “maniac” in remarks about North Korea’s nuclear program, but went on to say, “You gotta give him credit … how many young guys — he was like 26 or 25 when his father died — take over these tough generals, and all of a sudden … he goes in, he takes over and he’s the boss. It’s incredible. He wiped out the uncle, he wiped out this one, that one. I mean, this guy doesn’t play games …”

Trump speaks, and we see years of painstaking, delicate negotiations unraveling. Of course, the Great Leader responded by tossing a bouquet of his own, suggesting that Trump would be a “wise choice” as America’s president.

If it’s fair to judge a person by his or her friends, then we need to feel real concern about Trump’s public admiration for the worst despots on the planet. The Kim dynasty in North Korea has created a nether world of absolute rule where millions of citizens have been starved to death and tens of thousands have been murdered in the service of a military dictatorship. No free press. No civil rights. No access to the world outside what has come to be known as the “hermit kingdom.” And Trump says, “You gotta give him credit.”

Those who have unfriended the Donald include all of the Bush family and various other responsible leaders in both parties. Add that to the legions of bread-and-butter Republicans who have disavowed a potential Trump presidency as a travesty and a dangerous mistake. What he says about the cruelest and most brutal dictators on the planet should mark him as an unreliable and unsuitable candidate for president.

Copyright © 2016 Randi Kreiss. Randi can be reached at randik3@aol.com.