| | | The Vanishing GOP Adult
With apologies to Nebraska Senator Ben Sasse, who has bemoaned the disappearance of adult supervision in our culture, our more immediate problem is the absence of adult supervision in his own party.
Let's start with yesterday's presidential tantrum. In a roomful of putative adults, President Trump apparently melted down, becoming so abusive that Democrats actually walked out of the meeting. It was apparently at that same meeting that he handed out The Letter: "Don't be a tough guy. Don't be a fool! I will call you later."
And every sentient creature in the universe reacted: this can't possibly be real -- a plaintive cry in defiance of what we know deep down: There is no bottom to the juvenile ignorance of the man who sits in the presidency.
From Vanity Fair:
Donald Trump has said or done something certifiably insane nearly every day of his presidency. And not like, “This guy’s a little kooky”-level insane, but full-on “Mr. President, put down the stapler and unhand the president of Finland”-level insane. But last week, apparently seeking to prove to the world that we ain’t seen nothing yet re: the depths of his mental instability, he wrote and reportedly proudly distributed the following letter to Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, for all the world to see...
This is real:
Historians will puzzle over the document for decades. So let's spend a few minutes this morning.
Obviously, Trump wrote this himself. And was proud of it. This is the mind of the president and the way he communicates with foreign leaders about war and peace. We are well and truly fuqqed.
But beyond that, consider this: no one in the White House was able to stop him from sending it. There was no adult in on his staff; no one in the State Department or the Department of Defense, who could say. Let's think about this, Mr. President. Or even suggest editing it a bit, to raise it to the level of, I don't know, 6th grade English.
This came on the same day that Trump spouted bizarre conspiracy theories about Ukraine and the DNC server, slimed the Kurds, parroted talking points from Putin, Erdogan, and Assad, insulted his former secretary of defense, cut his own vice president off at the knees, and generally confirmed the suspicion that he really has no idea what he was talking about.
By the way, this was Day 1000 of the Trump presidency.
“I still ask the FBI: Where is the server?” Trump was saying in the Oval Office, referring to Russia’s hacking of the Democratic National Committee during the 2016 election. “How come the FBI never got the server from the DNC? Where is the server? I wanna see the server. Let’s see what’s on the server.”
Trump called the U.S. withdrawal from northern Syria a “strategically brilliant” decision that keeps “our soldiers totally safe.”
His former ISIS adviser, veteran national-security official Brett McGurk, took to Twitter with a sharp rebuke: “Trump has no idea what’s happening.”
A thousand days.
Interim question: Does the GOP really want... 5 more years of this?
thebulwark |
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