Americans are beginning to lose their cool with President Donald Trump, and there is no better barometer than the feedback from the intelligentsia. But when a former Director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), John Brennan, wrote a tweet a fortnight ago in response to the President’s tweet, it became apparent that to a certain cadre of the American society, the gloves are off.
For Trump’s celebrating the dismissal of former Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) deputy director Andrew McCabe two days to his retirement, Brennan let the President have it: “When the full extent of your venality, moral turpitude, and political corruption becomes known, you will take your rightful place as a disgraced demagogue in the dustbin of history. You may scapegoat Andy McCabe, but you will not destroy America…America will triumph over you.”
President Trump’s open warfare with the intelligence community began even during his campaign for the office. When the intelligence chiefs unanimously reported that Russians had interfered in the November 2016 elections at which Trump was elected, Trump viewed their declaration as a challenge to the legitimacy of his presidency.
It was not just Brennan that has had it with President Trump. Robert de Niro, the actor, who once called Trump an “idiot” returned to the theme again in his dinner speech in Los Angeles a fortnight ago to declare that Trump was “still an idiot” despite receiving a quality education from the University of Pennsylvania. The president, he said, lacked “any sense of humanity or compassion,” he said. “Now I’m not trying to turn this non-political event into a political one,” said De Niro, 74, “but as long as our country’s leadership is so appalling and so corrupt, I’ll be speaking out at every venue. To be silent in the face of such villainy is to be complicit, and it’s especially appropriate tonight because Trump treats education as a con, a way to make profit at the expense of the suckers.” De Niro called Trump a “f..king idiot” and a “f..king fool” at an award ceremony in January. In August 2017, the two-time Oscar winner told Deadline that Trump was “a flat-out blatant racist” who would be “even more dangerous” if he was smart. Actually, De Niro was among the first to describe Trump, in October 2016, as “a punk, he’s a pig, he’s a con, a bullshit artist, a mutt who doesn’t know what he’s talking about, doesn’t do his homework, doesn’t care, thinks he’s gaming society, doesn’t pay his taxes.”
Jeff Flake attacked the US President’s “reckless, outrageous and undignified” actions as a “danger to democracy” in an impassioned speech on the Senate floor. The Senator from Arizona criticized Mr. Trump for “glorying in the things that divide us and calling fake things true and true things fake” And he urged other Republican congressmen to speak out, telling the White House: “Mr. President, I will not be complicit or silent. We must stop pretending that the degradation of our politics and the conduct of some in our executive branch are normal,” Mr. Flake said. “They are not normal. Reckless, outrageous and undignified behaviour has become excused and countenanced as ‘tell it like it is’ when it is actually just reckless, outrageous and undignified. “And when such behaviour emanates from the top of our Government it is something else. It is dangerous to a democracy.”
Anger and resentment are not a governing philosophy. There is an undeniable potency to a populist appeal by mischaracterising or misunderstanding our problems. And we did not become the beacon of freedom in the darkest corners of the world by flouting our institutions and failing to understand just how hard won and vulnerable they are. This spell will eventually break, that is my belief. We will return to ourselves once more and I say the sooner the better.
David Frum, a reputed conservative thinker, is a senior editor at The Atlantic. In 2001–02, he was a speechwriter for President George W. Bush. He’s made a few surprising remarks about President Trump: “The president is used to getting his way by bluster and intimidation, but the strategy that once worked for him is now working against him.”
Congressional Republicans and conservative pundits had the chance to signal to Trump that his attacks on law enforcement are unacceptable—but they sent the opposite message.
For the most verbally belligerent president in history, Trump’s comments about Russia’s nerve-agent attack have been conspicuously weak.
The specific timing of the move—(the sack of Secretary of State Rex Tillerson) following the secretary of state’s split from the president to condemn a Russian attack in the U.K.—raises questions about its motive.
This president isn’t the first to embrace a “trade war” to bolster his populist credentials—but in the end, it’s ordinary people who will bear its cost. A year into the presidency of Donald Trump, the country is in danger of accepting the unacceptable.”
George F. Will is one of America’s most highly regarded conservative columnists. He has some colourful views about President Trump:
“To see what is in front of one’s nose,” George Orwell wrote, “needs a constant struggle.” An unnoticed reason for cheerfulness is that in one, if only one, particular, Trump is something the nation did not know it needed: a feeble president whose manner can cure the nation’s excessive fixation with the presidency.
As President-elect, Trump did not know the pedigree and importance of the one-China policy. About such things he can be, if he is willing to be, tutored. It is, however, too late to rectify this defect: He lacks what T.S. Eliot called a sense “not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence.” His fathomless lack of interest in America’s path to the present and his limitless gullibility leave him susceptible to being blown about by gusts of factoids that cling like lint to a disorderly mind.
Americans have placed vast military power at the discretion of this mind, a presidential discretion that is largely immune to restraint by the Madisonian system of institutional checks and balances. So, it is up to the public to quarantine this presidency by insistently communicating to its elected representatives a steady, rational fear of this man whose combination of impulsivity and credulity render him uniquely unfit to take the nation into a military conflict.
In February, acknowledging Black History Month, Trump said that “Frederick Douglass is an example of somebody who’s done an amazing job and is getting recognized more and more, I notice.” Because Trump is syntactically challenged, it was possible and tempting to see this not as a historical howler about a man who died 122 years ago, but as just another of Trump’s verbal fender benders, this one involving verb tenses.
Now, however, he has instructed us that Andrew Jackson was angry about the Civil War that began 16 years after Jackson’s death. Having, let us fancifully imagine, considered and found unconvincing William Seward’s 1858 judgment that the approaching Civil War was “an irrepressible conflict,” Trump says: “People don’t realize, you know, the Civil War, if you think about it, why? People don’t ask that question, but why was there the Civil War? Why could that one not have been worked out?”