The New York Times did as much as anyone to create the Trump presidency, and now they’ve published an op-ed from a White House insider who claims to be part of a double secret probation cabal that is working to prevent Trump from being an even worse disaster than the public realizes he is. A cabal of White House insiders supposedly flouts Trump’s commands, even swiping papers off his desk, to prevent him from knowing what’s actually going on in his own administration, and to prevent him from doing what he intends to do. Rest easily, this anonymous cretin reassures, there’s resistance inside the White House itself.
I call bullshit.
Here’s a clue: If you’re violating constitutional norms to prevent a constitutional crisis, we’re already there. If Trump is too stupid and too unhinged to fulfill his constitutional obligations, the answer isn’t for those working for him to supercede his authority, it’s to use legal and constitutional mechanisms to remove him from office. But they don’t want to remove him, they want to control him for their own craven purposes. The op-ed was written by someone pretending to be principled while having no principles at all. Some only half-jokingly speculated that it was written by Mike Pence. It just as easily could have been the work of that queen of complicity, Ivanka. Everyone on the inside desperately wants people to believe they’re really secretly on the outside.
Trump is a disaster, undermining national security, likely at the behest of a foreign controller, and the best thing he has going for his tenure in office is the growing economy he inherited from the predecessor he routinely rants against. Perhaps nothing haunts him more than the idea that he really ought to be saying “Thanks, Obama!” But Trump is as incapable of gratitude as he is of contrition. Or self-reflection. Or empathy. Or dignity. Or any other basic trait that allows a child to evolve into a complete human being. The Oval Office has seen plenty of wretched occupants, but never before has it hosted one who was so fundamentally, so profoundly, small.
That Trump is unfit to be president has been obvious since he first floated the idea of seeking the office, seemingly on a whim, decades ago. That 63 million people actually voted to put him in office speaks to the depth of the crisis this nation faces, and the failure of an education system that has been slowly gutted since the time of Reagan. Trump is a symptom of a cultural and societal collapse, and the inability or unwillingness of anyone who can to do anything realistic to stop him is just more evidence of the depth of the rot. The entire Republican Party is complicit. Those last principled Republicans jumped ship before Trump won the Electoral College. But they have no power. The Republicans who do have power are every bit as responsible for this crisis as is Trump himself.
