After listening to the Daily and carefully reading the OpEd again, my thoughts...(in bold)
President Trump is facing a test to his presidency unlike any faced by a modern American leader.
cry me a river - it is all his doing, enabled by republicans
It’s not just that the special counsel looms large. Or that the country is bitterly divided over Mr. Trump’s leadership. Or even that his party might well lose the House to an opposition hellbent on his downfall.
The dilemma — which he does not fully grasp — is that many of the senior officials in his own administration are working diligently from within to frustrate parts of his agenda and his worst inclinations.
I would know. I am one of them.
And you are a coward to do it this way.
To be clear, ours is not the popular “resistance” of the left. We want the administration to succeed and think that many of its policies have already made America safer and more prosperous.
First lie - how can an administration with no real credibility due to the clouds around the election results have any right to succeed at their particular ideas that are a clear minority of the population?
But we believe our first duty is to this country, and the president continues to act in a manner that is detrimental to the health of our republic.
If the duty is to your country, come out in the open and bring your fellow cry-me-a-river bunch along. Do it en masse.
That is why many Trump appointees have vowed to do what we can to preserve our democratic institutions while thwarting Mr. Trump’s more misguided impulses until he is out of office.
Here's the problem - none of you have been elected to office. Trump is an abomination, and none of you self-appointed saviors have the right do govern this country.
The root of the problem is the president’s amorality. Anyone who works with him knows he is not moored to any discernible first principles that guide his decision making.
Let's add a root - his manipulation by Putin
Although he was elected as a Republican, the president shows little affinity for ideals long espoused by conservatives: free minds, free markets and free people. At best, he has invoked these ideals in scripted settings. At worst, he has attacked them outright.
No words for this bullshit.
In addition to his mass-marketing of the notion that the press is the “enemy of the people,” President Trump’s impulses are generally anti-trade and anti-democratic.
And apparently all of you are happy as clams to have him go out and attack the media - all of the administration's surrogates sure do go along with him
Don’t get me wrong. There are bright spots that the near-ceaseless negative coverage of the administration fails to capture: effective deregulation, historic tax reform, a more robust military and more.
Maybe the negative coverage is because these are all regrettable, damaging ideas - making the rich richer, destroying our environment, and on and on. What utter bullshit.
But these successes have come despite — not because of — the president’s leadership style, which is impetuous, adversarial, petty and ineffective.
From the White House to executive branch departments and agencies, senior officials will privately admit their daily disbelief at the commander in chief’s comments and actions. Most are working to insulate their operations from his whims.
Most are clearly cowering and making excuses - or like this Op Ed writer, too chicken shit to come out into the light
Meetings with him veer off topic and off the rails, he engages in repetitive rants, and his impulsiveness results in half-baked, ill-informed and occasionally reckless decisions that have to be walked back.
“There is literally no telling whether he might change his mind from one minute to the next,” a top official complained to me recently, exasperated by an Oval Office meeting at which the president flip-flopped on a major policy decision he’d made only a week earlier.
We've seen this sort of behavior forever - nothing is new.
The erratic behavior would be more concerning if it weren’t for unsung heroes in and around the White House. Some of his aides have been cast as villains by the media. But in private, they have gone to great lengths to keep bad decisions contained to the West Wing, though they are clearly not always successful.
Again - these White House heroes were not elected. Are the efforts being coordinated? Who is involved? Which ideas are being pushed forward, are they vetted and by whom? This is simply out of control chaos trying to control out of control chaos
It may be cold comfort in this chaotic era, but Americans should know that there are adults in the room. We fully recognize what is happening. And we are trying to do what’s right even when Donald Trump won’t.
Could have fooled us - there really are no traces of any adults in the room
The result is a two-track presidency.
Take foreign policy: In public and in private, President Trump shows a preference for autocrats and dictators, such as President Vladimir Putin of Russia and North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong-un, and displays little genuine appreciation for the ties that bind us to allied, like-minded nations.
Astute observers have noted, though, that the rest of the administration is operating on another track, one where countries like Russia are called out for meddling and punished accordingly, and where allies around the world are engaged as peers rather than ridiculed as rivals.
This laughable - I suspect there is some coordination going on here to make it look that way, but this is a puppet pulling the strings - this part actually made me laugh
On Russia, for instance, the president was reluctant to expel so many of Mr. Putin’s spies as punishment for the poisoning of a former Russian spy in Britain. He complained for weeks about senior staff members letting him get boxed into further confrontation with Russia, and he expressed frustration that the United States continued to impose sanctions on the country for its malign behavior. But his national security team knew better — such actions had to be taken, to hold Moscow accountable.
This isn’t the work of the so-called deep state. It’s the work of the steady state.
Not even worth a comment - not clever.
Given the instability many witnessed, there were early whispers within the cabinet of invoking the 25th Amendment, which would start a complex process for removing the president. But no one wanted to precipitate a constitutional crisis. So we will do what we can to steer the administration in the right direction until — one way or another — it’s over.
The bigger concern is not what Mr. Trump has done to the presidency but rather what we as a nation have allowed him to do to us. We have sunk low with him and allowed our discourse to be stripped of civility.
Hello - the republican party - of which the Op Ed writer is a member - the party whose single purpose was to block Obama on everything, to cram right wing ideology down the country's throats - the damage is owned by many.
Senator John McCain put it best in his farewell letter. All Americans should heed his words and break free of the tribalism trap, with the high aim of uniting through our shared values and love of this great nation.
Look in the mirror. Look at the endless hate rallies. This is, once again, hypocritical and laughable
We may no longer have Senator McCain. But we will always have his example — a lodestar for restoring honor to public life and our national dialogue. Mr. Trump may fear such honorable men, but we should revere them.
Honorable men like Obama? Honorable men only? Hillary Clinton, the rightful winner of the election, is sure damn honorable. I call bullshit
There is a quiet resistance within the administration of people choosing to put country first. But the real difference will be made by everyday citizens rising above politics, reaching across the aisle and resolving to shed the labels in favor of a single one: Americans.
Why such a quiet resistance? Why the hell are people so afraid of a barely functioning, lying buffoon?
So, color me unimpressed. It is a drop of mist, when what we need is a torrential downpour.
= new reply since forum marked as read
But now they're doing their best to hold it all together, for us, for the nation...
The Republican party is a dead rotten fish poisoned with mercury. Not even good as fertilizer.
