Our Dishonest President

[struggle4progress]

PART I Our Dishonest President
PART II Monday
PART III Tuesday
PART IV Wednesday
By THE TIMES EDITORIAL BOARD
APRIL 2, 2017

... nothing prepared us for the magnitude of this train wreck. Like millions of other Americans, we clung to a slim hope that the new president would turn out to be all noise and bluster, or that the people around him in the White House would act as a check on his worst instincts, or that he would be sobered and transformed by the awesome responsibilities of office.

Instead, seventy-some days in — and with about 1,400 to go before his term is completed — it is increasingly clear that those hopes were misplaced.

... He is a man so unpredictable, so reckless, so petulant, so full of blind self-regard, so untethered to reality that it is impossible to know where his presidency will lead or how much damage he will do to our nation. His obsession with his own fame, wealth and success, his determination to vanquish enemies real and imagined, his craving for adulation — these traits were, of course, at the very heart of his scorched-earth outsider campaign; indeed, some of them helped get him elected. But in a real presidency in which he wields unimaginable power, they are nothing short of disastrous ...

In the days ahead, The Times editorial board will look more closely at the new president, with a special attention to three troubling traits ...

http://www.latimes.com/projects/la-ed-our-dishonest-president/

[Orrex]

1. kick, but with a caveat

I know that I'm not alone when I say that the Trump debacle is pretty much exactly as bad as I suspected it would be, to the point that I tend to call BS on any remorseful Trump voters who now claim that they had no way to know.

He's doing exactly what he promised, in exactly the way that anyone with open eyes should have been able to predict.

[dalton99a]

2. Great write-up

[Permanut]

3. Okay, so who is the "we"

who "clung to a slim hope that the new president would turn out to be all noise and bluster, or that the people around him in the White House would act as a check on his worst instincts, or that he would be sobered and transformed by the awesome responsibilities of office."

I know no of no one who would have subscribed to that "slim hope". The political environment was, and is, extremely polarized; the Trump cult members worship him,and the rest of us have known for oh, thirty years or so, that he is a vile, disgusting narcissistic mysogynistic psychopath. Millions of us KNEW precisely the magnitude of the train wreck that would be a Gropenfuhrer presidency.

Still, kudos to the Times for putting this information in front of their readers; it should be in every paper every day, and on every billboard in the country every day.

[kentuck]

4. And, with that evidence...

Can we say that the Republicans in the House and Senate who excuse his actions are just as incompetent??