A weak and paranoid president leads rapidly to a weak and paranoid government

[malaise]

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/apr/06/donald-trump-weak-paranoid-president-government
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Last modified on Thursday 6 April 2017 22.22 BST

In Donald Trump’s Washington, the first casualty is truth. His dishonesty seeps across the city until it poisons what’s left of anyone’s reputation. Congressional leaders, administration officials, ethics lawyers, America’s moral leadership: it has taken less than three months to undermine them all.

Take the case of the hapless Andrew Bowen, a grasping Republican foreign policy blowhard who should be entering a bumper job market. Bowen has a couple of thinktank gigs and a column at the august Arab News, where he committed the cardinal sin of praising Hillary Clinton.

There he also took a clear-eyed view of one Donald Trump, which is where his embarrassment begins. Bowen called the 45th president “boorish and predatory” and accused him of “whipping xenophobia and anti-Muslim sentiments”. All of which is beyond reasonable doubt to any jury of 12 good men, and true.

Not so much in Trumpworld, where Bowen is now hoping to get a job in an administration that values loyalty tests above competence, public service, patriotism or the functioning of government. So Bowen demanded that the editors of Arab News delete all evidence of his previous good judgment, because – as those editors put it in a public note – “this is needed for him ‘to be cleared’ for what he claims to be a possible job with the new Donald Trump administration’s State Department”.