"... doesn't listen to those with expertise, doesn't understand the constitutional limits on his office, is increasingly alone and paranoid. Are these things true? What else is true?... Why do those who have worked with Mr. Trump so rarely if ever speak in any depth, in public, of their experience?... Defense Secretary Jim Mattis said a great deal in his resignation letter... But one letter isn't enough. The Trump supporters I know are motivated by patriotism, not spleen, bigotry or bitterness. They are so loyal to their man in part because they see all the forces arrayed against him, especially in the media. They believe, legitimately, that he gets only grudging credit for his accomplishments. And they have told themselves a story about the brave if unlikely outsider who sacrificed his own comfort to upend a corrupt system and protect the interests of the common man.... They won't believe someone like Omarosa... They won't believe the words of 'Anonymous,' author of the September New York Times op-ed that became a sensation.... They will believe only the testimony of serious people who are obviously patriots.... We need some noble rats. May they come forward, speak softly, and make their motives clear."
"... you are guaranteeing that whoever is going to run against him will lose.... I think the man is an evil genius and he was able to outsmart the smartest person ever to run for president... He figured out how to win by losing the election. How did that happen? Historians are going to deal with this for years to come."
Says Michael Moore (who predicted in 2016 that Trump would win). Moore also said he thinks Trump is the author of that anonymous NYT op-ed: "Trump wrote it. Trump or one of his minions wrote it.... He's the master distractor. He's the king of the misdirect. If we have learned anything by now, it's that he does things to get people to turn away. Let me give you the line in there that is most identifiable that he wants the public to believe. It's the line that says, 'Don't worry, adults are in the room.' That's the idea, to get us to calm down and look away from what he's really doing."
I worked my way through the weeds over on Facebook (in a thread John started), so read this, including material linked from there.
Whatever you think of the word analysis — H's propensity to say "malign," etc. etc. — the form of his "denial" is the key. I didn't think he would lie, and he didn't. That's why he said: "Anything sent out by me would have carried my name. An early political lesson I learned: never send an anonymous op-ed." The NYT op-ed writer did send it out under his own name. The NYT knows the name. It was just published anonymously.
Show me where he denies writing the piece, and I'll relent.
... I would think that there is no real person behind the famous anonymous op-ed. I'd think it was a concocted composite based on the Woodward book and motivated by the Woodward book. Look how that little thrown together collection of paragraphs is now drawing more attention than the book Woodward labored over, which dominated headlines on Tuesday. Wednesday, this column comes out. What is in the column that couldn't have been extracted from the book and worked up into an op-ed purporting to be from a senior official in the White House?
That's just a conspiracy theory. I couldn't help thinking it, but I don't believe it's true, because I think the NYT has too much of a stake in at least the appearance of journalistic integrity. I do think that the real senior official who wrote the op-ed felt stimulated by the Woodward book, maybe thinks it's a good idea to add momentum to the various stop-Trump efforts, and is perhaps close to resigning and hoping to depart into the open arms of the Trump-hating elite.
Here are the last 3 paragraphs before the final paragraph:
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.
Civility! I never believe it when they say "civility."
Senator John McCain put it best in his farewell letter. All Americans should heed his words and break free of the tribalism trap...
I spent yesterday watching the Kavanaugh hearings, and I can tell you that the Democratic Senators and the shouting protesters they brought into the hearing room blithely do their own incivility whenever it suits their political interests. It's not a special Trump thing. Trump is just more straightforward about speaking his mind or lying to us or whatever's going on with him.
... with the high aim of uniting through our shared values and love of this great nation.
Sorry, I don't need another funeral oration. That sort of thing is okay within a death-ritual context, but in ordinary political discourse it's fusty, gassy blather. And I'm not buying the repackaging of McCain the Dead Man as the Anti-Trump. McCain was the feisty maverick who didn't lean in hard enough to get elected. Trump is the man who got elected President of the United States. That's a fact, no matter how hard it is to swallow.
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.
McCain was a real person. He was not a paragon.
Back then McCain was too crazy to be President, but now that he's dead, he's a symbol of the virtue everyone wants for the other guy: civility.
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....
The erratic behavior would be more concerning if it weren’t for unsung heroes in and around the White House.... 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....
Unsung heroes? This person is singing about his own heroism. We just don't know his/her name, because he/she has got to stay hidden to continue sabotaging the work of the President the deplorables elected.
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