Robert Gates Criticizes Trump, So Trump Calls Him a ‘Total Disaster’

Last updated on July 17th, 2023 at 09:12 pm

Former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates took to the Wall Street Journal to pen an op-ed in which he criticized both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, but his harshest words were for Trump, of whom he said,

“When it comes to credibility problems, though, Donald Trump is in a league of his own.”

We have seen how Republicans want to set a lower bar for Donald Trump, but according to Gates, “The world we confront is too perilous and too complex to have as president a man who believes he, and he alone, has all the answers and has no need to listen to anyone.” He pointed out that,

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“A thin-skinned, temperamental, shoot-from-the-hip and lip, uninformed commander in chief is too great a risk for America.”

Trump’s response? To be that thin-skinned leader Gates had just criticized. Trump tweeted in response:

Trump is more than willing to criticize people he doesn’t know and has never met, but woe unto any who dare criticize Trump, even if they have met him. He had similar words for New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd, tweeting “Crazy Maureen Dowd, the wacky columnist for the failing @nytimes, pretends she knows me well–wrong!”

Gates is right: Trump is “willfully ignorant about the rest of the world,” writing,

“At least on national security, I believe Mr. Trump is beyond repair. He is stubbornly uninformed about the world and how to lead our country and government, and temperamentally unsuited to lead our men and women in uniform. He is unqualified and unfit to be commander in chief.”

Trump’s ignorance is matched only by his dishonesty, of course, inventing outright encounters in a black church at which reporters were present, inventing out of whole cloth a tale about Donald Trump the hero who single-handedly ended the curse of bitherism when he was its foremost proponent. The list is too long at this point to list in its entirety.

The only ‘total disaster’ here is Donald Trump himself. And he makes that fact more obvious every day.

Hrafnkell Haraldsson

Hrafnkell Haraldsson, a social liberal with leanings toward centrist politics has degrees in history and philosophy. His interests include, besides history and philosophy, human rights issues, freedom of choice, religion, and the precarious dichotomy of freedom of speech and intolerance. He brings a slightly different perspective to his writing, being that he is neither a follower of an Abrahamic faith nor an atheist but a polytheist, a modern-day Heathen who follows the customs and traditions of his Norse ancestors. He maintains his own blog, A Heathen’s Day, which deals with Heathen and Pagan matters, and Mos Maiorum Foundation www.mosmaiorum.org, dedicated to ethnic religion. He has also contributed to NewsJunkiePost, GodsOwnParty and Pagan+Politics.