Never in the modern history of the presidency has a member of an administration came out in public a declared a president, unstable, unfit, and loaded with dangerous impulses to the country, but that is what happened today to Trump.
In a New York Times op-ed, a senior Trump administration official wrote:
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.
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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.
We did not allow this to happen. Republicans own Trump
The op-ed is stunning for what it confirms, but there is one point that must be made. America did not allow this to happen. Hillary Clinton won the popular vote for a reason. The majority of voters understood who Trump was and the danger that he posed.
It was the Republican Party that did this to America, and they can’t pass off their weakness on the rest of the country. It was the Republican Party that rolled over for Trump during the 2016 Republican presidential primary. It was Republican congressional leaders who refused to work with Obama to combat the Russian election attack, and it is Republicans who have shown the country nothing but cowardice and weakness in their failure to stand up to Trump after he took office.
Republicans made this mess, and it will be up to the voters and Democrats to save the country and clean it up.
There is a rebellion against Trump from within his own administration
Bob Woodward’s book wasn’t the end, but the beginning of a civil war inside the Trump administration. There are elements inside the White House that are trying to keep Trump from wrecking everything. Woodward’s book launched Trump on a crazed witch hunt within his own White House. This op-ed piece should drive the president over the edge. Members of his administration aren’t out to get him. They are trying to save the country from ruin at the unstable hand of Donald Trump.
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Jason is the managing editor. He is also a White House Press Pool and a Congressional correspondent for PoliticusUSA. Jason has a Bachelor’s Degree in Political Science. His graduate work focused on public policy, with a specialization in social reform movements.
Awards and Professional Memberships
Member of the Society of Professional Journalists and The American Political Science Association
