Rachel Maddow read explosive excerpts from an anonymous Trump official on Thursday night, and they show that the president’s own staff believes he is unfit to be president.
The passages come from a soon-to-be-released book written by the same unknown individual – a senior Trump administration official – who penned a New York Times op-ed more than a year ago.
According to Maddow, the anonymous author has grown even more concerned about Trump’s instability.
Video:
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Rachel Maddow reads explosive excerpts from a soon-to-be-released book by an anonymous Trump administration official. #ctl #p2 #maddow pic.twitter.com/b9dXIhvvx6
— PoliticusUSA (@politicususa) November 8, 2019
The excerpt as read by Maddow:
The Donald J. Trump administration will be remembered as among the most tumultuous in American history. Future historians will record the volatility of the president’s decision making, as well as the internal struggles of a government forced to grapple with it. They will write that his advisers came to find him unfit for the job. He couldn’t focus on governing and he was prone to abuses of power from ill-conceived schemes to punish his political rivals to a propensity for undermining vital American institutions. The president still lacks the guiding principles needed to govern our nation and fails to display the rudimentary qualities of leadership we should expect of any commander in chief. In The Times op-ed, I wrote of a quiet resistance of Trump appointees at the highest levels trying to manage his rash impulses. We wanted the administration to succeed and supported significant components of the president’s agenda, but we were alarmed by his unstable behavior in public and in private. Those who tried to steer him away from self-destructive impulses were not the so-called deep state, I wrote, but the steady state. This idea was assailed by the president. But the notion that his team is working to protect him from himself has since become one of the defining narratives of the Trump administration. Indeed, it was a hallmark takeaway from special counsel Robert Mueller’s report on the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election. The president’s efforts to influence the investigation were mostly unsuccessful, Mueller wrote, but that is largely because the persons surrounding the president declined to carry out orders or recede to his requests.
There are fewer people left to tame Trump
In itself, it’s terrifying that the president of the United States is seen as an unfit man-child by those who work closest to him.
But what’s even worse is that there appear to be fewer folks in the White House who are capable or willing to tame him, or to at least minimize the damage he’s able to do.
As another excerpt from the book read, “President Trump should not be shocked that wary aides and cabinet members saved his presidency. My colleagues have done so many times. He should be worried – we all should be worried – that these reasonable professionals are vanishing.”
A year after the anonymous op-ed was published in The New York Times, Donald Trump has become more unstable and has fewer guardrails. As a result, the United States is in greater danger.
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Sean Colarossi currently resides in Cleveland, Ohio. He earned his Bachelor of Arts degree in Journalism from the University of Massachusetts Amherst and was an organizing fellow for both of President Obama’s presidential campaigns. He also worked with Planned Parenthood as an Affordable Care Act Outreach Organizer in 2014, helping northeast Ohio residents obtain health insurance coverage.
