Even Conservatives wonder about Trump’s Actions in Helsinki
A reckless, clueless vaudevillian … a sad, embarrassing wreck of a man … crazy … boorish and bigoted, enemy of the people … treasonous.
Each of these epithets was applied this past week to Donald Trump following the president’s profoundly un-presidential performance standing alongside Vladimir Putin in Helsinki — and his later, laughable apology at the White House, his switching “would” for “wouldn’t”.
The first phrase — reckless, clueless vaudevillian — comes from the pen of conservative columnist Kathleen Parker; the second was the work of the esteemed George Will, whose bow ties were once synonymous with conservative thought; the “crazy” comment is attributable to the Washington Post’s always surprising and insighful Richard Cohen.
“Boorish and bigoted, enemies of the people” flew off the word processor or yellow legal pad (depending on preference) of Max Boot, a military historian and national security columnist who lines up on the Right side of the political playing field.
Treasonous was owned by Thomas Friedman of the New York Times, a thoughtful, innovative iconoclast whose political allegiance is difficult, even impossible, to discern. Friedman is too practical to be a partisan, too free-wheeling to be an ideologue, too smart to be hemmed in intellectually.
The point is that disgust with Donald Trump now reaches across the spectrum of serious thought-leaders in the country; one need not dwell in the precincts of liberalism to find columnist or others who think the president of the United States is a complete and utter disaster as well as a clear and present danger.
Only in the mind of Trump himself is former CIA chief John Brennan a Democratic Party spear carrier. An intelligence community professional, Brennan tweeted this last week:
“Donald Trump’s press conference performance in Helsinki rises to & exceeds the threshold of ‘high crimes & misdemeanors.’ It was nothing short of treasonous. Not only were Trump’s comments imbecilic, he is wholly in the pocket of Putin.”
And this: “Why did Trump meet 1 on 1 with Putin? What might he be hiding from Bolton, Pompeo, Kelly, & the American public? How will Putin use whatever Trump could be hiding to advantage Russia & hurt America? Trump’s total lack of credibility renders spurious whatever explanation he gives.”
Michael Hayden got into the act. A retired Air Force general (and incidentally, a Pittsburgh native) Hayden served as CIA director under George W. Bush. He calls himself “a conservative internationalist.”
Hayden said this to an interviewer last week about Trump and the president’s taking Putin’s and Russia’s side against American interests:
“… The longer this goes on the less inclined I am to attribute (it) to ignorance or naiveté or lack of knowledge because it’s so consistent, so pervasive and today so stark, and, frankly, so serious in its consequence…. I’ve got no evidence, but it’s harder and harder to pass this off as ignorance or some sort of personality quirk.”
Hayden told John Ziegler of the Mediaite news and opinion site, after he was asked if he thought Trump had been “compromised” by the Russians:
“I wouldn’t immediately go to compromised, but there might be something in the history, maybe even something … in the president’s own personality that makes him unable to see what is obvious to everyone else.”
Hayden said that as “a fact witness … I don’t want to jump to conclusions. If I ever get to that conclusion (that Trump is a Russian stooge) … I want most Americans to believe that I got there reluctantly, not enthusiastically, but I got there painfully and not reflexively. I’m going to be slow to get to that place.”
Now, many of Trump’s ardent supporters will attribute these opinions to the whining machinations and anti-Americanism of, first, the liberal-run mainstream media (MSM) and more telling to the Deep State, of which the MSM is an active and eager collaborator.
Many will consult their inner Trump.
Perhaps a plurality will fall back on their life experiences, on their political upbringing.
Michael Hayden, for one, is troubled — “frightened”, really — by Americans who see and hear but are not alarmed by the direction Trump is taking the country.
“I think the lasting harm to us as a people, to our political culture may not be just Donald Trump,” Hayden said. The greater worry, he insisted, are the millions of people “who either think this is OK, or are willing to let it pass.”
The former general and professed conservative said it comes down to “the eclipse of truth and the movement into a post-truth world.”
For years, even decades, many Americans, even Americans who consider themselves hard-headed, have moved in a kind of political fog. The reckoning may be at hand.
Richard Robbins lives in Uniontown and is the author of two books — Grand Salute: Stories of the World War II Generation and Our People. He can be reached at dick.l.robbins@gmail.com.