Where is backbone on Team Trump?

There is an extremely important takeaway from “Fit For Office,” (The New York Times Sunday Review, Oct. 18). However, this take-away requires thoughtful reflection about the individuals quoted. They were all insiders on the President’s “Team,” with the exception of Mary L.Trump, a niece. She is an insider, a niece and highly qualified, as a clinical psychologist, to professionally evaluate her uncle.

The rest of the men and women quoted confirm what has been heard for close to four years about the president’s fitness to hold the most powerful position in the world. In scathing and unequivocal terms, they all deemed him “unfit.” Nothing really new in their words. I can easily say “Three cheers for the New York Times” in its relentless investigations of the “man who would be king.”

However, I must ask where is their integrity, backbone, principles, or love of country, given the facts and their own opinions? These insiders are similar to the men Thomas Paine described in The American Crisis (1776): “These are the times that try men’s souls: the summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of his country…” Paine, also the author of Common Sense (17751776), would certainly speak such immortal words most vehemently to these armchair critics. They paid a price for not being on board with this incompetent. The price was not a “pound of flesh.” Celebrity status and book tours were, by and large, their punishment.

Why did they not work together at some point to defy this paper mache president? Did they skip reading Mary Trump’s “Too Much and Never Enough?” Words are revelatory, but often effective. Why didn’t they, as a group, challenge the chief executive as Joseph Welch did to Senator Joseph McCarthy? One might ask all of them what Welch asked of McCarthy: “At long last, have you left no sense of decency?” (ArmyMcCarthy hearings, 1954) Welch’s words helped precipitate McCarthy’s downfall.

If this president’s insiders-now-outsiders had spoken with such force, they would have shown Welch’s backbone and character. Certainly far short of a coup, this group, in my eyes, would have had the moral power to begin the only avalanche that would bring an end to the “reign” of this most impotent, insecure person to have ever sat at the president’s desk in the Oval Office.