USA TODAY International Edition
In Washington, an outbreak of lucidity about Trumpism
Sometimes it takes a child to point out that the emperor has no clothes. And sometimes it takes a Republican senator.
Sen. Jeff Flake, R- Ariz., is a conservative with impeccable credentials: a 93% lifetime rating from the American Conservative Union, a 100% rating from National Right to Life and an A from the National Rifle Association. He once served as executive director of the Goldwater Institute think tank in Phoenix. He has faithfully voted to repeal Obamacare.
And he says the Republican Party has been in denial about President Trump.
“Rather than defending the enduring principles that were consonant with everything that we knew and had believed in, we pretended the emperor wasn’t naked,” Flake writes in a new book, Conscience of a Conservative. “Even worse: We checked our critical faculties at the door and pretended that the emperor was making sense.”
It’s true that Flake, who faces a tough re- election bid next year, has never been a big fan of Trump. But the senator’s courageous candor comes amid a welcome, if belated, outbreak of lucidity about Trump’s crude mix of bombastic untruths and ineffectual leadership.
Across the capital, the sound you hear is that of backbones starting to stiffen:
After acting Drug Enforcement Agency chief Chuck Rosenberg heard about Trump’s foolish quip suggesting that law enforcement rough up arrested suspects, he fired off an email urging staff to ignore Trump’s endorsement of police misconduct.
The Pentagon declined to start immediately discriminating against transgender troops based on a presidential tweet to do so.
Republicans in the Senate shrugged off White House demands that Obamacare — despite a host of failed efforts — must be repealed. In fact, a number of GOP lawmakers expressed a willingness to work with Democrats on ways to shore up the Affordable Care Act and warned the White House against sabotaging the law in the meantime.
uA Boy Scouts executive apologized for Trump’s wholly inappropriate remarks before the National Scout Jamboree, and the Scouts refuted Trump’s false assertion that a top Scout leader had called the president to heap praise on the jamboree speech.
Like a 12- step program for reaching sobriety, the nation could finally be entering a necessary period of enlightenment about Trumpism. As Flake writes, “Reckless, outrageous and undignified behavior was excused and countenanced as ‘ telling it like it is,’ when it was actually just reckless, outrageous and undignified.”
This week, a respected new White House chief of staff, former Marine Corps general John Kelly, began attempting to restore order amid the West Wing chaos. Kelly pushed out foulmouthed Communications Director Anthony Scaramucci, assured Attorney General Jeff Sessions of job security, and attempted to restrict the flow of people and information into the Oval Office.
That’s all a good start. In this administration, however, the problems of the staff are secondary to what Flake correctly identifies as the nakedness of the commander in chief.