Liz laments past `moral leaders,' unlike Trump
Outside Kenmore Square yesterday, in the gleaming lobby of a new Boston University building, I watched Sen. Elizabeth Warren go into mind-numbing detail on a variety of public health issues like the opioid crisis and affordable health care.
For almost an hour, with no notes, she held an audience of students, teachers and health care professionals in rapt silence.
I tried to imagine Scott Brown, the guy Warren ejected from Ted Kennedy’s seat, ever delivering such an enlightened, policy-laden talk. I couldn’t. What I could imagine was Scotty giving the thumbs-up to Donald Trump’s endorsement of Roy Moore, the alleged sexual predator seeking the U.S. Senate seat in Alabama. That was easy to picture.
Before she left BU yesterday to catch a flight back to Washington, I asked Warren for her thoughts on Trump endorsing the senate campaign of a guy who was once banned from an Alabama mall for shadowing young female clerks.
“There was a time,” Warren told me, “when the president of the United States was the moral leader for our nation. Donald Trump has turned this country in exactly the opposite direction. And it’s heartbreaking.”
The senator was being too kind. Actually, it was disgusting, but hardly unexpected. After several weeks of ducking questions and waving off reporters, what else was President Trump going to say?
Was the man who laughed and bragged to Billy Bush about grabbing young starlets by their genitals ever going to shun Roy Moore and his decrepit libido? Hardly.
Was the ringmaster of a cheesy reality show, the tycoon one step ahead of bankruptcy, ever going to turn thumbs-down on a red meat, gun-waving, skirt-chasing judge? No way.
As far as Trump and too many spineless Republicans are concerned, Roy Moore could be Jack The Ripper, or the Boston Strangler, as long as he was for “building a wall,” or “strong on crime” and “the military,” whatever the hell that means.
Last week in the Oval Office, Trump managed to degrade the presidency as he insulted a group of genuine World War II heroes. In a moment designed to honor the service and sacrifice of Navajo code talkers in places like Iwo Jima, he couldn’t resist sliming the woman who gets under his skin — who defeated the Cosmo model The Donald appointed to keep watch over the beaches of New Zealand.
Trump’s Pocahontas crack went over like a lead balloon. But I think he may just be bright enough to know that Liz Warren will soon have the last laugh.