Storm brewing around Trump after scathing op-ed
Questions of fitness, internal dissent stack up
WASHINGTON – A storm is gathering.
The voices raising alarms about President Donald Trump’s temperament, steadiness and attitude toward the competing power centers of a democracy aren’t new; they date to his days as Candidate Trump. But the new authors of those arguments are making those concerns louder and more credible.
The consequences ahead aren’t set, at least not yet. But the stakes are pretty clear, and they could include Trump’s presidency. Consider the past week. Last Saturday, two former presidents, Democrat Barack Obama and Republican George W. Bush, spoke at Arizona Sen. John McCain’s memorial service with words that were hard to interpret as anything but castigation for the current occupant of the White House, though Trump’s name was never mentioned.
McCain, who was perhaps Trump’s most persistent critic within the GOP, “could not abide bigots and swaggering despots,” Bush declared. Then Obama spoke. “So much of our politics, our public life, our public discourse, can seem small and mean and petty, trafficking in bombast and insult, in phony controversies and manufactured outrage,” he said. “It is politics that pretends to be brave, but in fact is born of fear.”
On Tuesday, details from an explosive new book by journalist Bob Woodward, published in The Washington Post, described a “nervous breakdown” in the Trump administration as top aides maneuvered to prevent the president from making disastrous and impulsive missteps.
And Wednesday, there was jawdropping confirmation of Woodward’s point when an anonymous “senior administration official” wrote an op-ed in The New York Times, describing himself or herself as a member of the internal resistance. “Many of the senior officials in his own administration are working diligently from within to frustrate parts of his agenda and his worst inclinations,” the essay read.
At least two potential constitutional crises could follow – from one side, over questions about the president’s fitness for office, and from the other, over the notion of what Woodward calls “an administrative coup d’etat.”
This uproar doesn’t necessarily mean that congressional Republicans are about to speak out against him. Trump retains solid support among Republican voters.
He was characteristically defiant Thursday morning. “The Deep State and the Left, and their vehicle, the Fake News Media, are going Crazy – & they don’t know what to do,” he wrote, then ticked off what he says are his greatest achievements: “The Economy is booming like never before, Jobs are at Historic Highs, soon TWO Supreme Court Justices & maybe Declassification to find Additional Corruption. Wow!”
The most piercing assault Trump faces isn’t ideological, however. This debate is more personal, centering on Trump’s judgment and character.
The spectacle of a president’s own top aides describing a toxic workplace and an erratic boss is stunning. So is the need Vice President Mike Pence apparently felt to deny he wrote the op-ed.
The furor sets the stage for whenever special counsel Robert Mueller delivers his report on whether the president’s campaign colluded with Russian meddling in the 2016 election and whether the president tried to obstruct the investigation.
It increases Mueller’s credibility. It erodes Trump’s. And it fuels the storm.