[NY TIMES] I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration

So why did you respond to me like im defending a crisis?


Don't waste my time

 

Such an important point and Trump should take notice that it could be Pompeo, Haley, or even Pence. It doesn’t really matter. What matters is it’s clearly coming from someone who is putting out purely political propaganda for the GOP in an effort to Keep voters post Trump.

But it all comes down to winning back Congress. As the writer notes, they’re still there with Trump to get all their goodies for their donor class so it’s worth it to be with Trump while he remains a danger to the Republic. Because we can still get tax cuts for the wealthy, take away healthcare, and pollute the earth.. it’s worth it for now!

That’s the message here at the end of the day. I think the message should be taken by Democrats as well that those other guys in the GOP are not hero’s... they are gutless cowards in government to serve against your interests. There’s very little moral daylight between them and Donald Trump and they deserve to lose their jobs for generations until the party of true conservatism has a house cleaning and returns years later without the grip of the billionaire class driving their agenda.

 

But it's okay to make America look bad and damage her reputation and ideals if it makes liberals bothered. As long as that happens anything is okay.

 

It is not about PERSONAL LIFE, that is such small minded thinking.

it is about the REPUBLIC, and our SOCIETY as a whole - the more it degrades, the worse EVERYONE's life gets.

And as inflation starts, due to Trump's spending and Tariffs, everyone's QOL will drop.

Stop being such a SELFISH PRAT and think of society and our country.

DD

 

Hmm... an editorial from a right-wing newspaper commented upon by a conservative who is the editor of a conservative magazine...

 

Explain.

If you even had a halfway functional brain, you'd know that I don't "like Trump", never have. Then again, I've learned not to expect too much from you.

 

The op-ed confesses something I thought was true all along, something I've characterized before as the institution's immune system. If you order it to do something that is so totally foreign to its culture, it'll resist you. It is a check on power that was not anticipated in the Constitution, but seems very human and inevitable. I agree with you somewhat that this resistance is not completely heroic, but maybe not complete villainy either. Their argument is much like that of Vichy France -- we'll compromise ourselves and cooperate so you don't get some bigger ******* than me in charge instead. I think by averting disaster, they delay the reckoning where we say 'this president isn't good for us.' So, instead of doing catastrophic damage in the short term, we get death by a thousand paper cuts. On the flip side, we might be able to actually recover (scarred) from the paper cuts if there is an end in sight. Some catastrophic disaster might not be reversible at all. As for the things they are complicit in for their donor class -- the tax cuts, hamstringing Obamacare, and the environmental policy -- well, they are still Republicans. I think that's just politics. They'd have done much the same if Kasich was president. That's a really different thing from making massive foreign policy blunders, for example.

 

lol I wouldnt count this as "dirty secrets". I consider this an annoying fly buzzing in my ear compared to the **** I think the government has really done

 

I think internal confirmation that elected leadership serves their own interests instead of the people is more than a fly buzzing in your our ears. We all "know" they do it but know they've said they do it. Confirmation that a "deep state" exists or at the very least is possible is also a big deal. Lastly, confirming that the POTUS is a figure head with very little actual power despite their tremendous influence is a big deal. Again things we all knew but it's great to see them confirmed from within.

 

Well said! I can't agree more! When you cut regulations on big pharma, chemical companies, reduce the EPA's ability to protect, well, the environment, reduce taxes at the expense of increasing the deficit even more, unable to work with our allies on global issues, trade embargo, etc etc.....these aren't things that's going to be felt by any of us in the SHORT TERM. Give it 2, 3, 5, and 10 years and we'll start to see the "Trump effect". Right now there are people in Washington that's trying to prevent the damage from being irrevocable. These are the people you read about in the NYT and Woodward's upcoming book. Rather than ADVANCING this nation, people are working hard to prevent this nation from total collapse because a madman can't control his temperament and sanity. THAT IS WHAT'S AT STAKE!

 

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/a...lready_in_a_constitutional_crisis_138013.html

This Week Confirms We're Already in a Constitutional Crisis
Eugene Robinson
September 07, 2018

WASHINGTON -- Journalist Bob Woodward's new book and an op-ed by an anonymous administration official portray President Trump as dangerously capricious and amoral, exhibiting textbook symptoms of narcissistic personality disorder and behaving in ways that suggest, to some, early signs of age-related dementia.

But you knew that.

We've all known about Trump from the beginning. We've known that he was entirely unfit to hold any public office, much less wield the awesome powers of the presidency, regardless of what political views he might have. Trump demonstrates this fact literally every single day.

Wednesday afternoon, The New York Times published an extraordinary essay headlined, "I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration." In it, an unnamed "senior official" claimed to be "working diligently from within," in concert with "many" colleagues, "to frustrate parts of [Trump's] agenda and his worst inclinations." The author went on to describe chaos, dysfunction and a president who changes his mind "from one minute to the next."

Even more alarming, however, was the response from retiring Sen. Bob Corker of Tennessee, one of the few Republican officials who ever dare to criticize Trump, even mildly: "This is what all of us have understood to be the situation from day one."

Trump's enablers in Congress have all been lying to us. They pretend there is a normal president in the White House instead of, let's be honest, a maniac. They know the risk the nation is running. They have the power to alleviate that risk but they do nothing, instead counting on "mature adults" in the administration to keep Trump from plunging the nation off some cliff.

According to Woodward's book "Fear," Trump was going to pull the United States out of a trade agreement with South Korea, but former economic adviser Gary Cohn, who saw the move as unthinkable, simply swiped the order from Trump's desk before he could sign it. At another point, the book reports, Trump phoned Defense Secretary Jim Mattis and commanded him to assassinate Syrian dictator Bashar Assad. According to Woodward, Mattis played along, hung up the phone, and told an aide, "We're not going to do any of that."

It feels as if we have entered a new phase of the Trump saga. As with all the prior phases, it's impossible to predict with confidence what will happen. But the combination of the Woodward book and the insider's op-ed feels like an inflection point.

We learned about the insanity inside the West Wing months ago from Michael Wolff's "Fire and Fury," but he got enough little things wrong to cast doubt on the big things he reported. We read it all again in Omarosa's "Unhinged," but she was a professional minor celebrity who'd had only glowing things to say about Trump until she got fired. Woodward, to say the least, is different.

Beginning with Watergate and Deep Throat, Woodward has set the gold standard for Washington-based investigative reporting. He doesn't just get the goods; he keeps meticulous records, including recordings of many of his interviews. You will note that the denials coming from the Trump administration are actually carefully worded non-denials that skirt, rather than confront, the specifics of what Woodward wrote.

His account supports what we've been told all along by award-winning White House correspondents from The Washington Post, the Times and other media organizations.

As for the anonymous "senior official" who penned the op-ed in the Times, I'm not inclined to join the chorus of commentators who say he or she is being cowardly and instead should have gone public, resigned in front of television cameras, marched up to Congress and demanded to testify and ... and then what? Exactly what would such a performance achieve?

Does anyone believe the Republican leadership in the House and Senate would actually do anything? As Corker said, Trump's unfitness has been obvious from the beginning. Republican officials have made the conscious decision to see, hear and speak no evil. We're probably better off with the "senior official" still in place, saving us from Trump's destructive whims.

The whistleblower wrote that "there were early whispers within the Cabinet of invoking the 25th Amendment" by which Trump could be removed, but "no one wanted to precipitate a constitutional crisis."

After this week, however, it's clear that we're already in a constitutional crisis of frightening proportions. The Cabinet will not act. Congress, under GOP control, will not act. The internal "resistance" can only do so much.

Voters are the last line of defense. You must save the day.

(c) 2018, Washington Post Writers Group
​

 

You spend all your time defending Trump and never devote time into being critical of Trump. Someone who is actually indifferent towards trump would be critical of him half the time and defend him the other half. Someone who doesn't like Trump would criticize him more than half the time. You on the other hand are so slanted in terms of defending things Trump does and never criticizing anything that he does. \

Keep telling yourself that you don't like Trump. Your actions say otherwise.

 

It only seems that way to the Trump Derangement Syndrome crowd....If I was speaking to the Trump lover crowd they'd accuse me of being highly critical of him. If you guys would stop being so ridiculous all the time then the conversation would go much differently.

For example, I don't like the Yankees, but the Yankees aren't literally Hitler, if I was speaking to a crowd of simpletons that kept going on about how the Yankees are Nazis or whatever, I'd come across as a Yankee fan by calling them feeble minded idiots. It wouldn't actually mean I was a Yankee fan.

I think the first step is you seeking professional help for your condition. Do that and we'll talk once you start to get better.

 

Okay, what's one thing you have said that the trump lover crowd would take as being highly critical of him.

 

Nothing to explain. Just read your earlier post.

You are simply willingly to put everything else at risk for your selfish 'conservative' and right wing agenda.

 

Are you serious? You know that I was an original "Never Trump" guy right? I'm fully on board with him being the biggest joke of a president this country has had in modern history, I went on and on about how I had wished Obama was going to be the bottom of the barrel but then we were forced to pick between Hillary and Trump ensuring that we'd have the most disgraceful president ever. I've talked about how r****ded his rhetoric is, how it's often counter productive. I've talked about how he doesn't really have any ideological beliefs of his own, he just goes along with the program with whatever argument is most convincing to him at the time.

Honestly I could go on and on, it's not that I'm for Trump by any means, it's that I don't have a Trump related mental condition like many of our friends on the left seem to these days. When I'm not discussing things with an unhinged leftist bubble, the conversation goes very differently.

 

I don't see anything being "at risk". Is Trump just about the last person I'd want as president? Yes, but he's the president and so far things haven't really been bad. The economy has continued to improve under Trump, the US has made strides overseas to repair the damage of the last president's weakness.....I mean really the main complaint I'd have thus far would be about irresponsible spending, but if you look at the current spending next to the spending the last time Democrats controlled everything, it almost looks responsible by comparison.

Dealing with Trump is sub-optimal, but when you have both major parties go full r****d by nominating Trump and Hillary, you were always going to have a bad situation. Might as well make the best of it.

 

Whoever did this either knew the resultant Trump administration snipe hunt and paranoia would happen or they are a fool.

In either case, my judgement of them mirrors that of Trump. Either a clown and fool or someone with bad intentions playing at being a duplicitous and manipulative "eminence grise".

In either case I trust them and their motives and/or competence about as much as I trust Trump and the same from him.

Nobody actually capable of and willing to do what the author claims would have penned the op ed.

The entire edifice of the Trump administration is rotten and termite ridden. The whole thing needs to be torn down.

 

Considering the letter being discussed here and the Woodward's book excerpts (And Fury book before him) that delineate the way current president operates, I'm inclined to believe that we are doing fine in-spite of him (and possibly thanks to the anonymous cabal of "adults" inside his cabinet.)

He wanted to assassinate Bashar Assad. Do you know that one of the world wars started with an assassination?

Last time I checked we didn't have a legit Trump approved military strategy for Afghanistan.

The Russians hated Obama and love Trump. Our soft power is next to nill these days since we alienated our allies and provide so much propaganda PR for ideologically opposing states.

What do you think Trump would have done if he was in Obama's shoes when Putin took over Crimea? Serious question.

Trump cowers in front of Putin in person (see Helsinki infamous summit).

He sent a neophyte to solve the middle east crisis for god's sake!

I'm not going to go into why you think Hillary Clinton is somehow worse than the current guy in office. Or your utopian hope to get rid of plutocracy & ingrained bureaucracy by electing a rich opportunist with no principles/ideals. Seems like he is putting another one of the deep state representatives onto the SCOTUS at the moment. POTUS is just a tool helping one tribe over another in hopes to not be indicted/impeached.

I think you are a part of a tribe basically to say that we are not at heightened risk of an implosion of some sort. Trump is hated so thoroughly because his only appeal is that of anarchistic beginning. He doesn't offer solutions. His instability instills no trust and thus he has no friends. He fans fears on all sides. And then people start getting emotional (what you call a syndrome or whatever.)

I'm scared. And I'm not a democrat. I voted for McCain.