Opinion | I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration
I know this was mentioned in another thread, but I felt this was significant enough to get a separate thread.
Who do you think this anonymous person is? Do you think we will find out? And when?
I know certain people are going to try to normalize this. But this is not normal. We did not see anyone in the Obama administration trying to thwart his agenda, or talk about the 25th amendment. Nor did we see this in the Bush or Clinton administrations. I do not think this has ever happened before.
This will have historical ramifications.
I have no idea who wrote it or whether we'll ever find out who it is. Woodward kept Deep Throat's identity a secret for decades after Watergate.
It's hard to say what any of this means or what the ramifications might be. Until the identity of this person is revealed and the information they offer is verified, this will be more of a curiosity than anything else. Kind of like Carly Simon's "You're So Vain."
In the case of Deep Throat (aka Mark Felt), he was feeding tips to Woodward, who followed up and investigated, which led to the downfall of the Nixon Administration. This editorial seems quite a bit different, more like the rantings of a disgruntled employee.
One line that struck me was this:
"The root of the problem is the president’s amorality. Anyone who works with him knows he is not moored to any discernible first principles that guide his decision making."
I have little doubts about the president's amorality, but I do question the abilities of individuals at that high level of society to be able to properly gauge or judge someone else's morality. I happen to think once someone reaches a certain level of power, wealth, or prestige in this society, their perceptions of morality become skewed, and they're no longer qualified to judge on that basis.
Another point raised:
"Although he was elected as a Republican, the president shows little affinity for ideals long espoused by conservatives: free minds, free markets and free people. At best, he has invoked these ideals in scripted settings. At worst, he has attacked them outright."
This is interesting, since it implies that Trump is not really a Republican, so it would seem that the standard lines of argumentation between conservatives and liberals wouldn't necessarily apply in debates over the current administration. This might also explain why Trump resonated with large segments of the working class, since he was clearly seen as different from other Republicans.
However, I disagree strongly with the author's assertion about the "ideals long espoused by conservatives." While it's true that they've rabidly, obsessively, and zealously argued for free markets, the notion that conservatives favor "free minds" and "free people" has been a sick joke for a long time now.
It's that kind of endless BS coming out of the ruling class that eventually turned off a lot of voters, which is why they started listening to Trump at all.
If the author of this editorial does not understand this, while he/she continues spewing the same canned BS that politicians have been spewing for decades, then he/she indicates that they're more a part of the problem than a part of the solution.
Another point raised:
"The bigger concern is not what Mr. Trump has done to the presidency but rather what we as a nation have allowed him to do to us. We have sunk low with him and allowed our discourse to be stripped of civility."
"We" as a nation have allowed our leaders to do a lot of things to us. We've sunk low many, many, many times, and public discourse was stripped of civility decades ago. The only thing that's really different now is that certain people in certain positions in society who felt untouchable and invulnerable to criticism are now beginning to realize just how uncivil they've allowed things to become.
What's really happened is that a lot of people in insulated ivory towers have been so out of touch for so long that it's only now that they're beginning to realize that there are problems. They've been living in an Orwellian delusion for so long that they just didn't see this coming at all. They didn't anticipate this, and it indicates widespread political myopia on the part of the ruling class. That, in and of itself, is rather disturbing and far more worrisome than a cantankerous president.
The fact that they believe that "we" are sinking low with Trump would indicate that they've been utterly clueless about how low "we" have been all along.
"Senator John McCain put it best in his farewell letter. All Americans should heed his words and break free of the tribalism trap, with the high aim of uniting through our shared values and love of this great nation."
The irony here is that it would be so incredibly simple to aim high and bring about greater unity in this country. The main obstacle has been those at the upper crust of society, the ones who have engineered and created this dog-eat-dog society and an economic system ruled by vultures and sharks. After decades of foreclosures, layoffs, and outsourcing, taking people's livelihoods, imposing a police state, a war on drugs where people are thrown in prison just for possessing a weed - they now want people to make nice?
They claim they want "unity," but they're not willing to pay the price. They're not willing to put their money where their mouth is, and they believe they can continue to thrive on BS. If you live by BS, you die by BS. That's the lesson they should have learned a long time ago. That's the lesson we can still learn now, but after all the rhetoric and endless debates over the "Orange Man," I'm convinced that this quagmire will never really end until it is blown up completely and we have to start over from scratch.
