This was John Brennan, former director of the Central Intelligence Agency, speaking to Trump in response to the firing of Andrew McCabe, a scant 26 hours before McCabe reached his 50th birthday, thus becoming eligible to draw his full pension upon retiring from the FBI. I don’t know whether McCabe was, as Trump had charged, guilty of misconduct, but regardless, by all accounts he had performed admirably for 22 years, and to fire him at such a time displays a level of gratuitous cruelty and mean-spiritedness worthy of the most despicable back-alley bully.
That, after all, is what we now have in the White House: an aging version of a schoolyard thug. How else to explain the name-calling, insults, lies, and childish boasting he pours out daily to contaminate the world we all inhabit? The childish chaos and constant churn of personnel? The fringe figures he puts in crucial positions? John Bolton? Really? The hawk who suggested not long ago that we should attack North Korea before they attack us?
But here’s the larger question: Where are the Republicans? And when will they grow up, confront their own complicity in the creation of a situation which now endangers us all, and take responsibility?
Trump won’t be the only one relegated to the “dustbin of history.” The Republican party will be there with him, I believe.
Republicans, you whose priority is not the good of the nation but the greedy glee of your donors, whose major goal is to keep yourselves in office ... you will be remembered as the party of hard-hearted, self-absorbed sycophants lacking even a semblance of moral clarity. You've clearly conveyed this message: low-income, sick, needy voters be damned; we're here to take care of the guys that fill the campaign coffers.
Trump is the worst kind of dangerous because he’s the worst kind of ignorant. He doesn’t know what he doesn’t know. And I’m beginning to wonder, Republicans, whether the same is true of you.