re: #527 KGxvi

Honestly, Trump should find out who wrote the op-ed. He shouldn’t use the DOJ to do it, it should be an internal White House investigation. But as the duly elected president (and as much as we want to bemoan the facts, he won based on the rules in place at the time), he’s entitled to have staff working to carry out his policy preferences. If they can’t do that, then they should resign and explain publicly why the resigned. This isn’t a red state senator writing an op-ed criticizing his preferred policies, this is a member of his staff basically saying “people in the building are working to undermine the president’s policies.” That is not how the presidency should work, and if any official from any past administration had done this, they’d be rode out of town on a rail.

Basically, this is one of those spots where he’s right, but for the wrong reasons.

Exactly. However it’s also a symptom of the dysfunctional environment he’s created and incubated, and the outwardly sycophantic personality traits he values and has promoted in his staff. Eventually any leader who refuses to hear the truth while surrounding himself with mendacious, obsequious fuckwits is going to find themselves metaphorically stabbed in the back like this. So while it’s true that a President is totally entitled to better service from his people in the abstract, it’s also true that he bears a massive chunk of the responsibility for being in this particular predicament in the first place.

This is why I find the whole thing both hilarious and truly terrifying at the same time. Whoever did this is an absolutely venomous little shit, but it happened because Trump chose to surround himself with venomous little shits.