Aides know Trump is badly flawed
It’s normal for members of a president’s inner circle to stick up for the man who was their boss. Most became great admirers.
Typical is Harry Hopkins, who described his boss, Franklin Roosevelt, this way: “When great issues were at stake Roosevelt never faltered.”
And then there’s Donald Trump. For certain, there are men and women who served Trump in the White House who remain loyal and enthusiastic supporters.
Other former aides and associates, however, are openly disdainful of the 45th president – the would-be president starting in January 2025.
Former Vice President Mike Pence told Margaret Brennan of CBS’s Face the Nation last Sunday: “I won’t be endorsing Donald Trump this year… The president and I have profound differences…. The fact that the president continues to insist that I had the right to overturn the [2020] election is a fundamental difference….
“Donald Trump … is walking away from keeping faith with the Constitution,” Pence said. “I see him departing from the mainstream Republican agenda that has defined the Republican party over the last 40 years.”
Here is what former attorney general William Barr has said about his one-time chief:
“He is a consummate narcissist. And he constantly engages in reckless conduct….. He’s a very petty individual who will always put his interests ahead of his country’s…. Our country can’t … be a therapy session for a troubled man like this.”
Barr has said, “It’s all about the assertion of ego [with Trump], and I think he will be self-indulgent in a new administration … things would start to move toward chaos.”
According to former national security advisor John Bolton, Trump “doesn’t understand the job, particularly in the national security space…. If Trump is elected [in 2024] there will be celebration in the Kremlin … because [Russian president] Putin thinks he’s an easy target.”
John Kelly, one of several Trump chiefs of staff in the White House, has criticized Trump for “not knowing what America stands for and has no idea what America is all about.”
According to Kelly, an ex-Marine general, Trump “admires autocrats and murderous dictators.”
Gen. Mark Milley, commenting on his service during the Trump years as chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, said, “We don’t take an oath to a king or queen, or tyrant or dictator, and we don’t take an oath to a wanna-be dictator.”
Another former Marine general, Jim Mattis, who was Trump’s first Pentagon chief, has said, “Donald Trump is the first president in my lifetime who does not try to unite the American people. Instead, he tries to divide us.”
Addressing Trump’s performance during the Covid pandemic, Mick Mulvaney, a Trump White House chief of staff, insists that Trump “failed as president” when he needed to step up to the plate. “That was a time when we needed the president to be the president, and he wasn’t.”
From high to low, former Trump staffers are alarmed by the prospect of a second Trump presidency. Sarah Matthews, a deputy White House press secretary for Trump, said, “We don’t need to speculate what a second term would be like because we already saw it play out.”
Alyssa Farah Griffin, the Trump White House communications director, warns, “Donald Trump in office could spell … the last election in our lifetime…. I don’t say that lightly.”
And this from Uniontown’s Mark Esper, a Trump secretary of defense, “I … regard him as a threat to democracy, democracy as we know it, our institutions, our political culture, all those things that make America great.”
Esper fears what Trump might do in a second administration based on what he did during his first four years in office.
“He wanted to deploy active-duty troops on the streets of Washington, D.C., and suggested actually that we shoot Americans in the street. That’s kind of more of what you’ll see.”
John Bolton said, “I think in private, honest conversations, almost all of Trump’s cabinet members would agree Trump is not fit to be president.”
Richard Robbins lives in Uniontown. He can be reached at dick.l.robbins@gmail.com.