Liberal anti-Trump columnist Damon Linker alights upon what is, as far as I’m concerned, the most egregious and infuriating part of the anonymous White House staffer’s New York Times op-ed:
The message telegraphed in these self-aggrandizing statements isn’t that Trump is a fundamental threat to the well being of the United States and the world and so must be removed from office. The message, instead, is: “Some of the president’s instincts are good — tax cuts, deregulation, judges. In those areas, we’ll work with him to get as much done as we can, and we already have, to great effect. As for the rest, we can handle it. We’ve got this. We won’t let the bad stuff happen.”
But just what is the bad stuff? The policies that diverge from the Republican Party line since Reagan. That’s the real meaning of the author’s lament about the president’s “amorality.” The point isn’t primarily that Trump is fundamentally corrupt or unmoored from ordinary moral considerations, although both are obvious to any casual observer. The point is that he’s a bad Republican. As the author writes in what is meant to be the most damning indictment of all: “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.”
Donald Trump is an ideological heretic. He simply must be stopped.
Hey, anonymous jackass: Ideological heresy is precisely why many of us voted for him.