Almost 17 months since Donald Trump’s return to the White House, conservative Washington Post columnist George Will offers a blistering “autopsy” on his second presidency. And he is downright scathing, attacking a broad range of Trump policies in his June 19 column.
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“Deferring gratification can be virtuous, but now is the time for an autopsy of Donald Trump’s presidency,” the 84-year-old Will argues. “The nation has experienced more than a few failing presidencies, but this flailing presidency is as uniquely unsightly as it is terminal. Trump’s plummet will intensify what is causing it, his self-absorption and self-indulgence. Recently, he has waged war carelessly, pursued a fixation incontinently, and named a building contemptibly.”
Trump is drawing a great deal of criticism from Never Trump conservatives — from MS NOW’s Joe Scarborough to former GOP strategist Steve Schmidt to The Bulwark’s Bill Kristol — for his ceasefire deal with Iran, which they believe left the Iranian Islamist regime in a stronger position than they were in before the war. And Will, himself very much a Never Trumper, is equally critical.
“He unleashed America’s military competence, in conjunction with Israel’s, for a defensible purpose: preventing a genocidal and theologically demented regime from completing the Holocaust (it has called Israel ‘a one-bomb country’) and punishing God’s foremost enemy, America,” Will explains. “But this worthy U.S. goal became a casualty of presidential frivolousness. Trump launched this war eight months after declaring that last summer’s U.S. and Israeli bombing ‘obliterated’ Iran’s nuclear weapon program. The general who led the Defense Department’s intelligence agency was fired after its report concluded otherwise.”
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Will also lambasts Trump for continuing to claim that election fraud is rampant in the United States.
“A figment of Trump’s imagination, the theft of the 2020 election, has produced a congressional train wreck,” the Never Trump conservative laments. “He is willing to sacrifice national security in order to get a voting-security law that is intended to prevent a repeat of what did not happen in 2020. A vital anti-terrorism law expired while he was toying with nominating (he retreated) another know-nothing — Bill Pulte, a real-estate mogul — as director of national intelligence.”
Will continues, “The neutering of Trump might continue with the Senate not confirming Todd Blanche as attorney general. National Review, conservatism’s flagship publication, says, ‘Blanche has been everything President Trump wants in an attorney general, and that’s the problem.’ As acting attorney general, he has been ‘an instrument of Trump’s unworthy and abusive campaign to investigate and prosecute his political opponents.”
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