‘Treason’: Trump Urges Federal Probe Of New York Times Op-Ed
Reprinted with permission from Shareblue.
Trump is not very happy that someone in his White House wrote a sort of mean anonymous editorial about him.
At a rally in Montana Thursday night, Trump said the New York Times’ decision to publish the op-ed from a supposed senior White House official was “virtually, you know, you could call it treason.”
And now he wants to make a federal case out of it.
He told reporters Friday that he is looking at legal action and he wants Attorney General Jeff Sessions to investigate the identity of the anonymous author “because I really believe it is national security.”
Apparently, the plan of press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders to call on Trump supporters to dial up the Times and demand “to know who this gutless loser is” has yet to yield results.
The op-ed accuses Trump of acting “in a manner that is detrimental to the health of our republic.” But Trump’s impulsive, uninformed, unhinged behavior is hardly a classified secret. He puts it on display every time he spends his morning “executive time” on Twitter — or campaigning for his fellow Republicans, where he often veers dangerously off teleprompter.
“The root of the problem is the president’s amorality,” the anonymous author wrote. Again, that’s no secret. The whole country heard Trump brag on tape that he sexually assaults women. His longtime “fixer” Michael Cohen just pleaded guilty to violating campaign finance laws by paying hush money to Trump’s mistresses — at Trump’s direction.
The op-ed also says that some Trump aides “have gone to great lengths to keep bad decisions contained to the West Wing” — but that’s the job of aides to any president. It just so happens that Trump is more inclined to make more bad decisions before lunch than a normal president would consider in a year. Or ever.
The op-ed does not actually go into much detail about what is wrong with Trump. In fact, it praises the administration’s “effective deregulation, historic tax reform, a more robust military and more.”
But that’s not quite enough for Trump, who claims he is the most beloved Republican president of all time, beating even the polling of Abraham Lincoln. Obviously, that’s not true: one, because there was no polling when Lincoln was president, and two, because even the catastrophically bad George W. Bush had higher polling numbers after 9/11.
It’s not as if this is the first time members of Trump’s administration have criticized him. Former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson reportedly said Trump was a “fucking moron” — and Tillerson wouldn’t even deny it. Chief of staff John Kelly reportedly called him an “idiot.”
Plenty of anonymous White House aides have leaked plenty of alarming, embarrassing, or just plain mean things about Trump since he took office.
But this op-ed has so upset him, it seems, that he thinks the Department of Justice has to do … something.
Unfortunately for Trump, Sessions already has his hands full. Earlier this week, the DOJ announced it will be investigating another one of Trump’s pet peeves: why conservatives aren’t more popular on social media.
For a president who keeps hinting that he’s going to get rid of Sessions for insufficient loyalty — any day now, really! — Trump sure does keep finding plenty of ridiculous uses for him. At taxpayer expense, of course.
Published with permission of The American Independent.
