Trump is Not Becoming Any More Presidential
That has left the new, shellshocked Trump team clueless about the magnitude of the task facing them. Really, all White House employees of the previous administration are out the door on Inauguration Day? How were they to know? Um, ask an experienced transition planner?
Third, and most disturbing, are the unnerving clues about the ideological direction of the Trump administration. A president has the right to assemble advisers with whom he is comfortable and who reflect his views.
But most of his choices so far convey the message that loyalty will be rewarded above all, and that Trump’s election night promise to “bind the wounds of division” was empty rhetoric.
Choosing Stephen Bannon to be his chief White House strategist does not bind the wounds of division. This is a man who prides himself on being the voice of the alt-right; whose ex-wife said in a sworn declaration that “he doesn’t like Jews” and didn’t want his daughters “going to school with Jews”; whose website blasts a columnist as a “renegade Jew” and proclaims that “birth control makes women unattractive and crazy.”
Choosing Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions to be the nation’s chief law enforcement officer -- and oversee issues of discrimination, police brutality and voting rights -- does not bind the wounds of division. This is a man who called the NAACP “anti-American,” said he thought the Ku Klux Klan was “OK until I found out they smoked pot,” and described a white civil rights lawyer as a “disgrace to his race.”
Choosing retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn to serve as national security adviser does not bind the wounds of division. This is a man who has tweeted that “fear of Muslims is RATIONAL” and described Islam as a “malignant cancer,” a “political ideology” that “hides behind this notion of it being a religion.”
Perhaps the full picture will be less disturbing than the sketch so far. Perhaps Trump will grow on the job. The evidence so far offers slim grounds for hope.
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Ruth Marcus’ email address is ruthmarcus@washpost.com.
(c) 2016, Washington Post Writers Group
Copyright 2016 Washington Post Writers Group
