A Warning

by Anonymous

“To announce that there must be no criticism of the President, or that we are to stand by the President, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public,” he wrote. “Nothing but the truth should be spoken about him or anyone else. But it is even more important to tell the truth, pleasant or unpleasant, about him than about anyone else.” We do not owe the president our silence. We owe him the truth.

“No government, any more than an individual, will long be respected without being truly respectable; nor be truly respectable without possessing a certain portion of order and stability.” —James Madison

Seeing this type of behavior was both educating and jarring to the burgeoning Steady State. It was a visceral lesson that we weren’t just appointees of the president. We were glorified government babysitters.

“About a third of the things the president wants us to do are flat-out stupid. Another third would be impossible to implement and wouldn’t even solve the problem. And a third of them would be flat-out illegal.” Heads nodded.

“God grant that men of principle be our principal men,” Thomas Jefferson once wrote.

“A good moral character is the first essential in a man…It is therefore highly important that you should endeavor not only to be learned but virtuous.” —George Washington

“Power always thinks it has a great soul and vast views beyond the comprehension of the weak, and that it is doing God’s service when it is violating all His laws.” —John Quincy Adams

Trump is out of his mind.

Willful ignorance is the fairest way to describe the president’s attitude toward our enemies.

Naive doesn’t begin to describe it.

“The president sees in these guys what he wishes he had: total power, no term limits, enforced popularity, and the ability to silence critics for good.” He was spot on. It was the simplest explanation.

He enthused to reporters about Kim Jong Un’s ability to control his population: “He’s the head of a country, and I mean he’s the strong head. Don’t let anyone think anything different. He speaks, and his people sit up at attention. I want my people to do the same.”

And he commiserated with Putin about the free press in the United States, telling the notorious thug, “You don’t have this problem in Russia, but we do.”

grifter in chief,

Our enemies and adversaries recognize the president is a simplistic pushover.

The president of the European Council tweeted a viewpoint shared by many of his colleagues in May 2018, writing, “Looking at the latest decisions of @realDonaldTrump someone could even think: with friends like that who needs enemies.”

“If we are to have another contest in the near future of our national existence, I predict that the dividing line will not be Mason and Dixon’s, but between patriotism and intelligence on the one side, and superstition, ambition, and ignorance on the other.” —Ulysses S. Grant

He spreads lies he hears. He makes up new lies to spread. He lies to our faces. He asks people around him to lie.

President Trump is fundamentally undermining our perceptions of “truth.”

In his own words, Trump embraces fear as a management tool.

“When you’re going down a dirt road and see a turtle atop a fence post, chances are that turtle didn’t get there by itself.”