A New York Times columnist called President Fucktard Trump "this appalling worst-president-ever."

New York Times - The President in Plain Sight Is Bad Enough

Now what should the Democrats do about it?

By Gail Collins and Bret Stephens

Ms. Collins and Mr. Stephens are opinion columnists. They converse every other week.

April 23, 2019

Bret Stephens: Hi Gail. I know neither of us can wait to debate the best name for Meghan Markle’s and Prince Harry’s royal baby, but can we first discuss the small matter of the Mueller report? How do you see it playing out, politically speaking, for President Trump?

Gail Collins: Bret, I am actually taking a conservative approach, which is that we can wait to reject this appalling worst-president-ever in the next election.

Impeachment would drive the whole country even further apart. The Republicans in the Senate would never go for it anyway. And by the time we staggered to the inevitable stalemate, it’d be well into 2020. Let’s just vote the sucker out.

Bret: Agree on both points. But I’m afraid the president is helped by the report, even if he, as usual, isn’t acting like it. Much as we might want to dwell on all the unsavory things the report tells us about the way Trump conducted his business and now runs his presidency, it’s not anything the American people, including most of his supporters, didn’t already know.

But the report lays to rest the central and most damning charge against him, conspiracy (or collusion), much like the 2004 Duelfer Report on Iraq laid to rest the charge that Saddam Hussein had been developing weapons of mass destruction on the eve of the Iraq War: You still knew Saddam was a scheming, horrible person bent on destruction, but the casus belli that had caused the United States and its allies to invade proved to be false.

A lot of the president’s critics will now go through the motions of acting like this is still the biggest scandal in American politics since Watergate, but the more they do that the more I suspect it will help Trump. My own view is that the biggest scandal in American politics happened on Nov. 8, 2016, the day Trump got elected. It’s the president in plain sight that should worry us, not the guy behind closed doors.

Gail: I’ve always nurtured the theory that Trump doesn’t have the mental capacity to collude. You do need a certain amount of organized thinking to conspire.

Bret: The Inspector Clouseau theory of the Trump presidency. Go on.

Gail: But the report, lily-livered though it may be, does make it pretty damn clear he was engaged in an attempt to obstruct justice. Don’t you think Congress should at least try to censure him for that?

Bret: I would support it, though I’m afraid it would wind up being a mostly partisan affair with a few possible surprises. (How, for instance, would Mitt Romney vote?)

Gail: If it got down to waiting to see if Mitt Romney would become a profile in courage, we’d have been doomed anyway.

Bret: Speaking of obstruction, the thing I found most interesting about the Mueller report is how often Trump’s advisers wound up obstructing him. Don McGahn, the former White House counsel, refused the president’s demand that he fire Mueller. Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein refused a White House request to put out a statement that firing Jim Comey had been his idea. Ditto for a number of other officials who, if they weren’t directly disobeying Trump, seemed to have taken a “Bartleby the Scrivener” approach to his order: They would prefer not to.

Gail: Maybe the best thing about this episode will be the lesson it gives Trump’s team: when in doubt, ignore him completely.

Bret: In the meantime, the main task for Democrats right now is to get behind a candidate who can win. Word is that Joe Biden is planning to declare sometime this week. Is he the Trump-slayer or the second coming of Jeb Bush?

Gail: Actually, he’s just the third or fourth coming of Joe Biden. Lovely guy but fate keeps trying to tell him there’s no Oval Office in his future.

I’m looking forward to watching the new faces in this race. But a little worried there are going to be so many people in these primaries that one of the very old faces will win just on superior name recognition.

Any of the Democrats appeal to you right now?

Bret: In many ways, the Democratic field reminds me to some extent of the Republican one in the last election cycle. The presumptive front-runners — Jeb Bush then, Joe Biden now — have loads of name recognition but are weak or weary campaigners. You have, in Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders, two quasi-outsiders whose political views fall outside the mainstream of their respective parties and who are considered unelectable in the general election, and yet command almost cult-like loyalty among their core supporters. And then you have a large field of secondary contenders who are either too young, too obscure, too joyless, or too doctrinaire. In 2016, those lesser contenders carved each other to bits while leaving Trump to claim the field.

All of which is to say: I like Pete Buttigieg.

Gail: Is it just because he can speak eight languages?

Seriously, I’m sort of in awe of the way he’s sweeping the field. We haven’t heard his detailed positions on the big issues the Democrats will be arguing about, but I believe you’ve pointed out in the past that the main thing is just to nominate somebody who can win. Either one of Pete Buttigieg’s dogs would be better than the man we’ve got in the Oval Office now.

But what would you do if the primaries went a different way and the winner was, say, Bernie Sanders. Would you vote for him?

Bret: I’ll get to Sanders in a second, but let’s say this about Buttigieg: It helps that he is incredibly bright — the contrast between the guy who learned Norwegian just for fun and the incumbent who hasn’t yet mastered English would be a useful one in a general election. But what really impresses me about Buttigieg is that he’s campaigning as a moderate Midwest problem-solver in a field full of coastal ideologues. I think it’s a no-lose strategy, setting himself up either as a credible candidate if he wins or a highly plausible VP pick if he doesn’t.

As for Bernie: I would never vote for him under any circumstances. I want Trump gone as much as anyone, but Sanders is a bridge too far as far as I’m concerned. I guess it would mean a Bill Weld vote for me, or whoever is the least feckless third-party candidate.

Gail: Bernie Sanders would not bring shame on the White House. He’d never defame a religious or ethnic group. He’s got a position on health care you hate, but if he couldn’t get a bill through Congress he wouldn’t try to declare a national emergency to force his will on the country. He’d bring America back to its position as a global leader, not a global delinquent.

And you know that voting for a third-party candidate is a cop-out. Also, it can screw things up if enough people do it and throw the election to the worst of two evils. I don’t think the people who self-righteously voted for Jill Stein really intended to give Donald Trump the presidency. But here we are.

Bret: Well, this is why I hope and pray that Sanders isn’t the nominee. We already have one major political party in the United States that has jumped off the cliff, morally and ideologically speaking. Why should I participate in helping the second one go over it also?

There are many Democrats I’d gladly vote for just to get rid of Trump, even if I disagree with many or even most of their policies. But I find Bernie not much better, morally speaking, than Trump, and that’s to say nothing about his extreme domestic and foreign policy views.

Gail: Morally speaking?

Bret: Anyone who said there’s a virtue to bread lines, as he did, or who praised the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, as he did, or who went to the U.S.S.R. only so that he could admire the chandeliers in the Moscow subways, as he did, isn’t going to get my vote. Period. You have to have been utterly blind to what the Soviet Union and communism were all about to have taken those positions, and by the time Sanders came of age there was no excuse for ignorance or naïve idealism. And I’m not talking about Stalinist Russia, which Sanders did and does condemn. I mean the kind of regime apparatus whose East German version was accurately portrayed in “The Lives of Others.”

It would be one thing if Sanders had publicly recanted these positions, as many people on the left did when they finally figured out what the Soviet Union was all about. As far as I know, he never did. That makes him a non-starter for me, and I suspect for any non-millennial who recalls the ideological divides of the Cold War and doesn’t find the word “socialism” cute.

Gail: The bread lines thing was a stupid joke from — what, 30 or 40 years ago? — when he basically said, “Well, bread lines are better than not getting bread.” I don’t think we’ve got time to go through every careless thing Bernie Sanders has said over the last six decades, and I will instantly concede that while bopping around as the senator from Vermont, Sanders was not a guy who carefully parsed every word.

But just two things: First, there is nothing you can say about Sanders’ attitude toward Russia that I can’t top with something from Donald Trump that’s intellectually slipshod and also based on personal greed. Second, I can see we’re going to be having some “socialism” discussions this season. Just want to put one marker down: they’re thinking about free health care and a guaranteed income for the poor, not Stalinism.

Understand, I’m not arguing that Bernie Sanders would be a great choice for president. But to keep Donald Trump from a second term, I’d vote for him any day of the year.

Bret: We agree on Trump’s awfulness. And I realize Bernie isn’t the second coming of Hugo Chavez (though I’m not sure the same can be said of some of his closest policy advisers). But I find even his brand of “socialism” a nonstarter, and I suspect millions of middle-of-the-road Americans who would otherwise love to see Trump go will feel the same way when they realize how much Scandinavian-style welfare statism is going to cost them and weaken the long-term economic health of the United States. So I can only hope Democrats won’t succumb to the same temptation to nominate their most extreme candidate the way Republicans did in 2016.

We’re a weird country. I think the overwhelming majority of Americans would be perfectly happy with a center-left or center-right president who was sane, steady, even a bit boring. But our politics are increasingly anything but that, because partisan activists, talking heads and the Twitter furies won’t allow it. How do we change that? How does boring triumph over bad?

Gail: Well, that’s one heck of an agenda for future conversations. Here’s to a scrappy spring and summer. I look forward to arguing with you in good weather.

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Gail Collins is an Op-Ed columnist and a former member of the editorial board, and was the first woman to serve as the Times editorial page editor, from 2001 to 2007. @GailCollins • Facebook

Bret L. Stephens has been an Opinion columnist with The Times since April 2017. He won a Pulitzer Prize for commentary at The Wall Street Journal in 2013 and was previously editor in chief of The Jerusalem Post. @BretStephensNYT • Facebook