George F. Will, who turned 79 on May 4, is among the most prominent conservative journalists in the United States — although he has been a vehement critic of Donald Trump's presidency and even left the Republican Party because of it. And Will's most recent Washington Post column is especially scathing: the Never Trumper stresses that voting the "crybaby in chief" out of office in November is crucial in order to reverse the country's "downward spiral."
"In 2016," Will recalls, "voters were presented an unprecedentedly unpalatable choice: never had both major parties offered nominees with higher disapproval than approval numbers. Voters chose what they wagered would be the lesser blight. Now, however, they have watched him govern for 40 months and more than 40% — slightly less than the percentage that voted for him — approve of his sordid conduct."
But according to Will, voting Trump out of office this year is not enough to reverse the United States' decline — all of his Republican "enablers" in Congress must be voted out of office as well for allying themselves with a "vulgarian."
"The nation's downward spiral into acrimony and sporadic anarchy has had many causes much larger than the small man who is the great exacerbator of them," Will writes. "Most of the causes predate his presidency, and most will survive its January terminus. The measures necessary for restoration of national equilibrium are many and will be protracted far beyond his removal. One such measure must be the removal of those in Congress who, unlike the sycophantic mediocrities who cosset him in the White House, will not disappear 'magically,' as Eric Trump said the coronavirus would. Voters must dispatch his congressional enablers, especially the senators who still gambol around his ankles with a canine hunger for petting."
From the coronavirus pandemic to harming the United States' standing as a world leader to promoting a false accusation of murder, Will argues, Trump has been a disastrous president. The target of Trump's false murder accusation is Never Trump conservative Joe Scarborough, the former GOP congressman who hosts "Morning Joe" with his wife, liberal pundit Mika Brzezinski, on MSNBC. Trump has been promoting the totally debunked conspiracy theory that Scarborough, in 2001, killed Lori Klausutis — who was a staffer when he was serving in the U.S. House of Representatives. Sadly, she suffered from a heart condition and died after falling and hitting her head, and Klausutis' widower has asserted that the anti-Scarborough conspiracy theory is total nonsense and implored Trump to let his wife rest in peace.
"Those who think our unhinged president's recent mania about a murder two decades ago that never happened represents his moral nadir have missed the lesson of his life: there is no such thing as rock bottom," Will writes. "So, assume that the worst is yet to come. Which implicates national security: abroad, anti-Americanism sleeps lightly when it sleeps at all, and it is wide-awake as decent people judge our nation's health by the character of those to whom power is entrusted. Watching, too, are indecent people in Beijing and Moscow."
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