• Skip to main content
  • Skip to secondary menu
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Skip to footer
  • Home
  • About
    • About Current
    • Masthead
  • Podcasts
  • Blogs
    • The Way of Improvement Leads Home
    • The Arena
  • Support
  • Way of Improvement
  • About John
  • Vita
  • Books
  • Speaking
  • Media Requests

Hey George Will, Why Don’t You Tell Us What You REALLY Think About Donald Trump?

John Fea   |  July 17, 2018 Leave a Comment

George Will

Conservative columnist George Will has already told conservatives to vote for Democratic candidates in 2018.  In today’s column he calls Trump a “sad, embarrassing wreck of a man.”  Here is a taste:

Like the purloined letter in Edgar Allan Poe’s short story with that title, collusion with Russia is hiding in plain sight. We shall learn from special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s investigation whether in 2016 there was collusion with Russia by members of the Trump campaign. The world, however, saw in Helsinki something more grave — ongoing collusion between Trump, now in power, and Russia. The collusion is in what Trump says (refusing to back the United States’ intelligence agencies) and in what evidently went unsaid (such as: You ought to stop disrupting Ukraine, downing civilian airliners, attempting to assassinate people abroad using poisons, and so on, and on).

Americans elected a president who — this is a safe surmise — knew that he had more to fear from making his tax returns public than from keeping them secret. The most innocent inference is that for decades he has depended on an American weakness, susceptibility to the tacky charisma of wealth, which would evaporate when his tax returns revealed that he has always lied about his wealth, too. A more ominous explanation might be that his redundantly demonstrated incompetence as a businessman tumbled him into unsavory financial dependencies on Russians. A still more sinister explanation might be that the Russians have something else, something worse, to keep him compliant.

The explanation is in doubt; what needs to be explained — his compliance — is not. Granted, Trump has a weak man’s banal fascination with strong men whose disdain for him is evidently unimaginable to him. And, yes, he only perfunctorily pretends to have priorities beyond personal aggrandizement. But just as astronomers inferred, from anomalies in the orbits of the planet Uranus, the existence of Neptune before actually seeing it, Mueller might infer, and then find, still-hidden sources of the behavior of this sad, embarrassing wreck of a man.

Read the rest here.

Filed Under: Way of Improvement Tagged With: #ageoftrump, Donald Trump, George Will

Reader Interactions

Leave a Reply

You must be logged in to post a comment.

Primary Sidebar

Patron Access

The Way of Improvement Leads Home

Commonplace Book #237

February 3, 2023 By John Fea

Rod Dreher in Hungary: “blogging and backtracking”

February 3, 2023 By John Fea

The Organization of American Historians responds to the Florida controversy over AP African American Studies

February 3, 2023 By John Fea

College in the age of A.I.

February 3, 2023 By John Fea

More from The Way of Improvement →

The Arena Blog

Equity and Justice at a Harvard Abortion Conference

February 3, 2023 By Daniel K. Williams Leave a Comment

Complicity and the Failure to Care

February 2, 2023 By Elizabeth Stice Leave a Comment

Welcome to the Arena

February 1, 2023 By Nadya Williams Leave a Comment

“The Arena” is coming to Current

January 31, 2023 By John Fea Leave a Comment

More from The Arena →

Subscribe via Email



Please wait...
Please enter all required fields Click to hide
Correct invalid entries Click to hide

Footer

Contact Forms

General Inquiries
Pitch Us

Search

Subscribe via Email



Please wait...
Please enter all required fields Click to hide
Correct invalid entries Click to hide
Subscribe via Email


Please wait...
Please enter all required fields Click to hide
Correct invalid entries Click to hide