Trump and His Sheep

Today, Roger Stone, a long-time friend and former advisor to Donald Trump, was supposed to begin serving a 40-month prison sentence. He will not set foot there. His sentence was commuted last Friday by the president.

This act has been strongly condemned in the United States. A New York Times analyst wrote that Donald Trump has crossed a line that even the ousted former Republican President Richard Nixon “in the depths of Watergate dared not cross.”

However, among Republicans, it’s as if nothing has happened. The only prominent party member in Washington who has truly dared to call a spade a spade is Senator Mitt Romney.

“Unprecedented historic corruption: an American president commutes the sentence of a person convicted by a jury of lying to shield that very president,” he wrote on Twitter.

He is certainly not the only Republican to be stunned by this deeply troubling act. But he is one of the few to stand apart from the rest and criticize the president.

Trump knows that Republican politicians will, almost unanimously, either support him or remain silent. This is one of the reasons why he makes so many decisions that are inappropriate for a president.

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Former White House National Security Advisor John Bolton is another rare Republican who dared to speak the truth about Trump. The picture that he paints of the president in his book published late last month, “The Room Where It Happened: A White House Memoir,” is devastating.

In his memoir, he describes Trump as if he were a combination of a 7-year-old child with severe attention deficit disorder and a senile, belligerent and narcissistic old man — an incompetent politician to whom leaving control of the country is as dangerous as allowing a blind person to fly a plane.

Bolton’s account shows that he is far from being the only one in the president’s inner circle who thinks this way. One example among many: Former Chief of Staff John Kelly is as shocked by Trump’s behavior as Bolton.

One day, Kelly goes so far as to wonder, after a chaotic meeting, what would happen if the country faced “a real crisis like 9/11, with the way [Trump] makes decisions.”

We now know the answer. The chaos of the past few weeks in the United States is a reflection of the man who has reigned over the White House for almost four years.

Although we are delighted to see Bolton tell the truth about his time at the White House, we must not forget that, until very recently, he behaved like the rest of the Republicans. As long as Trump promoted ideas that were close to Bolton’s heart, he supported everything else. He was a loyal soldier of the Trump empire.

A sheep.

These are the sheep who defend the president at every opportunity when he embarrasses himself. Who mollycoddle him regardless of the nature of his decisions. Who maintain a complicit silence when he frees Stone.

No wonder the country is currently entangled in several crises simultaneously. These sheep have created a monster.

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The Republicans have made a pact with the devil. But they are not compelled to continue doing so. Any one of them can break the pact at any time.

But they won’t do it. It’s too late for that. Hopefully, the American voters will remember this in the November election and make these politicians regret giving Trump carte blanche for so long.