by Philip Rucker and Carol Leonnig
Some reflections by George Kennedy on
“A Very Stable Genius – Donald J. Trump’s Testing of America” by Philip Rucker and Carol Leonnig
Washington Post national investigative reporter Carol Leonnig and White House bureau chief Philip Rucker, both Pulitzer Prize winners, join a lengthening roster of noted Washington insiders illuminating the calamity that is the Trump presidency.
The authors offer in excruciating detail examples of presidential leadership without direction; leadership without strategic calculation; and presidential action with disastrous outcomes. There are no constraining principles, values, or parameters for a chief executive with an authoritarian personality; a president obsessed with the universal recognition accorded his predecessor, Barack Obama; and, a president seething over the ridicule he faces from allies and adversaries alike.
Leonnig and Rucker describe the 45th President as enthralled with his innate genius who rages at the absence of the plaudits, notably the Nobel Peace Prize, he feels are his due.
The authors write “The universal value of the Trump administration is loyalty – not to the country, but to the president himself – and Trump’s North Star has been the perpetuation of his own power, even when it meant imperiling our shaky and mistrustful democracy…This peerless and gripping narrative reveals President Trump at his most unvarnished and exposes how decision making in his administration has been driven by a reflexive logic of self-preservation and self-aggrandizement…”
Perhaps the most damning observation of this President was offered by a former senior administration official who offered: “This is a presidency of one…Trump unleashed, unchained, unhinged.”
