George Will Obliterates Trump on Stone Pardon, Pandemic Response: ‘Floundering Government’ Being Run By a ‘Gangster Regime’
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Conservative columnist George Will has been a vocal and consistent critic of President Donald Trump and his “enablers” in the Republican Party but an op-ed in Wednesday’s Washington Post may be the first time that he has employed a condiment-based insult to critique the commander-in-chief.
“Because of his incontinent use of it,” writes Will, “the rhetorical mustard that the president slathers on every subject has lost its tang,” adding perhaps the more damning aspersion for our reality show president: that “[t]he entertainer has become a bore.”
“Under the most frivolous person ever to hold any great nation’s highest office,” Will continues, “this nation is in a downward spiral,” describing America as “pitied” and “viewed with disdainful condescension” as coronavirus cases continue to spike and our “floundering government is now administered by a gangster regime.”
Elaborating on that last line, Will slams the president for commuting Roger Stone’s sentence — which the conservative commentator views as a quid pro quo.
“Roger Stone adopted the argot of B-grade mobster movies when he said he would not “roll on” Donald Trump,’ Will writes. “By commuting his sentence, Stone’s beneficiary played his part in this down-market drama, showing gratitude for Stone’s version of omertà (the Mafia code of silence), which involved lots of speaking but much lying.”
Will goes on to slam Trump and his administration not only for the bungled response to the coronavirus pandemic, but also for the president’s “reckless lying” and “the supine nature of most Republican officeholders” who decline to hold him in check.
Will expresses concerns about how the 2020 election will be conducted, mentioning the “shambolic” and incompetent Iowa Democratic caucuses and efforts to suppress voter turnout around the country, such as overly broad and strict purges of the voter rolls and reductions in the number of polling places, resulting in absurdly long lines — an issue that Will specifically called out as “scandalous.”
America today is a “less serious” nation than in years past, writes Will, “unable to competently combat a pandemic, or even reliably conduct elections.”
“This is what national decline looks like.”
Read the op-ed at the Washington Post.
