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Op-Ed

Just Because You’re an Idiot Doesn’t Mean You’re Not a Traitor

May 19, 2017

Donald Trump does not understand that The Washington Post and The New York Times tried to protect him: by being more accurate in their reporting than Trump has been on anything since he took office.

Robert Kahn

By Robert Kahn

Deputy editor emeritus, Courthouse News

Donald Trump does not understand that The Washington Post and The New York Times tried to protect him: by being more accurate in their reporting than Trump has been on anything since he took office.

The Post on Monday broke the story that Trump had delivered Top Secret spy material to the Russian ambassador and foreign minister, in the Oval Office, in a meeting in from which the U.S. press was banned — but Russia’s was not.

“I get great intel,” Trump boasted to his Russian friends — longtime enemies of the United States. “I have people brief me on great intel every day.”

Knowing Trump as we do, it’s likely that Trump just wanted to use his cool new word “intel,” and brag about his “great intel” to whomever happened to be there at the time.

Trump then told his Russian friends specific information Mossad had collected about ISIS terror plots, including the city in Syria where Mossad got it.

The Post did not publish the name of the city or the name of the U.S. ally from whom Trump got his cool intel. But even your humble reporter, alone on a mountainside in Vermont, figured it out in two seconds.

So Trump not only betrayed his country, he endangered the lives of Mossad agents in Syria, and he endangered our country’s relationship with Israel, which knows far more about ISIS, Syria, Iran, Iraq and everything else going on in the Middle East than we do.

That was Monday.

Not enough news yet?

On Tuesday, The New York Times reported that Trump told FBI Director James Comey, “I hope you can let this go” — “this” being the FBI investigation of Trump’s first national security director, Army Lt. Gen. (Ret.) Michael Flynn, and Flynn’s financial enrichment from Turkey and Russia, and his lies about it.

Comey refused to “let this go,” and Trump fired him.

All of this is consistent with Trump’s character: a rich coddled brat so insecure he’ll brag to anyone, about anything, to try to impress him for a moment, so long as Trump can fire someone else for it, if Trump the princess has to sleep on a pea.

We know that Trump is a serial liar, a sexual predator, a bully, a sociopath and a crook. We know that no one changes at age 70.

But that’s not the worst of it.

Just as vile as Trump himself is the entire Republican delegation in Congress: sitting like 301 bobblehead dolls in the back of Trump’s white RV, cruising around the Beltway. Littering.

Can’t the Republicans see yet that Trump is dragging them into a LaBrea Tar Pit — soiling everyone he touches?

After Trump betrayed us to Russia, and betrayed Israel, he dispatched his new national security adviser, Army Gen. H.R. McMaster, to try to save his sorry ass. McMaster, tugging his forelock, bowed and said Tuesday afternoon: “At no time — at no time — were intelligence sources or methods discussed. And the president did not disclose any military operations that were not already publicly known.”

But that’s not what The Washington Post reported.

McMaster denied an accusation that no one had made.

The Post did not report that “intelligence sources or methods [were] discussed.” It did not report that Trump had “disclose(d) any military operations that were not already publicly known.”

The Post reported that the Russians could track those things down from what Trump told them. And that was correct.

Then Tuesday night — am I going too fast for you? — Trump threw McMaster into the White House toilet, and changed his story again.

Trump soils everyone and everything he touches.

Why would anyone want to work for him? The only reasonable explanation I’ve seen came from the political consultant who said that Trump’s advisers are “not exactly the A team,” so are holding on in a tough job market — and a shot at a tell-all memoir.

I say again: The Post, and the Times, tried to protect Trump — by being accurate, and trying to be fair to him — two things that apparently never occur to Trump, ever.

So it looks today, less than four months into Trump’s term, that he’s at the long end of a short rope, and falling.

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