Bruce Bartlett was Reagan’s White House aide who has recently soured on his party as it has completely lost it way. Like Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, he has been out there criticizing the party and urging it to reform.
Salon’s Chauncey Devega interviewed Bruce Bartlett about the state of our politics and received some fascinating answers that should make Republicans cringe. The article is well worth the read. Here are some noteworthy snippets.
- The New York Times bend over much too far backward. I don’t know why they bother. Conservatives don’t read the New York Times; they’re not going to lose any subscribers by telling the truth.
- Trump is clearly the most incompetent president we’ve ever had in our lives. Richard Nixon may well have been the smartest. Nixon was cursed by paranoia, and I think Trump is as well. The question then becomes: Is this incompetence a good thing or a bad thing? Is it more dangerous to have a paranoid incompetent than it was to have a highly intelligent paranoid person as president? I don’t think we can tell. When I hear Trump talk, I sometimes have this feeling that he literally had no idea what was going on in his own campaign. He can deny these allegations and be perfectly truthful in his own mind because nobody told him.
- [Trump’s a useful idiot] That’s one way of describing him. It may be that he is the person who will be the most shocked when the truth finally comes out. He may say, “Oh my God, I had no idea my son-in-law was doing such stupid things.”
- I had this naïve idea that Trump had been a successful businessman because he had competent staff. I just assumed that Trump’s company had an army of lawyers and vice presidents with MBAs from Harvard Business School who went around like the guy behind the elephant in the parade with a broom and a shovel cleaning up his messes and fixing the contracts and getting the deals done properly that their boss was too incompetent to do himself. I just assumed that once he got into the White House we’d find these people would just come in and run things. I was shocked that that wasn’t the case. There was nobody.
- The Republican Party needs to die. It’s already a zombie. It’s brain dead.
I think most would agree with Mr. Bartlett. Now it is time to mobilize and make it a reality.