July 31, 2017 | MSNBC - The Last Word with Lawrence O'Donnell
On July 28, 2017, EPPC Senior Fellow Peter Wehner appeared on MSNBC’s “The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell” to discuss the latest developments in the Trump presidency.
Click here to watch a clip of Mr. Wehner’s appearance.
Below is a partial transcript of Mr. Wehner’s remarks:
The problem at its core is Donald Trump and it is at its core that he is a person who thrives on chaos and manages with chaos, but it’s really deeper than that… it is a psychological and emotional affliction; he has a disoriented and disordered mind, and there is no controlling or containing that… This chaos is unlike anything that we’ve ever seen, and they haven’t faced a genuine crisis yet. Can you imagine if you had a 9-11 type situation, or a financial meltdown, or a military collision happen with this crew and with this Commander-in-Chief? That’s the really frightening prospect.
[General Kelly’s] an honorable man. He’s obviously a courageous man, and I think he’s a competent man — but again, he’s in a situation that is impossible. One of the things we have seen about Donald Trump is that he ends up humiliating and diminishing everybody around him. It doesn’t matter; anyone within his orbit leaves that orbit a reduced human being.
I do think with Republicans, there is a kind of resignation now within the Republican Party. They’ve been in this delusional world thinking that at some point they would be able to keep Donald Trump on track and I think that they finally figured out, much after they should have, that that is an impossible task.
I worked in the White House for seven years, three administrations; if anybody had done what Scaramucci had done they would have been fired within an hour. And it’s not only that he wasn’t fired; it’s that he was vindicated, that he got the trophy on the wall: Priebus is out, Scaramucci is there. And that kind of style, that kind of approach, has been validated, and it’s been validated by Donald Trump, which gets us back to the original point. This is what is fundamentally — the core problem with the Trump White House is Donald Trump himself.
