Once Trump loyalist on
Fox News, Napolitano quit backing him unconditionally some time back. Now he's written an OpEd in the
Washington Times.
Normally, when the president of the United States meets with a foreign leader to consummate an agreement between the countries, the actual meeting is a formality and a public relations triumph.
That’s because normally, emissaries from the two countries have been meeting for months, hammering out the details of an agreement. It is in the private hammering-out that the real work of diplomacy is done, not in the public handshaking and backslapping.
[...]
Mr. Trump knew when he left Washington for Hanoi that there was no agreement between the countries, and he also knew that no agreement was likely. But he believed that the force of his towering personality could produce a meeting of the minds.
[...]
While the world watched the pseudo-negotiations in Hanoi, House Democrats were conducting a public hearing, over the objections of their Republicans colleagues, about Mr. Trump’s alleged unlawful behavior before and while he was president. The sole witness at the hearings was Michael Cohen.
[...]
Can a lawyer testify against his own client? What has become of the attorney-client privilege? These are sound questions that were not asked last week because of something called the crime-fraud exception.
Normally, all communications between a client and his lawyer are privileged from revelation. The exception comes when the lawyer can demonstrate that he and the client were together engaged in criminal or fraudulent acts.
[...]
While this was happening, Democrats and Republicans in the Senate were joining their House colleagues in opposition to the president’s expenditure of funds that Congress had expressly declined to authorize.
[...]
While all this was going on, The New York Times revealed that the FBI and the CIA declined to authorize a top-secret security clearance for the president’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, because they claimed he was less than candid with them and that the president overruled them.
It was lawful for the president to do this, but it was extremely dangerous and profoundly unwise. It undermined the intelligence and law enforcement communities, demeaned those who obtained such clearances by hard work and merit, and has exposed the nation’s most carefully guarded secrets to a person who American intelligence believes is naive and susceptible to foreign inducements to reveal what he knows.
[...]
Can President Trump survive all this? Yes — but not if he has another week like the last one.
Washington Times
I would not want to place a bet on that. He's already survived dozens of things that should have each alone stopped him, yet even the aggregate hasn't.
The president has serious and powerful tormentors whom he cannot overcome by mockery alone. He needs to do more than demean them with acerbic tweets, because many of those tormentors can legally cause him real harm. He needs to address these issues soberly, directly and maturely.
...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.
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