EJ Dionne: "The dam of denial has broken" By E.J.

Quote:

EJ Dionne: "The dam of denial has broken"

By E.J. Dionne Jr. Opinion writer January 7 at 7:07 PM

The most astonishing aspect of the response to Michael Wolff’s book is that anyone is surprised. President Trump’s unfitness for office was obvious long before he was elected.

Once he moved into the White House, the destructive chaos of his administration was there for all to see. Future historians will scratch their heads to figure out why it took this particular book to break the dam of denial.

None of this takes anything away from Wolff’s achievement in “Fire and Fury.” On the contrary, he deserves our thanks for creating Trump’s “emperor has no clothes” moment, even if this point should have been reached before, say, Nov. 8, 2016.

Trump’s tweets on Saturday pronouncing himself “a very stable genius” only underscored the damage Wolff has done and Trump’s dumbfounding insecurity.

How many typing Trumpanzees would it take before the phrase 'very stable genius' would appear?


But Wolff alone cannot bring this presidency crashing down, given how many Republicans still seem determined to protect Trump. Even as the news was dominated by Wolff’s revelations, Republican Sens. Charles E. Grassley and Lindsey O. Graham made a criminal referral to the Justice Department on Friday — and not against anyone who might have colluded with Russia. Instead, they urged investigation of Christopher Steele, the former British spy who authored an explosive dossier including information that Trump may have been compromised by Moscow.
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The first key is his phony populism, with an emphasis on both words.

Trump will continue to try to rally what base he has left with tweets about kneeling NFL players, immigrants, law and order and “political correctness.” He will keep attacking Hillary Clinton, the surest sign of his weakness, since his own record has done little to draw Americans his way. He needs targets to make his enemy-of-my-enemy-is-my-friend approach work.
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What might be called the Wolff Effect will thus be paradoxical. It could strengthen the bonds between Republican politicians and Trump at the very moment when everyone else is coming to terms with how dangerous it is to have a president who is so uninformed and unstable.

In the meantime, more traditional journalists will carry on their painstaking work, piling up evidence that Trump did all he could to block a legal accounting for the methods that helped get him to the White House in the first place.

We should have gotten here sooner. But far better late than never.

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