Hillary Clinton, in a Friday New York Times editorial, called the Trump administration’s approach to governing both dumb and dangerous.
The former Secretary of State excoriated the Signal chat scandal and the Musk mission to slash the federal workforce, and concluded that Trump would make the US “feeble and friendless”.
The headline read “How much dumber will this get?”
It’s not the hypocrisy that bothers me; it’s the stupidity. We’re all shocked — shocked! — that President Trump and his team don’t actually care about protecting classified information or federal record retention laws. But we knew that already. What’s much worse is that top Trump administration officials put our troops in jeopardy by sharing military plans on a commercial messaging app and unwittingly invited a journalist into the chat. That’s dangerous. And it’s just dumb.
Clinton blamed the administration for putting our military troups in jeopardy, adding, “This is the latest in a string of self-inflicted wounds by the new administration that are squandering America’s strength and threatening our national security.”
Without naming Mars Boi by name, she called out the slashing of the federal workforce, specifically the USAID fund that President John F. Kennedy started as a way to spread American influence around the world without the strongarm tactics of the Orange One.
“In a dangerous and complex world, it’s not enough to be strong. You must also be smart,” she said, adding that she “argued for smart power, integrating the hard power of our military with the soft power of our diplomacy, development assistance, economic might and cultural influence.”
The Trump approach is dumb power. Instead of a strong America using all our strengths to lead the world and confront our adversaries, Mr Trump’s America will be increasingly blind and blundering, feeble and friendless.”
Clinton argued for competence and wisdom over the anti-woke swagger oozing from Trump and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, and concluded that Team Orange appeared not to know its way, was putting the US in danger and mused that perhaps Trump “is in way over his head.”
Does anyone really think deleting tributes to the Tuskegee Airmen makes us more safe? The Trump Pentagon purged images of the plane that dropped the atomic bomb that ended World War II because its name is the Enola Gay. Dumb.
One of my personal favorite lines:
Leadership is hard. But our best chance to get it right and to keep our country safe is to strengthen our government, not weaken it. We should invest in the patriots who serve our nation, not insult them.
