OPINION:
George Will, so-called voice of the conservatives — but really, spokesman for the establishment of the Republican Party — slammed President Donald Trump on national television as an idiot.
And he did it in that quasi-clever English style of feigning compliment while poking sarcastic fun. Gotta love the English sense of humor, right?
This is GOP elitism, at its finest.
Will was asked by MSNBC’s Chuck Todd about the ongoing media coverage of Trump’s treatment of veterans — a story that included the president’s supposed cavalier treatment of a widowed wife of a killed soldier, as well as Trump’s promised $25,000 payment to a Gold Star family.
“It feels like the president can’t stop digging a hole here,” Todd said, referring to Trump’s ongoing pushback against the negative narratives that have been reported, Mediaite noted.
Will, a Washington Post columnist and NBC pundit, offered up a snarky defense of Trump — call it the Defense That Wasn’t.
“Let me say something mildly on his behalf,” Will said. “He is barely on speaking terms with the English language. I don’t think I’ve heard him complete a sentence in two years that had a subject, an object and a verb. He makes George W. Bush look like Cicero. He gets on the phone with these people, and it is awkward. It is an agonizing moment, and he doesn’t respond well.”
Well, here’s a quick rebuttal to that: Barack Obama was noted by the left as an admirable public speaker, a true scholar and genuine thinker. Yet he couldn’t connect with the public.
Obama was tone-deaf and insensitive — couldn’t understand why, for example, Americans might not like him announcing the beheading of a U.S. journalist at the hands of ISIS, then trotting off to the golf course for a quick nine or 18.
So Trump isn’t the most elegant of speakers?
That may be true. But Trump’s got something that matters more: He connects with average Americans — and in the end, that matters more, much more, than fancy speech and scholarly rhetoric.
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