Leading From Behind

Trump’s Worst Week Yet Keeps Getting Worse

As the president digs his heels in, the list of his former allies who have repudiated his Charlottesville views grows.
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By Nicholas Kamm/Getty Images.

In the eye of his administration’s latest unprecedented political hurricane (they seem to happen weekly) President Donald Trump, on a so-called working vacation at his golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey, was reportedly in “good spirits” on Thursday. He held meetings with Linda McMahon, the head of the Small Business Administration, and Republican Governor Rick Scott of Florida and dined with his longtime friend, developer Richard LeFrak. But while Trump ignored the media frenzy and the intra-party crisis he incited on Tuesday when he walked back his condemnation of white supremacist violence in Charlottesville, the list of high-profile figures to distance themselves from the president grew.

In an impromptu interview with local reporters at a Rotary Club event in Chattanooga, Tennessee, Senator Bob Corker, the head of the Foreign Relations Committee who was once floated as a potential running mate for Trump, called for “radical changes” within the chaotic White House. “The president has not yet been able to demonstrate the stability nor some of the competence that he needs to demonstrate in order to be successful,” the lawmaker said. “Helping inspire divisions because it generates support from your political base is not a formula for causing our nation to advance, our nation to overcome the many issues we have to deal with right now.”

The sentiment was echoed by Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina. “I’m not going to defend the indefensible . . . [Trump’s] comments on Monday were strong. His comments on Tuesday started erasing the comments that were strong,” Scott, the only black Republican in the Senate, said in an interview with Vice. “What we want to see from our president is clarity and moral authority. And that moral authority is compromised when Tuesday happened. There’s no question about that.”

Julius Krein, one of Trump’s most prominent intellectual supporters, penned an op-ed for The New York Times in which he conceded, “From the very start of his run, one of the most serious charges against Mr. Trump was that he panders to racists. Many of his supporters, myself included, managed to convince ourselves that his more outrageous comments—such as the Judge Gonzalo Curiel controversy or his initial hesitance to disavow David Duke’s endorsement—were merely Bidenesque gaffes committed during the heat of a campaign. It is now clear that we were deluding ourselves.”

James Murdoch, the younger son of Trump ally and conservative media mogul Rupert Murdoch, pledged to donate $1 million to the Anti-Defamation League in a rebuke of Trump and urged others to do the same. “What we watched this last week in Charlottesville and the reaction to it by the President of the United States concern all of us as Americans and free people,” Murdoch wrote in an e-mail.

These latest defections add to a long and growing list, which includes his own military leaders, enough of the handpicked C.E.O.s on his policy and manufacturing advisory councils that he was forced to disband them, more than half of the members on his Digital Economy Board of Advisors, and the entirety of his arts council (including, ironically, honorary chairwoman Melania Trump).

And, as the week’s Friday afternoon capstone, Trump has decided to fire Steve Bannon—the only one of his advisers who supported his statements about Charlottesville. Dismissing Bannon, while it may cause the Charlottesville storm to dissipate somewhat, will no doubt bring on another hurricane with Bannon’s allies—and possibly Trump’s base—on the right.

Trump is historically isolated, close to being a pariah president. Whether this sense has penetrated his bubble at Bedminster is another question.