With Donald Trump defending a Republican congressman for body-slamming a reporter after the president spent the week running interference for a murderous Saudi prince, the Washington Post's Jennifer Rubin has about had it with Trump's enablers.
The conservative columnist, who has evolved into one of Trump's fiercest and most prodigious critics with a scalding column once or twice a day, feels that Trump and his supporters have hit a new low this week.
"One can hardly fathom the twisted psyche of a president who, after acknowledging that Jamal Khashoggi, a contributing columnist for The Post’s Global Opinions, had likely been murdered, would go before a cheering mob to lavish praise on a U.S. congressman who physically attacked a journalist," Rubin wrote.
"Trump won’t apologize, of course, nor will his devoted base hold his remarks against him. To the contrary, this is what they love about him — the contempt for a free press, the celebration of male thuggishness, the mindless emotional outbursts," she continued. "Somehow it empowers them, to side with brutes and bullies, to revel in the silencing of a free press."
Rubin then noted Trump backers who are condoning his Saudi excuses by smearing her Washington Post colleague, Jamal Khashoggi, as an enemy of the U.S.
"The whisper campaign comes not only from the fever swamps and usual talk radio know-nothings, but also from those who fancy themselves as foreign policy sophisticates at the forefront of efforts to counter Iran’s nuclear ambitions and regional aggression," she explained.
'Whatever the impetus, the lack of decency on display — the willingness to defame a reportedly tortured, murdered and dismembered journalist to deflect blame from a brutal regime that snookered both the U.S. and Israeli governments into adopting it as the key bulwark against Iran — should disgust people of good will." Rubin charged.
"Proximity to and reverential treatment of an amoral, congenital liar in the White House have disabled the intellectual and moral reasoning powers of many previously respectable Republicans," she added before shaming those who have become part of Trump's coterie of smear- artists.
"Whatever the cause, if you are falsely smearing a missing man, trying to diminish the horror of a thuggish regime’s alleged gruesome murder or yukking it up with a president celebrating violence against a reporter, it’s time to rethink your politics," she concluded.
You can read the whole thing here.