Trump will continue to run a 'gangster White House' as long as he is allowed to stay: ex-George W Bush aide

In a column for the Atlantic, conservative David Frum -- who previously wrote speeches for former Preside t George W. Bush -- ripped into the current occupant sitting in the Oval Office, accusing Donald Trump of being a "gangster" with absolutely no regard for the law.

Noting that the president tweeted out a link to a story that named the whistleblower whose report was the impetus for impeachment, Frum wrote, "This is a step the president has been building toward for some time. The name of the presumed whistle-blower has been circulating among Trump supporters for months. Trump surrogates—including the president’s elder son—have posted the name on social media and discussed it on television. Yet actually crossing the line to post the name on the president’s own account? Until this week, Trump hesitated. That red line has now been crossed."

As Frum sees it, the president didn't "retaliate" against the government employee as it is legally defined, but he set the stage for others.

"While the presumed whistle-blower reportedly remains employed by the government, he is also reportedly subject to regular death threats, including at least implicit threat by Trump himself," he wrote before noting that the president has seemed to go off the rails since the House approved articles of impeachment against him.

"Trump’s tweeting in the past two days was so frenzied and the sources quoted were so bizarre—including at least four accounts devoted to the Pizzagate-adjacent conspiracy theory QAnon, as well as one that describes former President Barack Obama as “Satan’s Muslim scum”—as to renew doubts about the president’s mental stability," he explained. "But Trump’s long reticence about outright naming the presumed whistle-blower suggests that he remained sufficiently tethered to reality to hear and heed a lawyer’s advice. He disregarded that advice in full awareness that he was disregarding it."

According to Frum, "The country is left once again with the problem of a president who refuses to obey the law."

"Trump is organizing from the White House a conspiracy to revenge himself on the person who first alerted the country that Trump was extorting Ukraine to help his reelection: more lawbreaking to punish the revelation of past lawbreaking," he continued, adding, "Trump’s post-Christmas mania confirms House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s prediction that Trump would impeach himself."

"Donald Trump will not be bound by any rule, even after he has been caught. He is unrepentant and determined to break the rules again—in part by punishing those who try to enforce them. He is a president with the mind of a gangster, and as long as he is in office, he will head a gangster White House," he concluded.

You can read the whole piece here.