A necessary quality for leadership
Expect new Trump eruptions today: top military guy says Trump is crooked as a dog’s hind leg.
Retired four-star Gen. Stanley McChrystal did not mince words about President Donald Trump in a wide-ranging interview with ABC’s “This Week,” saying the president is dishonest and immoral and adding that he could not work for Trump.
“I don’t think he tells the truth,” McChrystal told ABC’s Martha Raddatz who questioned the general on whether he feels Trump is a liar.
When asked if Trump is immoral, McChrystal said: “I think he is.”
Trump slaps his immorality out there on Twitter every day. A moral person doesn’t talk to and about people the way Trump does, especially from a position of power.
Having recently published “Leaders: Myth and Reality,” McChrystal took issue with Trump’s leadership style. He mentioned a necessary quality for leadership in his mind — a leader being willing to sacrifice himself for others.
“I have to believe that the people I’m working for would do that, whether we disagree on a lot of other things,” McChrystal said. “I’m not convinced from the behavior that I’ve seen that that’s the case here.”
Understatement. I think we’re all quite convinced, from the behavior we’ve seen and read about, that that’s not the case here. Trump wouldn’t sacrifice himself for others to the extent of a paper cut or a mosquito bite.
McChrystal said, if asked, he would reject the opportunity to work in the Trump administration.
“I think it’s important for me to work for people who I think are basically honest, who tell the truth as best they know it,” he said.
“I’m very tolerant of people who make mistakes because I make so many of them — and I’ve been around leaders who’ve made mistakes … but through all of them, I almost never saw people trying to get it wrong. And I almost never saw people who were openly disingenuous on things.”
“Openly disingenuous” – it should be an oxymoron, but Trump makes it work.
I once thought that Bush could not have enacted a military coup because of the depth and breadth, with attendant diversity and rivalry, of the nation’s military and paramilitary institutions. But lately I’ve been reading up on Sulla, and Caesar, and Octavian; I’ve realised that military coups and dictatorships are often acclaimed and supported in extremis, against a sclerotic and failing state.
I have come to fear that Bush and Trump were and are not tyrants, but rather that they are the manifestations of a failed state for which the general curative has been the rise of tyrants. That is, these days I do not fear Trump or his ideological successors so much as I fear a reluctant but honorable military figure who has been persuaded, against his instincts and by the love of his country, to step in and ‘correct’ the manifest and undeniable failings of the system which allowed the Trumps and Bushes and their kith to grasp power in the first place.
That Trump’s ostentatious unfitness for his position would lead even a portion of reasonable citizens to breathe a sigh of relief at the prospect of a coup by ‘responsible adults’ is alarming, but the embers are already there in the dismay over Mattis’ resignation and the crowing over pieces such as this.
We may yet find ourselves in bed with a new Sulla, and our new Sulla may yet retire once his bloody work is done, but we should be just as wary of the Sullas as we should be of the Trumps.
Not even a raindrop for his own son.
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PERFECT!