I’m surely not the only person who has noticed that whenever His Fraudulency is eviscerated by a former insider, he and his minions fire back with the same pathetic response.
Richard Bright, a government vaccine expert, blew the whistle on Trump earlier this year, savaging the regime’s inept response to the growing pandemic. Trump called him “a disgruntled employee.”
James Mattis, John Kelly, and John Bolton, all senior figures at one time, have listed Trump’s manifest failures in the realm of national security. Trump, the other night in Philadelphia, called them “disgruntled former employees.”
Miles Taylor, former chief of staff at the Department of Homeland Security, says that in meetings, Trump was “like a third grader.” In a recent tweet, Trump said that Taylor is merely “a former DISGRUNTLED EMPLOYEE.”
Rex Tillerson, the one-time Secretary of State, reportedly described Trump as a “f—–g moron.” Trump toady Sarah Huckabee Sanders, in a new book, dismisses Tillerson as “a former disgruntled employee.”
And now we have Olivia Troye, a lifelong Republican who served two years as Mike Pence’s coronavirus adviser. As a task force member from day one, she was in the room where it happened. She quit in August and now says that Trump’s “promulgation of false narratives and incorrect information of the virus have made (the regime’s) ongoing response a failure.” She says that every initiative designed to save lives was “derailed by the person at the very top,” someone who had “flat-out disregard for human life.”
The regime’s response? You guessed it. Yesterday, Mike Pence mocked Troye as “one more disgruntled employee.”
Trump somehow believes that disgruntled is some kind of magical adjective that discredits all critics and purges him of sin. In truth, it’s just a symptom of his desperation. Like groping for a twig when you’re being swept away in a flood.
The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines the word as “unhappy and annoyed.” Precisely so. People who witness a toxic mix of mendacity, ignorance, and incompetence do tend to become unhappy and annoyed. The word disgruntled is not necessarily a pejorative. Olivia Troye is unhappy and annoyed (to say the least) that 200,000 Americans have needlessly died because of Trump’s cavalier attitude about human life.
As she says in a savage video produced by Republican Voters Against Trump, the so-called leader knew by mid-February that the virus was a lethal domestic threat – “but the President didn’t want to hear that, because his biggest concern was that we were in an election year. It was shocking to see the President saying that the virus was a hoax, saying that everything was OK when it was not,” and he knew it was not.
Unhappy and annoyed indeed.
Bill Kristol, the longtime conservative commentator, tweeted this helpful definition: Disgruntled = worked hard, public spirited, did her very best to advance policies that would save lives – and finally left because she couldn’t change the fact that the president of the United States is a selfish monster who couldn’t care less about other Americans.
She, and the other patriots who’ve bailed on Trump, have esteemed company in the history books. Three Nixon foreign policy advisers – Anthony Lake, Roger Morris, and William Watts – were “disgruntled” when they quit in protest over Nixon’s invasion of Cambodia. Elliot Richardson and William Ruckelshaus were “disgruntled” when they quit the Justice Department, defying Nixon’s order to fire the Watergate prosecutor. Cyrus Vance was “disgruntled” when he quit as Secretary of State to protest Jimmy Carter’s ill-planned Iranian hostage rescue.
And German Army officer Claus von Stauffenberg was certainly “disgruntled” when he tried to blow up Adolf Hitler in 1944. Dissenters tend to feel that way.
But we don’t need to be as rash as Claus. What we need, over the next six weeks, is a massive Army of the Disgruntled marching to the ballot box.