Former speechwriter for Ronald Reagan and Presidents George H. W. Bush and George W. Bush, Peter Wehner, tore into Donald Trump Jr. in a column for The Atlantic, and he didn’t hold back. While calling Junior “intensely unappealing and uninteresting,” Wehner also pointed to the former president’s son’s “corruption, ineptitude, and banality.”
Wehner noted Junior’s recent speech at the Turning Point USA conference in Arizona where he said the teachings of Jesus, specifically to “turn the other cheek,” have “gotten us nothing while we’ve ceded ground in every major institution.”
“He is perpetually aggrieved; obsessed with trolling the left; a crude, one-dimensional figure who has done a remarkably good job of keeping from public view any redeeming qualities he might have, Wehner writes.
“The problem is that the Trumpian ethic hasn’t been confined to the Trump family,” he continues. “We saw that not just in the enthusiastic and at times impassioned response of the Turning Point USA crowd to Don Jr.’s speech but nearly every day in the words and actions of Republicans in positions of power. Donald Trump and his oldest son have become evangelists of a different kind.”
Stay up-to-date with the latest news!
Subscribe and start recieving our daily emails.
He then tore into the Republican party.
“Liz Cheney voted with President Trump more than 90 percent of the time but is now persona non grata in the GOP because she is willing to defend the Constitution and the rule of law and stand against a violent assault on the Capitol and an effort to overturn a free and fair election,” Wehner continues. “When Liz Cheney is more despised in the party than the crazed Marjorie Taylor Greene, Paul Gosar, Lauren Boebert, Jim Jordan, Madison Cawthorn, or Donald Trump Jr., you know that the GOP has lost its moral bearings.”
Wehner said that Don Jr. “believes, as his father does that politics should be practiced ruthlessly, mercilessly, and vengefully. The ends justify the means. Norms and guardrails need to be smashed. Morality and lawfulness must always be subordinated to the pursuit of power and self-interest. That is the Trumpian ethic.”
He also writes that Junior believes that “decency is for suckers,” and he’s not wrong.
You can read the full column here.
Featured image via Gage Skidmore/Flickr, under Creative Commons license 2.0
