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Trump Critics Have Let Their Dismay Go Too Far, Military Analyst Says

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President Trump arrives for a "Celebration of America" event on the South Lawn of the White House in Washington, Tuesday, June 5, 2018. (Susan Walsh/AP)
President Trump arrives for a "Celebration of America" event on the South Lawn of the White House in Washington, Tuesday, June 5, 2018. (Susan Walsh/AP)

President Trump tried to downplay the backlash to his roundly criticized meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin this week by tweeting, "Some people HATE the fact that I got along well with President Putin of Russia. They would rather go to war than see this. It's called Trump Derangement Syndrome!"

Even some critics of the president might agree.

Here & Now's Robin Young speaks with military analyst Andrew Bacevich, who writes in an op-ed for The Boston Globe critics of Trump "have allowed their understandable dismay with the president to become an all-consuming mania."

“We have a penchant for the paranoid style,” he says. “It occurs periodically in our politics, and it has a tremendously distorting effect. And I think that in some respects, we are experiencing a similar phenomenon right now.”

Interview Highlights

On how Trump triggered a “paranoid response”

“It is, I believe, anger on the right — not confined to a small minority — anger on the right that led to the election of Donald Trump. The focus of my essay was to suggest that now that Trump is president that has induced a paranoid response on the left, among Trump's critics.”

On why the paranoid response poses a greater danger than Trump himself

“Trump has certainly distorted our politics in ways that I certainly don't approve of. But I fear that this obsessive response to Trump deepens that distortion and that the events of the past couple of weeks — the G-7, the NATO summit, the Helsinki summit -- all illustrate this problem.”

"We should take cognizance of the idiotic things that [Trump] says, but I think it's equally important to recognize that much of what he says actually doesn't end up producing any substantive change."

Andrew Bacevich

On why it's important not to get caught up in Trump’s rhetoric

“So much of what the president says is utter nonsense, and it's important to call him on it. But I think it's also necessary to think about what happens next. So we have a president who makes all of these extraordinary statements about NATO — suggesting that the United States is about to withdraw from NATO, that the whole alliance system is going to collapse — and then lo and behold, that doesn't happen. So yes, we should take cognizance of the idiotic things that he says, but I think it's equally important to recognize that much of what he says actually doesn't end up producing any substantive change. We're still in NATO. There still are sanctions on the Russians for their annexation of the Crimea. The G-7 is still up and running. I'm not defending the president. I think his statements are beyond counterproductive, but it doesn't mean the end of the world.”

“What I'm saying is pay attention to more than Trump."

Andrew Bacevich

On how Trump’s “America First” policy hasn’t extended to ending wars

“So we have a president who embarrasses us, but we also have an approach to policy — one that predates Trump, that Trump, despite what he promised to do as a candidate, is in fact affirming — and I refer here to our endless wars. And I would argue that that is a far greater scandal than anything that happened at Helsinki. That what members of the press ought to be grabbing onto with the same sort of fierceness that they grab onto his stupid remarks is how can it possibly be that we are lodged in this condition of permanent war? That's what people should be writing about, talking about, arguing about every day, not Trump's latest mishap. I find it inexplicable that so many people voted for Trump. But the complaints that led so many people to vote for Trump are legitimate complaints and that's where the attention of our political system, of our media ought to be on — those grievances.

“What I'm saying is pay attention to more than Trump. Somebody sent me a note and said, 'You know, the American people have very limited bandwidth when it comes to public affairs.' And it seems to me that we are allowing Trump to suck up more of that bandwidth than he deserves.”

On how radical changes in the nation’s moral landscape led to Trump

“What I mean is that our culture is moving rapidly in a direction away from what we might call 'traditional norms' derived from our Judeo-Christian religious traditions, and a lot of people think that that's fine, necessary. But I think it's fair to recognize that there are quite a number of our fellow citizens who are uneasy with these changes. We're never going to go back to the 1950s. We shouldn't go back to the 1950s. But it seems necessary — if we're ever going to bring the country back together again — to at least acknowledge that people whose values derive from the 1950s at least deserve a certain hearing, a certain amount of respect. And I think that again is one of those issues that demands a heck of a lot more attention than the president's latest gaffe.”

This segment aired on July 20, 2018.

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