Former Fox host blasts Trump for 'doing whatever it takes to expand his power'

Howard Kurtz, former host of FOX News Channel's "MediaBuzz" says that though President Donald Trump is hailed as a peacemaker abroad following the volatile ceasefire between Israel and terrorist organization Hamas, at home he is the complete opposite.

Thanks to his intervening in the Middle East, Trump, Kurtz writes, "has drawn praise from leading Democrats (the Clintons), virtually all the media (which he thanked), and the likes of Jimmy Kimmel, James Carville and Bill Maher."

However, Kurtz says, "then he came home," to the United States, where government employees aren't being paid in a seemingly endless shutdown that "Trump engineered," and where he targeted the Department of Education, whose Office of Civil Rights and the Special Education unit "will be down to about six staffers, a 95 percent reduction since he took office."

The president has "cut or frozen almost $28 billion for projects largely based in Democratic-led cities and states, according to a New York Times analysis. That includes giant transportation projects in New York and Chicago," Kurtz says.

The former Fox host also points out how Trump refused to take questions from an ABC reporter after an on-air clash between anchor George Stephanopoulos and Vice President JD Vance in which Stephanopoulos pressed Vance repeatedly about bribery allegations involving Trump border czar Tom Homan, ultimately cutting the interview short.

"What a stark contrast. Why is the man capable of such steely leadership abroad insisting on being such a divisive figure at home?" Kurtz asks and then offers an answer to his own question.

"He fervently believes that keeping an iron grip on his MAGA base is how he got elected and crucial to his political health. When Democrats attack his actions, it thrills most of his Republican supporters," he says.

Kurtz goes on to say that "Trump often complains that he is a victim."

And though Kurtz says the president has a point, he also says that "no president has ever ordered the Justice Department to prosecute his political opponents, as with the indictments of James Comey and Letitia James. That shatters any remaining notion of DOJ independence."

And while Trump has remained silent on the recent scandal unleashed when Politico published thousands of chat messages between young Republicans spewing racist, antisemitic and misogynistic slurs, Kurtz notes how a White House spokesperson brushed them off as a "random group chat."

What's "striking," he says, is how Vice President JD Vance reacted to the messages, downplaying them and pointing to a Democratic candidate for Virginia Attorney General whose texts revealed his desire to put "two bullets to the head" of a Republican colleague.

"It’s also a classic case of whataboutism, with each party’s leaders — there are some exceptions — focusing on the other side’s misconduct," Kurtz says.

The president has shown "little interest in winning over his detractors," Kurtz says, adding, "In the Middle East, Trump was trying to bring combatants together. In America, he is the chief combatant, doing whatever it takes to wield and expand his power."