'Hapless president' deserves 'no courtesy': Trump ripped in scathing NYT op-ed

06 July

U.S. President Donald Trump uses a gavel after signing the sweeping spending and tax legislation, known as the "One Big Beautiful Bill Act," at the White House in Washington, D.C., U.S., July 4, 2025. REUTERS/Leah Millis TPX IMAGES OF THE DAY

The Lamp Editor Matthew Walther tells the New York Times that President Donald Trump does not deserve to be taken seriously by whatever historian gets stuck writing his book chapter.

“We have been advised to take Mr. Trump, if not literally, then at least seriously. I do not think we should extend him even that courtesy,” wrote Walther.

Trump is not “a Caesarean figure set upon remaking the United States in his own image,” Walther said. Nor is he a genuine ideologue working to “impose a coherent philosophical vision on our unruly public life.” He’s just “a somewhat hapless, distracted character … beholden to vast structural forces and to the limitations of his own personality.”

Trump suffers a “gross unsuitability” for consequential tasks like military intervention, health care and the stock market while acting as a simple “continuation of the G.O.P. establishment,” writes Walther. “If Barry Goldwater was the book and Ronald Reagan the movie, Mr. Trump is the glitzy jukebox musical.”

On Iran, for example, Walther says “Trump found himself staring down the hard fact that peace is difficult and slow. So he bombed a few things,” while pleading for oil prices not to increase. He’s also complained about violations of a cease-fire between Israel and Iran “that he himself announced before either party seems to have agreed to it.”

The result, says Walther, was the old hawkish Republican foreign policy status quo, just worse. Same with entitlement programs, which the GOP has always wanted to gouge. Trump declares Social Security and Medicare sacrosanct, then passes a budget bill that “includes significant cuts to Medicaid, food benefits and other programs.” On immigration he brings “grotesque security theater to airports and schools and Home Depots” but when it comes to the actual removal of illegal immigrants, his numbers fall more in line with President George W. Bush’s second term.

“The numbers don’t matter, though,” says Walther. It’s about “making headlines. … His followers are meant to cheer at the sight of Dr. Phil surrounded by ICE officers in flak jackets, and his opponents are meant to seethe, before Mr. Trump, satisfied by the noise, moves on.”

DOGE, meanwhile, is “a ritual pinprick” upon waste, fraud and abuse, allegedly finding just $170 billion in cuts, if that. Far short of the $1 trillion DOGE wanted. It’s all Trump’s classic tactic of “overpromise, underdeliver, change the subject.”

“Mr. Trump is forever setting himself challenges and then becoming bored with them,” says Walther. “He does not evolve. He flinches, recants, forgets, redirects. He discovers each time — freshly, dumbly — that this is not how power works.”

Read the full Times report at this link.

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