The professional Trump haters

How many vicious, clever, angry, sputtering take-downs of Donald Trump is enough?

If the president actually does something significant — as opposed to merely tweeting or saying something obnoxious or offensive — then pundits should certainly feel free to write about and denounce it. (I certainly do.) But the relentless, obsessive-compulsive focus on every Trumpian action and utterance by the likes of Max Boot, Jennifer Rubin, Michael Gerson, Bill Kristol, Peter Wehner, and a handful of other commentators is something else entirely. The Trump preoccupation says far more about the critics than the criticized.

Yes, presidents are important. And yes, Trump is appalling — ignorant, bigoted, corrupt, malicious, inept. But from the moment he launched his presidential campaign in June 2015, he's proven himself to be brilliant at one thing above all, and that is "triggering the libs." And not just the libs. To judge by the political analysts most likely to devote multiple column inches a week to ejaculating outrage in his direction, Trump is also remarkably adept at triggering the neocons. Which, come to think of it, may indicate that at least some of them have always been more lib than con.

With every column dedicated to verifying the awfulness of Donald Trump, these pundits confess to his pathological hold over their psyches. They also inadvertently demonstrate that their judgment has been distorted by their boundless loathing of the man who inhabits the White House. They fail to recognize that their Trump hatred ends up elevating him into a seemingly all-powerful force in American (and world) politics when he is in fact an incredibly weak president who can't even get his own staff to follow through on direct orders. This has been vividly clear since the very beginning of his presidency and has recently been confirmed more powerfully than ever by the Mueller report, with its intricate narrative of institutionalized defiance and insubordination by underlings.

Describing the Trump haters as primarily triggered libs is to some extent unfair to liberals. It's true that nearly every progressive pundit and activist despises Trump, and many of them respond right on cue to every tweeted provocation. Yet liberal opinion journalists tend not to be quite as Trump obsessed as those who write from the center-right. The left's exposés of the president's atrocious words and deeds tend to be interspersed with broader attacks on the institutional Republican Party and its voters and intellectual infrastructure, as well as examinations of progressive policy priorities and candidates for president.