(Quin Hillyer, Liberty Headlines) New Republican presidents usually enjoy an extra-long “honeymoon” on the political right, but Donald Trump instead continues to attract spectacularly divergent reviews even from those on his side of the ideological spectrum.
Friday’s main page of National Review Online gave a perfect example of this phenomenon, with former Pulitzer Prize winners George Will and Charles Krauthammer calling Trump various shades of “dangerous” while media mogul (and British peer) Conrad Black did the opposite, praising Trump profusely. That one page proves a microcosm of the larger conservative media world’s assessment of the billionaire president.
Few columnists have been as scathingly critical of Trump as Will has, and his latest column is no exception. Will writes that Trump has “an untrained mind bereft of information and married to stratospheric self-confidence.”
Will continued:
Trump has entered his eighth decade unscathed by even elementary knowledge about the nation’s history. As this column has said before, the problem isn’t that he does not know this or that, or that he does not know that he does not know this or that. Rather, the dangerous thing is that he does not know what it is to know something.
Further, Will says, the American public should possess “a steady, rational fear of this man whose combination of impulsivity and credulity render him uniquely unfit to take the nation into a military conflict.”
Tough stuff….
[Later in the column]….
[On the other hand,] Slate did a roundup of right-leaning sources commenting on the benchmark of Trump’s first 100 days, concluding that “almost all” conservative media outlets gave him “high marks.” National Review as an institution “was largely affirmative” because it posited the new president “has stopped and reversed Obama’s eight-year slouch toward socialism.” Slate likewise counted Breitbart, The Daily Caller, and Lifezette among those that gave Trump high grades – although several of those same publications identified by Slate in the pro-Trump column used headlines that were less definitive, as in the case of Lifezette calling its own experts’ assessments a “mixed report card.”…
[The full story is at this link.]
