Krauthammer hit Trump pretty hard last night after his tweets against Morning Joe and Mika. Krauthammer argued this is the kind of rhetoric you hear in banana republics and compared it to how Chavez and Duterte would talk about opponents.
Watch (it’s cued up to 4:25):
Krauthammer said that Trump’s tone is degrading and reduces America from a grand republic to a banana republic.
At that point Mercedes Schlapp interrupts Krauthammer by pointing out that Trump isn’t acting like a banana republic dictator by shutting down the press and putting tanks in the street, and that he has a ‘right’ to state his opinion. But that wasn’t Krauthammer’s point. He was only referring to Trump’s tone and the subsequent degradation of the politics, not an abuse of power. Also, Mercedes sounded just a bit unhinged in that clip.
Krauthammer went on to say this about Trump’s tweeting:
We’re getting a look into the psyche of the president and what we’re seeing is a vindictiveness, a cruelty, a lack of temperedness(?), a lack of self control which is truly shocking, and that’s what I think people are reacting to…
That’s a very good way to describe what we are seeing in these tweets that bother us so much. It’s not to say that Trump is a cruel man – not at all. But he is clearly vindictive and he wants to hit back when he gets offended and sometimes he’s cruel about the way in which he does it.
I can’t disagree with that at all.