President Donald Trump just can’t get Washington to respect him, with his national security adviser H.R. McMaster becoming the latest person in the president’s orbit to apparently question the commander-in-chief’s intelligence in public.
McMaster in July reportedly called his boss a “dope” and an “idiot” who has the mind of a “kindergartner,” according to a BuzzFeed News story Monday. Those insults, which five sources said came during a private dinner with Oracle CEO Safra Catz, would put McMaster in a growing group of officials who made clear they don’t think we have the sharpest guy in the Oval Office.
The National Security Council denied that McMaster trashed Trump, as did a few other White House workers who supposedly bashed the president behind his back. But other critics have been loud and proud while belittling Trump’s intellect. These are Trump’s taunters so far:
Rex Tillerson
July must have been a trying month in Trump’s world. The same month McMaster reportedly mocked the president, the secretary of state called him a “fucking moron” during a Pentagon meeting, as NBC News reported last month. The report said Tillerson, a former ExxonMobil CEO, considered leaving his post over his clashes with Trump, and he thought Trump’s controversial speech before the Boy Scouts of America would be the last straw.
Tillerson stayed on the job and told the media he wouldn’t engage “petty stuff” about his relationship to Trump. But he has never outright denied saying the insult. Trump, meanwhile, simply called the report “fake news.”
Senator Bob Corker (R-Tenn.)
Corker’s beef with Trump spilled out into the open last month when the two declared a Twitter war on each other.
After Corker had been publicly criticizing the president, Trump ranted about the Tennessee senator’s performance in a series of tweets and said the retiring lawmaker “didn’t have the guts” to run for another term. Corker, in turn, tweeted that under Trump, “the White House has become an adult day care center.”
Later that night, Corker told the New York Times Trump was treating the presidency like “a reality show” and putting the U.S. “on the path to World War III.”
Senator Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.)
Flake, who like Corker is not seeking re-election next year, has been a vocal critic of Trump for some time and condemned Trump’s leadership when he announced his impending exit on the Senate floor.
“The notion that one should stay silent as the norms and values that keep America strong are undermined,” Flake said, “and as the alliances and agreements that ensure the stability of the entire world are routinely threatened by the level of thought that goes into 140 characters — the notion that we should say or do nothing in the face of such mercurial behavior is ahistoric and, I believe, profoundly misguided. We must stop pretending.”
Trump has fired back with numerous Twitter insults about Flake and insisted the senator would have lost if he ran for another term.
Anthony Scaramucci
Though he professed his love for the president during his 11-day White House, former communications director Scaramucci penned an op-ed for Fox Business in January 2016 in which he clearly called out Trump as a danger to the GOP.
“Unbridled demagoguery has driven the GOP to an inflection point from which there is no turning back,” Scaramucci wrote while predicting a a primary loss for Trump.
He added: “Call it, if you will, a moral debt restructuring, one caused by the reckless behavior of a man who knows a thing or two about bankruptcy.”
During his blink-and-miss-it White House employment, Scaramucci started denying that the article was about Trump, who he never named in the piece.
This article was first written by Newsweek
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