NOVEMBER 2025 – Thanks largely to Trump’s daily turpitude, there’s been a surge of moral clarity among opinion writers – especially those with no allegiance to Democrats. Take yesterday’s column by DC legend George Will, headlined “A Sickening Moral Slum of an Administration” after the latest Hegseth outburst. “Worse than simply incompetent,” as the subhead concludes. That’s perhaps the sharpest criticism, among many, that Will, now 84 and a lifelong classical liberal (read that traditional conservative), has generated since Trump has taken power.
But perhaps a more prolific moral critic these days is The Atlantic’s Tom Nichols. In November he wrote a series of biting commentaries on Trump and the administration. And the most spot-on was his Nov. 21 piece in The Atlantic headlined: “Trump is Losing Control of Himself: (His) Outbursts This Week on Social Media Were Different from Usual.” Much of the piece focused on Trump’s cruel and insulting treatment of women journalists – a Bloomberg reporter and an ABC News correspondent – over the last weeks.
The first two paragraphs:
Presidents often lose control over their agenda, or the policy process, or pieces of legislation. Sometimes, they even lose control of their party. But Donald Trump seems to have lost control over the one thing every person, and especially those with immense power, should always maintain control over: himself. Yesterday the president called for the arrest and execution of elected American officials for the crime—as he sees it—of fidelity to the Constitution.
It would be easy merely to note, yet again, that the president is a depraved man and a menace to the American system of government. As remarkable as it is to say it, however, the outbursts of this past week are different, and were likely triggered by Trump’s panic over the release of files about his former friend, the dead sex offender Jeffery Epstein. No one should treat this new phase in the president’s aggression against democracy as just another episode in the Trump reality show.
The 64-year-old Nichols is labeled a think-tank academic, retired from teaching. He’s certainly a star on the public intellectual circuit. He won a Rosebud earlier this year for his on-deadline commentary on Hegseth’s bizarre presentation before 800 generals in Quantico, Va., which took place in September.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/11/trump-maga-insults-trolling/684786/
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/2025/11/trump-truth-social-control/685019/
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2025/12/pete-hegseth-pentagon-department-defense/685098/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2025/12/02/trump-hegseth-rubio-ukraine-venezuela-boats/