George Will’s Spleen Defeats His Good Sense

By Conrad Black| January 24th, 2019

Once again, it is my unpleasant duty to take issue with my friend of nearly 40 years, the eminent commentator George Will. On January 18, he published a column in the Washington Post entitled, “The Shabbiest U.S. President Ever Is an Inexpressibly Sad Specimen.” Will has deployed his formidable polemical talents very consistently in describing the president before and since his inauguration as a vulgar, uncultured, impulsive, frequently infantile, erratic, shallow, and in his present position, dangerous man.

Unfortunately, some of the president’s less likeable foibles vest Will’s strictures with some plausibility. But as in his many previous verbal assaults on this president, Will’s policy objections to the administration are sparse and unsubstantial.

Will grants himself extreme liberties in psychoanalyzing the president, imputing motives to him, and mind-reading generally. He is, as he has sometimes said, like all of us, an “unlicensed psychiatrist,” an admission which acknowledges the unrigorous nature of these reflections, however entertainingly formulated.

Among President Trump’s many unusual accomplishments, he has reduced a number of America’s, and other countries’ most distinguished commentators to repetitive and vertiginously escalating invective almost devoid of serious analysis. Will and many others, every week, are just putting old wine in new bottles.

Will’s January 18 column describes “this incessantly splenetic presidency.” That is inaccurate as a description of Trump, but is a fair description of Will and many other commentators, who would, in earlier times, deserve to be read assiduously and considered seriously. Donald Trump is generally behaving more or less as he has in all the 40 years he has been a well-known public figure. It is George Will and many other generally less exalted observers of the Washington political scene who have abandoned all claims to reasoned analysis, and have been completely predictable and steadily more extreme in their disparagement of the president and his administration...........To Read More....