The Washington Post Monday is reporting on stories of top Trump administration aides who are finding it increasingly difficult and uncomfortable to merely navigate daily life in Washington, D.C. amid the sheer hatred of the president’s polices and behaviors.
One anecdote from Kellyanne Conway involves a grocery store episode. She says a shopper rushed up and yelled at her, “You ought to be ashamed of yourself! Go look in the mirror!”
Never one to miss the opportunity for an attack, Conway tells The Post she told the voter, “Mirrors are in aisle 9 — I’ll go get one now.”
Another complaint from a top White House aide comes from Stephen Miller, a Senior Advisor to the President who has ties to the alt-right. He has been exposed as the architect of Trump’s horrific “zero-tolerance” policy of separating infants, toddlers, young children, and teens from their undocumented parents, and placing them in cages and tent cities in sweltering heat.
“Better be better!” a “stranger” told Miller, in a verbal attack that also mocked the First Lady’s inane campaign for children – launched just before it was revealed her husband was placing kids in concentration camps.
In addition to his face appearing on “Wanted” posters plastered to lampposts in his neighborhood, Miller recounted another protest against him and his boss by a local Washington, D.C. bartender.
“One night, after Miller ordered $80 of takeout sushi from a restaurant near his apartment, a bartender followed him into the street and shouted, ‘Stephen!’ When Miller turned around, the bartender raised both middle fingers and cursed at him, according to an account Miller has shared with White House colleagues,” The Post says. “Outraged, Miller threw the sushi away, he later told his colleagues.”
A New York Times TV critic responded to a tweet Monday morning about Miller’s sushi story with emojis of, yes, a box of sushi and a small violin.
Short-lived Trump Communications Director Anthony Scaramucci tells The Post these attacks and protests on top Trump officials are “burning people out.”
“I just think there’s so much meanness,” Scaramnucci laments, “it’s causing some level of, ‘What do I need this for?’ And I think it’s a recruiting speed bump for the administration. To be part of it, you’ve got to deal with the incoming of some of this viciousness.”
In other words, the attacks and protests are working.
Image by Gage Skidmore via Flickr and a CC license