Credit: Ben Wiseman

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The president’s advisers stink. That’s not the problem.

By Frank Bruni

Given President Trump’s habitual insistence that he’s a victim — of partisan prosecutors, incompetent pollsters, the Federal Reserve, Norway — it’s a tribute to him that Republicans are identifying yet another clique of malefactors doing him wrong: He’s being undermined by his own accomplices. They’re doling out “bad advice.”

That was the precise phrase — the exact verdict — rendered by Gov. Kevin Stitt of Oklahoma in an interview on CNN about the killing of Alex Pretti and the brutality of ICE agents in Minneapolis. Stitt acknowledged “deep concerns over federal tactics and accountability.” But he also insisted that the president’s priorities regarding immigration and border security were right. It’s just that Trump was “getting bad advice right now.”

Other Republicans delivered the same message by focusing intently on the sins of Kristi Noem, the nation’s homeland security secretary, and the callousness of Gregory Bovino, the senior Border Patrol official who egged on the government’s masked gunmen — until he was given a timeout last week. They botched the mission. Debased the president.

What a joke. You can’t dishonor someone who has no honor to begin with. You can’t humiliate someone who so consistently and thoroughly humiliates himself.

But that’s just the start of the “bad advice” bunk.

Continue/Read Original Article Here: Trump can be bad all on his own