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On March 8, 1933, on his 92 th birthday, retired Supreme Court judge Oliver Wendell Holmes received a sudden visit from the new president, Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
The two chatted for half an hour. after Roosevelt left, a young clerk asked Holmes what he thought of the new couple in the White Palace. "A second-
"First-class wisdom," Holmes said. "But a first-
Class temperament.
"In the commander-in-chief of the United States, good temperament is usually more important than the brain.
That's why Ronald Reagan is a very successful president, a smart but cheerful person. When President Richard Nixon, who was smart but thoughtful and paranoid, ended up in scandal and disgrace. A first-
John F.
Kennedy passed the Cuban missile crisis, and after the failed grand plan of the intellectual Woodro Wilson to build a peaceful, democratic international order after World War I, he eventually became a broken man.
If the great Holmes were alive to judge the current president of the United States, he would almost certainly sign on to more and more people, including many Republicans and conservatives: Donald Trump has a third
Class intelligence paired with an unstable temperament.
Last week, the sharp swings in sentiment and rhetoric Trump showed in a series of public appearances appeared to make public assessments of the president more inclined to this highly shocking view.
Last Monday night, when he outlined a rather unobtrusive but rather coherent shift in US involvement in Afghanistan, he read stiffly from the script, but, the next night, trump at a campaign rally in Phoenix, more than an hour, attacked free media and members of his own party when he was about his new
Nazi violence in Charlottsville, Virginia
After a long speech at Trump's Phoenix, former Director of National Intelligence James R.
Clapper questioned on CNN whether Trump was fit to serve, saying the speech was "very scary and disturbing" and saying, "I am concerned about getting the nuclear code.
In a commentary in The New York Times on Sunday, Ronald Reagan and Peter Weiner, senior figures from the Bush administration, urged congressional Republicans to see themselves as "shadow governments ", to make up for Trump's "moral ugliness and intellectual inconsistency ".
Republicans in Congress acknowledged the Trump administration's rolling disaster, he said.
Wehner said the Republicans privately declared the president an incompetent and unfit "King of Children ".
Some of the Republicans are open with disdain. Tennessee Sen.
Bob Cork and Arizona Sen.
Jeff Fletcher has all made harsh criticisms of Trump.
And was attacked by Trump.
"The president has not yet been able to show stability, nor has he shown some of the abilities he needs to show to succeed," Corker said in a television interview . ".
"He didn't show that he understood what made the country great and what it was today.
"Fletcher wrote his thoughts in a book," conservative conscience, "which calls for Trump's reckless Twitter, his unnerving appeal to false conspiracy theories, and his mad anger
He also condemned Trump's extreme opposition.
Immigration and
Muslim rhetoric and his long-standing betrayal of the Republican Party
Resolutely oppose oppressive regimes around the world.
Mr. Fletcher is likely to pay for his bold criticism of Trump's instability in his re-election campaign next year.
The president has encouraged three possible rights.
The wing challenger who wants to chase flag in the primary.
But he could not remain silent on his conscience, he said.
"For the future of conservatives and for the future of our country, the risks are too high," Fletcher wrote in his book . ".
When the president's own party members began to ask themselves if the people they put in the White House were almost crazy, it was hard to imagine that the risk would be higher.
For Spain reading the article, click on hereDavid. Horsey@latimes.
On twitter @ David Horsey @ twitterdoyle McManus: Trump has abandoned supporters like no other president in the modern history editing series: Trump's enemies are enough, questioning him, I want to get him out of office with Amendment 25.
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