PRESIDENT BARTLET HAS THOUGHTS ON PRESIDENT TRUMP: Martin Sheen’s blistering anti-Trump speech is branded ‘self-important’ and ‘cringe’ by furious fans.
Martin Sheen didn’t hold back while slamming the Trump administration during a fiery interview with MSNBC’s Nicolle Wallace on Monday.
While filming a live-taping of The Best People podcast, the three-time Emmy winner, 85, criticized the president’s inner circle for lacking integrity and failing to meet the public’s ‘great hunger’ for truth.
‘It’s a mighty battle going on. It’s not about winning or losing. It’s about being in touch with your own personal humanity because there’s such a lack of it coming from this administration,’ Sheen said.
The West Wing star, known for portraying a fictional U.S. president, went on to describe the atmosphere he believes surrounds Trump’s cabinet.
‘I’m convinced of this — that when you look at this group of people at the round table in the White House, the cabinet room, every one of those people look across the table and they do not see anyone who is better than they are,’ he said.
He continued: ‘They generally see a reflection of their [worst] selves. There’s no heroes in there. There’s no music. There’s no laughter. There’s no self-effacement. There’s no joy in that room. It smells of ego and fear and false worship.’
Exit quote: “Sheen went on to advise Trump start speaking from his ‘heart and start being human.’”
Beyond the extraordinarily bad timing of Sheen’s meltdown on this of all days, it’s a reminder that the veteran actor has no problem with a president’s inner circle displaying a complete lack of humanity – as long as that president has a (D) after his name:
Flashback: Magical Sorkinism:
Among the worst disasters for progressivism in recent decades has been the work of Aaron Sorkin, whose impossibly articulate ratatat dialogue made it way too easy to imagine sexy technocrats saving the world. It’s great entertainment, but normalized unreasonable expectations of the flawed human beings who happen to have high IQs and impeccable credentials.
As a child of the New Left, I never missed The West Wing: it was irresistible catnip for my adolescent hopes and dreams, and so much more satisfying than whatever was on the news—except for the eloquent public intellectuals on the Bill Moyers show on PBS. Later, as an idealistic policy major at Brown, I was surprised and disappointed to find basically nobody operating on that level.
It was only when I’d lucked into joining the Moyers organization that I began to understand how such Sorkinesque eloquence was manufactured each week—not with deliberate dishonesty, but ever more misleading as years passed and the scene grew shallower.
Or as Megan McArdle reminded leftists at the Daily Beast over a decade ago: Memo: The Aaron Sorkin Model of Political Discourse Doesn’t Actually Work.