Donald Trump is insecure and scared. He feels threatened.

That’s the opinion of David Brooks in a piece on the New York Times site.

Consider the tenor of Trump’s first week in office. It’s all about threat perception. He has made moves to build a wall against the Mexican threat, to build barriers against the Muslim threat, to end a trade deal with Asia to fight the foreign economic threat, to build black site torture chambers against the terrorist threat.

And he is a coward, Brooks says:

We have a word for people who are dominated by fear. We call them cowards. Trump was not a coward in the business or campaign worlds. He could take on enormous debt and had the audacity to appear at televised national debates with no clue what he was talking about. But as president his is a policy of cowardice. On every front, he wants to shrink the country into a shell.

I would add that all of this applies to those advising Trump in the White House, because he is not acting alone. There appear to be extremists in the White House who are little better that the ISIS terrorists and cowards they fear so much.

A New York Times editorial today picks up on the same theme, focusing on Trump’s Muslim ban:

The first casualties of this bigoted, cowardly, self-defeating policy were detained early Saturday at American airports just hours after the executive order, ludicrously titled “Protecting the Nation From Foreign Terrorist Entry Into the United States,” went into effect.

It also adds this:

Republicans in Congress who remain quiet or tacitly supportive of the ban should recognize that history will remember them as cowards.

Of course, as you might expect from the Twitter president, he tweeted out his displeasure again with the Times, calling them “fake news”:

There are some who feel the White House administration is deliberately picking a fight with mainstream media. With former Breitbart chief Stephan Bannon now chief adviser to Trump, does this surprise anyone? Does it surprise anyone that this administration would prefer to see the proliferation of alt-right newspapers and the demise of objective, liberal newspapers?

If Trump and Bannon’s policies concern you and you want to help in the growing resistance, the least you can do is subscribe to the New York Times for a mere $14 a month for the online edition.

You can do a lot more, of course.

And you may have to, because America appears to be on the brink of civil war — again.

— Jillian

Photo: Donald Trump on the campaign trail in 2016. Source: Donald Trump. (Photo: Marc Nozell/Wikimedia Commons)