“
“The Republican Party has got to get a grip on itself. Right now, Republican leaders and members of the Congress, in both the Senate and in the House, are holding back because they’re terrified of what will happen to any one of them if they speak out,” he said. “Will they lose a primary? I don’t know why that’s such a disaster, but will they lose a primary?
“And so, they need to get a grip, and when they see things that are not right they need to say something about it, because our foreign policy is in shambles right now in my humble judgement,” he added.
Powell cited Trump reportedly circling Alabama with a sharpie on a hurricane map — sparking a weeks-long controversy that involved federal agencies covering up the odd gambit — as evidence of the current problems with the government.
“And I see things happening that are hard to understand. A couple weeks ago the president put a circle around south east Alabama, saying it’s going to get hit by a hurricane. He put it on top of the meteorological prediction,” Powell said.
“In my time, one of us would have gone to the president and said, ‘Mr President, you screwed up, so we’ve got to fix it and we’ll put out a correction.’ You know what they did this time? They ordered the Commerce Department to go out and backup whatever the president mis-said. This is not the way the country’s supposed to run, and Congress is one of the institutions that should be doing something about this.”
Powell concluded, “The media has a role to play, we all have a role to play, you’ve got to remember that all these pieces are a part of our government. Executive branch, Congress, Supreme Court, and of the Fourth Estate, and we’ve got to remember that the Constitution started with, ‘We the People,’ not ‘Me the President.'”
