George Conway to Trump: 'You would have been fired from any other job by now'
Outspoken Trump critic George Conway on Sunday said the president “would have been fired from any other job by now” for “self-defeating behavior” after he celebrated, then defended, a deal his administration forged with Mexico to avoid tariffs he threatened to impose in retaliation for illegal immigration.
“I know it is not at all ‘Presidential’ to hit back at the Corrupt Media, or people who work for the Corrupt Media, when they make false statements about me or the Trump Administration,” the president tweeted Saturday, a day after he announced the deal with Mexico, aspects of which the New York Times reported were already agreed upon months before the president’s tariff threat.
“Problem is, if you don’t hit back, people believe the Fake News is true. So we’ll hit back!” Trump’s tweet continued.
“You’re not ‘presidential’ at all, period,” Conway, who has fiercely advocated for Trump’s resignation and called the president's mental fitness into question, responded Sunday via Twitter after the president lambasted media reports that devalued his deal.
“You’re mentally unwell,” wrote Conway, who is married to White House counselor Kellyanne Conway. “You engage in bizarre, irrational, self-defeating behavior, which prompts criticism of you, which triggers more bizarre, irrational, self-defeating behavior. You would have been fired from any other job by now.”
“Do yourself and the country a favor,” Conway added. “Resign and seek the psychological treatment you so obviously need.”
Later, Trump on Sunday “hit back” against the New York Times after it called into question the breakthrough he claimed for his deal and compared his record with that of his predecessor Barack Obama.
“Another false report in the Failing @nytimes,” he wrote in the first in a series of tweets. “We have been trying to get some of these Border Actions for a long time, as have other administrations, but were not able to get them, or get them in full, until our signed agreement with Mexico.”
“If President Obama made the deals that I have made, both at the Border and for the Economy, the Corrupt Media would be hailing them as Incredible [and] a National Holiday would be immediately declared,” he followed up in a separate tweet. “With me, despite our record setting Economy and all that I have done, no credit!”
Before reaching the deal with Mexico, Trump threatened to impose 5 percent tariffs on all Mexican goods starting on Monday if Mexico didn’t act to stem the flow of Central American migrants traveling through to the Mexico-U.S. border to seek asylum.
Democratic presidential candidates criticized his close-call trade war with Mexico and overall approach to addressing what Trump has called a “humanitarian and national security crisis” at the border.
“The president has completely overblown what he reports to have achieved,” said Democratic candidate Beto O’Rourke Sunday in an interview on ABC’s “This Week.” “These are agreements that Mexico had already made, in some cases months ago. They might have accelerated the time table, but by and large the president achieved nothing except to jeopardize the most important trading relationship that the United States of America has.”
He continued: “There are 6 million jobs in this country that depend on U.S.-Mexico trade, about 40 percent of the value of everything that we import from Mexico actually originated here in this country, on factory floors in Michigan, in Indiana and Ohio, farmers right here in Iowa who depend on those markets in Mexico that they’ve worked a lifetime to create.”
“We need a leader in this country who’s going to make sure that we fight for those farmers for the American workers, that we strengthen our ties with Mexico and that we secure our connection with the rest of the world, not through walls or putting kids in cages,” O’Rourke added.
Another 2020 hopeful, Sen. Bernie Sanders, blasted Trump for using tariffs to threaten allies and implementing a "trade policy based on tweets."
“What the president has done is tout what, in fact, in many respects Mexico has agreed to do many months ago,” said Sanders in an interview with CNN's “State of the Union” Sunday. “What the world is tired of, and what I am tired of, is a president who consistently goes to war, verbal war, with our allies — whether it is Mexico, whether it is Canada.”
“We need a decent relationship with Mexico,” he added. “They are our allies, as is the case with Canada. We should not be confronting them every other day.”
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