Evidently the only person who’s allowed to insult the old president is the new president.
President Trump condemned whistleblower Chelsea Manning Thursday for criticizing former President Barack Obama with an insult Trump himself has used against the former commander-in-chief.
“Ungrateful TRAITOR Chelsea Manning,
who should never have been
released from prison, is now calling President Obama a weak leader,” he
tweeted just after 6 a.m. “Terrible!”
Trump himself has frequently suggested that Obama, who left office last week, lacked leadership skills, repeatedly praising Russian President Vladimir Putin at Obama’s expense, saying the Kremlin head is a “stronger leader” than the Democrat.
The tweet came just a day after Manning penned a scathing column for the Guardian
arguing that Obama compromised with his adversaries too much and thusly
wasn’t the “strong and unapologetic progressive” leader many liberals
had hoped he’d be.
“The one simple lesson to draw from President Obama’s legacy: do not
start off with a compromise. They won’t meet you in the middle,” she
wrote. “Instead, what we need is an unapologetic progressive leader.”
During his final days in office, Obama commuted Manning’s prison sentence.
The former private — who was sentenced to 35 years in a military prison
in 2013 for leaking classified information to whistleblowing site
WikiLeaks — will be released in May following the commutation.
Her scornful op-ed marked a complete change in tone toward Obama.
“Thank you @BarackObama for giving me a chance,” Manning tweeted last week alongside a smiling emoji with a tear of joy.
While her column
is deeply critical of Obama and his legacy, Manning did not directly
call Obama a “weak leader,” as Trump suggested. She pointed out that
Obama’s opponents called him weak, and she criticized him for attempting
to compromise with rivals who mocked him — but she didn’t directly use
the term against him.
“When it came to foreign policy, even though he was only carrying out
the expanding national security policies of the previous administration,
they would ceaselessly criticize him for being too weak, or too soft or
too sympathetic,” she wrote. “After months of comprise on his end, they
never cooperated a single time.”
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