Oh for sure, Trump absolutely only ever goes after people he things wronged him. But when you’re trying to be president, that list also includes a lot of genuinely really shitty people whose shit has been getting “politely” ignored. He’s just picking up what he knows are bad things for those people to have done (i.e. he specifically says Powell made mistakes in Iraq in his “statement”) and, because his mouth is wired directly to his brain stem, firing those things out as part of justifying why they were terrible for being mean to him, or at least why it’s not fair for them to get treated “better” than him. The criticism of the system and its players is incidental to his personal vendettas, simply by virtue of who the targets are.
Absolutely. It has the veneer of legitimate criticism, but it’s really all just self-indulgent bullying. Too many people seem to look at his remarks and say “well, he criticized Powell (or really, [insert political figure from the early 2000s here]) over Iraq, and you know, he’s got a point”. But he’s not making a point, he’s just scoring one. The inability to distinguish between those two things is, as the article you linked says at length, a major problem. It’s how tritely-vague-but-also-not-wrong applause lines like “drain the swamp” get transformed from “god there’s just so much corruption in DC, we need to fix this” into nights of long knives wielded by the corrupt.
