Renowned journalist and author Thomas Friedman used some strong words to describe President Trump's actions.
Renowned journalist and author Thomas Friedman has likened President Trump to a "brain-eating disease."
He made the comment Wednesday during an interview with MSNBC host Andrea Mitchell who had lamented about reporters' lack of bandwidth to keep track of ongoing investigations as well as individual agencies.
"I find from a journalism point of view Donald Trump is a brain-eating disease. That is, he does so many outrageous things on a daily basis," Friedman said in response.
He then brought up the failed nomination of Sam Clovis to be chief scientist of the Agriculture Department despite Clovis's lack of qualifications.
"As a journalist or columnist, you just sit there and say, 'How can I not write about that, that's so outrageous?' And yet, if I write about it every week, I end up not going out and learning or writing about all these other things," Friedman also noted. "And I think it's a real danger that Trump is going to suck the brains out of so many reporters and columnists because you spend four years outraged at him..."
Friedman, a New York Times columnist, has been a vocal critic of the president.
"Trump is a person who doesn't connect dots — even when they're big, fat polka dots that are hard to miss," he wrote in a recent op-ed about Niger. "Rather, he thinks inside narrow little boxes built from his own simplistic impulses and applause lines — and that tendency is leading us into a web of contradictions abroad."
Trump, not surprisingly, has a different view of his presidency.
"The stock market in the United States is at an all-time high, adding already $5.5 trillion in new wealth since the very, very well-known and now very important November 8th election," the president said at a business event during his recent visit to China. "Unemployment is at a 17-year low, and so many other great things are happening to the United States, economically and otherwise. Frankly, too many to mention."