As some readers know, I never felt that Donald Trump met the standards of moral integrity and decency that Americans should look for in a candidate for the highest secular office in the world.

Mr. Trump was elected president for, among other reasons, his business acumen and managerial skills that many voters felt would be transferred to the oval office. The past few months have invalidated those assumptions.

I decided to set aside further comment until I read Ross Douthat’s column in The New York Times on May 17, “The 25th Amendment Solution to Remove Trump.” (Douthat is a conservative Republican.)

One paragraph from that column struck me like a slap in the face: [President Trump is deficient in these qualities:] “. . . a reasonable level of intellectual curiosity, a certain seriousness of purpose, a basic level of managerial competence, a decent attention span, a functional moral compass, a measure of restraint and self-control.  And if a president is deficient in one or more of them, you can be sure it will be exposed.”

The events of the past few months have exposed President Trump for what he is — I’ll let the reader paint his or her own portrait of this troubled presidency. You will find Mr. Douthat’s full column here:

I might also remind President Trump, and indeed any of us whose ego gets in the way of leading a just and decent life, of Hamlet’s words in Shakespeare’s play of that name:

HAMLET: A man may fish with the worm that hath eat of a king, and cat of the fish that hath fed of that worm.
CLAUDIUS: What dost you mean by this?
HAMLET: Nothing but to show you how a king may go a Progress through the guts of a beggar.

*Bill Britton is a Vero Communiqué Contributing Editor and a freelance writer for John Hopkins University.