New York Rep. Dan Donovan, one of a number of Republicans worried about Trump’s prospects next year, criticized the president for denigrating U.S. institutions and characterizations in speeches this week, saying, “Anybody that pays a lot of attention to the media, watching what the president is doing with him or her or what he says about the judiciary should have some concerns.”
Mr. Donovan said he thought Mr. Trump’s description of the ruling by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals allowing immigrants who passed the security screening process to stay in the country was “the most ungracious thing I’ve ever heard” from a president.
“It was un-presidential in the sense that he wouldn’t let the court speak for itself,” he said.
Mr. Donovan, who is running for a job on the New York State Supreme Court, is far more sanguine about Mr. Trump’s prospects next year. The former prosecutor, who said he didn’t think Mr. Trump was responsible for the efforts by his former lawyers to undermine special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s investigation, described Mr. Trump as “thriving and very, very energized.”
“I think the turbulence around him, if it makes him more engaged in what he’s doing, then I think he’s a force to be reckoned with,” he said.
His district, Long Island’s 11th, is Trump country and in April became the first seat of its kind since Mr. Trump won the presidency, representing GOP county lines in a Democratic-leaning swath of Long Island known as the “Island Empire.”
