What next? Frighteningly, this is not a rhetorical question.
President Donald Trump is looking into another self-inflicted disaster. His reaction in the past is to do something horrid as a distraction. It’s worked well for him up until now, but the nature of manipulation means that each distraction has to be bigger than the last.
So what’s going wrong for Trump this week? First — and most important — Trump has to come up with a funding plan for the federal government this week and get it passed. Otherwise, the government closes down. It’s a big deal. Trump hasn’t done that yet, so we’re looking at a possible federal shutdown even though the Republican party controls both Houses of Congress and the Presidency. That’s not just impressively bad, it’s an unprecedented failure.
And everyone is watching Trump drive the bus right into a shutdown.
Since Mexico is clearly never paying for Trump’s wall, Trump’s looking for US taxpayers to cough up the $24 billion. Unsurprisingly, most people are pretty thin on the idea. So Trump threatened the destroy the ACA unless Democrats caved and funded his wall in the budget. That he hasn’t written, and that, by itself, threatens a government shutdown.
Come on. Of course Trump got caught! He was publicly threatening to dynamite health care as blackmail.
Trump somehow put his healthcare repeal back on his agenda, despite no chance of success. He still has the same plan that failed before — for good reason — and the people who voted against it haven’t changed their minds. Another failure lined up.
Trump says he’ll announce a massive tax reform announcement by Wednesday. Sounds unlikely to happen, since tax reform is hugely complex, and none of the White House staff even knew they were working on it. Trump continues to insist he’ll do that this week.
The governmental Russian investigations keeps imploding, but the press keeps uncovering felonious crimes. The fake Congressional investigations continue to not deflect attention from Trump’s many disturbing connections to the Russian attempts to jigger the US election, and the Senate’s investigation was shown to be a paper tiger, too. The FBI is compromised under Directory Comey, and we already know any FBI recommendations would be sent to the Trump DOJ for action. Or not. So people aren’t waiting.
Trump manages to express his support for Marine Le Pen, the far-right, utterly terrible French Presidential candidate and darling of the Kremlin. This is the Kremlin and Putin, who, emboldened by their success weakening America, continue to break laws all over the world trying to tear down NATO, the EU, and even working on convincing California to secede from the Union.
And Trump got caught.
Rex Tillerson is dismantling the State Department, but he keeps getting caught at it. As North Korea threatens to launch new ballistic missiles, and conduct nuclear weapons tests, threatening South Korea, Japan, and even the northwestern US, the US rattles its sabres as loudly as it can. Except that Trump’s threatened ‘armada’ was actually steaming south, directly away from North Korea. And the other military people who knew this appear to have been afraid to actually tell Trump he was completely wrong, so they lied about it for weeks. And the State Department, inexplicably, wasn’t involved in this diplomatic effort.
And Trump got caught.
Instead of dealing with that, the State Department used their resources to illegally promote the private Mar-A-Lago resort.
And Trump got caught.
Trump declared new, big tariffs against… Canada! One of our few remaining close allies. That one’s not making him friends.
Trump continues to fill the DC swamp with billionaire alligators and fat Wall Street bankers. And Russian agents: Flynn, Manafort, Page, and others. Trump still hasn’t nominated people for more than a few dozen of the five-hundred-something positions he’s required to fill, and the few thousand secondary positions he’s expected to fill. And even so, something like 24 of his nominees have withdrawn from consideration, and many have left or been marginalized (Michael Flynn remains the boy wonder for being a paid foreign agent, but ever wonder what happened to Steve Bannen or Kellyanne Conway?).
At the same time, his administration continues to fire or remove waves of senior federal professionals: senior State Department career professional, 46 US Attorneys, even the Surgeon General, all without cause and without nominating replacements. Hell, Trump can’t seem to find anyone outside his own family he trusts.
And of course Trump gets caught. As he fires more career professionals are forced out or transferred, his administration as a group becomes less informed and less competent. They’re starting to make amazingly ineffective and self-destructive choices.
Despite railing obscenely against Obama’s Executive Orders during his campaign, President Trump now puffs himself up for his many, massive, Executive Orders. And the courts have blocked both of his Muslim Bans, and now they’ve blocked Trump’s EO threatening sanctuary cities. Trump’s avowedly apolitical Attorney General Jeff Sessions announces both how much he thinks courts shouldn’t disagree with Trump, how little Sessions understands the American judiciary, and even whether Sessions knows that Hawaii is actually a full US state.
Trump is profiting obscenely from the Presidency. And his Trust is profiting. And his children are profiting. And his in-laws are profiting. And while we’re probably missing the majority of those payoffs, Trump and his family do get caught, over and over. Just last weekend, Trump met with two former Colombian Presidents at Mar-A-Lago, and appeared to reap hundreds of thousands of dollars just from that one meeting. They have to if they want to meet Trump at his privately owned, members-only golf club. Or at his hotel in DC. Or in Trump Tower in New York.
And Trump got caught.
Near the 100-day mark, Trump has the lowest approval rating of any President in polling history. Really, at least for NBC polling. And his administration, rather than getting past its initial problems, seems to be getting less capable and less competent. I hope that they will eventually become better at the job, but right now, they’re still declining.
Yesterday, Trump announced he was asking for all US Senators to come to the White House for a secret briefing about North Korea. (Side note: the White House doesn’t have a Secure Classified Information Facility (a SCIF) big enough to fit that many people at once. The Capital does, and they invited Trump there, but the White House refused, choosing to modify a White House auditorium instead.) All this while we’re in the middle of a diplomatic crisis.
Sure, all that’s entertaining, but what’s the problem right now? Why am I making a special fuss this week?
North Korea is likely to test a nuclear weapon soon. Trump, who fired his career diplomats and is operating without a functioning State Department, is trying to deal with North Korea nuclear aggression with empty threats and sabre-rattling. Trump is a guy who’s hapless, incompetent, indifferent to the consequences of his actions, and desperate for a new distraction.
I wonder what he’s planning to announce?
