We begin today’s roundup with Aaron Blake’s analysis at The Washington Post on another week of chaos and controversy at the White House:
On two issues — health care and calling the families of dead service members — the White House has shown itself to be clearly unmoored, careening back and forth based upon the unhelpful and impulsive comments and tweets of its captain.
On the more substantial issue of health care, Trump apparently told Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) to craft a deal to replace the Affordable Care Act subsidies for insurers covering low-income Americans. Trump then canceled the subsidies and explained that the money was only making insurers rich (it's not). Then he suggested he would support Alexander's deal. Then he apparently realized that those two things were completely inconsistent, and he backed off his support for the deal, leaving Alexander holding the bag and apparently (understandably) puzzled. [...]
If you think any of these things were planned, you are kidding yourself. [...] There is no game plan on any of this; it's Trump simply floating from one controversy to the next and making things worse by flying off the handle and saying untrue things. Trump's controversies are usually at least within the realm of plausible deniability; these examples just seem totally careless and haphazard.
Here’s Paul Waldman’s take at The Week:
No one suggests that Trump set out to horrify Sgt. Johnson's widow; the problem is that he is a man completely devoid of empathy, so it's hard for him to find comforting words. [...]
So here we are, with Trump getting very close to initiating a squabble with the family of a dead American soldier. Can you imagine any other president doing this?
Amy Davidson Sorkin:
One needs, also, to return to the evaded questions. Does the Trump Administration have a coherent account of what happened in Niger, and an explanation of what might happen with the deployment of troops there? Does Trump understand how many people may die in the wars he casually talks about starting? Would he make all the phone calls then? More than that, does he accept that the deaths, for the troops’ families, have meanings that have nothing to do with him?
David Graham at The Atlantic:
[I]t’s odd for the president to offer a five-figure check to one family and not to others. Second, it’s odd to offer huge sums and then not follow through—though as David Fahrenthold demonstrated during the campaign, promising large checks and then not following through has been a signature Trump move for decades. Third, Trump should have known that he had made promises like this and not followed through, and that by encouraging reporters to look around, he was inviting disaster. It was like Gary Hart telling the press they could feel free to look into his personal life, only adding the explosive element of national reverence for the military.
Audaciously, White House Press Secretary Sarah H. Sanders on Wednesday attacked Representative Frederica Wilson, who first disclosed the fiasco of the call to the Johnson family, for “trying to politicize this issue,” as though Trump had not done that with his answer at the press conference on Monday.
At The New Yorker, John Cassidy wonders if a “Trump slump” is in the cards for the market:
During his time in office, and particularly during his 2012 reëlection campaign, Obama often pointed to the market’s strong performance, but he didn’t make a fetish out of it. There were two good reasons for that. Although Presidential policies do affect the economy and the market, the link is often indirect and somewhat tenuous. In addition, as Black Monday so vividly demonstrated, what goes up can also go down. Presidents who attach their names to bull markets run the risk of becoming associated with a subsequent crash—a fate that could well befall Trump. In recent months, as the upward trend in stock prices has accelerated, the risk of a violent reversal has been increasing by the day. /react-text
On a final note, this piece by E.J. Dionne Jr. on Trump’s enablers is a must-read:
Up to now, most have cravenly absorbed all manner of insults, accepted unspeakable unseemliness, and sat by with wan smiles as Trump left them hanging by shifting his positions moment to moment. [...]
Sorry, but all Republican politicians who take their obligations seriously must stop rationalizing the irrational and say what has long been obvious, that Trump’s way of doing business is unproductive, erratic, mean and scary. Until this happens, Republicans deserve to be seen as enablers of a dangerous presidency.