Presidenting isn’t easy.
Yes, apparently the one thing the Donald Trump camp has learned over the past three months is that “this sh*t is hard.” As reported by Politico:
“I think he’s much more aware how complicated the world is,” former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, an informal adviser to the administration, told the website. “This will all be more uphill than he thought it would be because I think he had the old-fashioned American idea that you run for office, you win, then people behave as though you won.”
Well, you can say that again.
As the Politico article illustrates, it appears that even Trump himself may have noticed that most of his “business acumen” is of little use in the White House.
Trump admitted last week that getting legislation passed was a lot different than negotiating real estate or reality television deals, according to Politico.
“Making business decisions and buying buildings don’t involve heart,” Trump said. “This involves heart. These are heavy decisions.”
You can't really cram for a “heart” test. It's not something you can get out of a briefing book: it’s either there or it isn’t. And in Trump’s own case, it mostly isn’t. Some of his aides have made a similar discovery.
“I kind of pooh-poohed the experience stuff when I first got here,” one White House official told Politico. “But this sh*t is hard.”
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“If you’re an adviser to him, your job is to help him at the margins, to talk him out of doing crazy things," said one source described by Politico as a “Trump confidante.”
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“You don’t walk in with a traditional presentation, like a binder or a PowerPoint — he doesn’t care,” said one senior administration official. “He doesn’t consume information that way. You go in and tell him the pros and cons, and what the media coverage is going to be like.”
Because what the media thinks is all that really matters to Trump. It’s been reported that he binge watches cable news whenever he gets a chance and rage tweets when he sees something he doesn’t like, or something he thinks more media outlets—besides Fox—should be reporting.
Never mind the escalating threat of war with North Korea: he can’t even get the simple things straight.
Like when Melania had to remind him to put his hand over his heart during the National Anthem that preceded this year’s White House Easter Egg Roll.
Remember when people said Obama was “un-American" for that? Of course you do.
Then there was the time Trump got fixated on chocolate cake and forgot which country he was bombing.
“So what happened is, I said [to President Xi], ‘We’ve just launched 59 missiles heading to Iraq,’” Trump said.
Into where? Of course he corrected himself a few seconds later, after the reporter pointed out his mistake. But that’s a rather important detail, don’t you think?
There was also the time he become confused between House Speaker Paul Ryan and Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson while speaking in their home state of Wisconsin.
“I said, Ron, make sure these [NATO] countries start paying their bills a little bit more,” Trump said, referring to a man whose name is definitely Paul.
“They’re way, way behind, Ron,” Trump continued, speaking to the guy whose name is still, without question, Paul.
Or the time he thought the current leader of North Korea, Kim Jong Un, was the same person as both his father, Kim Jong Il, and also his grand-father, Kim Jong Sung Kim Il-Sung, who ran the country until 1994 when Bill Clinton was president.
“They’ve been talking with this gentleman for a long time,” Trump said. “You read Clinton’s book, he said, ‘Oh, we made such a great peace deal,’ and it was a joke. You look at different things over the years, with President Obama. Everybody’s been outplayed. They’ve all been outplayed by this gentleman.”
The current “gentleman” leading North Korea, Kim Jong-Un, was high school-age when Clinton was president and didn’t become the leader of the country until 2011.
And don’t let Trump start trying to share new things he’s “learned,” like he did during a dinner event for the National Republican Congressional Committee after he’d made a yet another fascinating discovery about Abraham Lincoln.
“Most people don’t even know he was a Republican,” Trump said, which is absolutely not true. “Right? Does anyone know? A lot of people don’t know that. We have to build that up a little bit more.”
Yeah, you go build that up. People will be shocked—shocked, I say!
Then there was when he revealed he thinks Frederick Douglass is still alive, somewhere out there.
“Frederick Douglass is an example of somebody who has done an amazing job that is being recognized more and more, I noticed,”
Yeah, he’s been dead since 1895.
Or this one, from a recent women’s forum where he spoke.
“Have you heard of Susan B. Anthony? I’m shocked that you’ve heard of her!”
Well, I had a silver dollar once, so yeah, I’ve heard of her.
Or how about when he forgot exactly where he put one of our aircraft carrier “armadas?”
Remember that U.S. aircraft carrier that was headed to the Korean Peninsula as both the Trump administration and North Korea began to talk tough with one another? It turns out it wasn't — at least, not when we were led to think it was.
The Trump administration is again facing questions about why it appeared to mislead — or, at the very least, failed to correct the record about pervasive reports — that the USS Carl Vinson was headed to North Korea starting 10 days ago. Newly discovered photos show that it was actually traveling in the other direction — into the Indian Ocean — as recently as four days ago.
Who could not know that the Indian Ocean is just a measly 3,000 miles from the Sea of Japan and North Korea? That’s like knowing that Abraham Lincoln was a Republican—and have you heard of Susan B. Anthony? And how about this amazing new guy on the scene, Frederick Douglass?
While one could argue this is merely trivia, Trump’s lack of understanding about government doesn't just extend to people and places: it extends to the nature of the Constitution itself. That would be why both of his attempted Muslim travel bans went down in flames, as did his failed attempt to strong-arm so called “sanctuary cities” by threatening to pull funding.
And in retaliation for those court decisions he’s threatened to “break up the Ninth Circuit,” even though they merely upheld the decisions lower courts in the first two of those cases.
Fresh from his tweeted attacks on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals for a district court decision against his executive order seeking to punish sanctuary cities that said court of appeals — being a court of appeals — did not have a thing to do with, President Trump went out of his way in an interview with the Washington Examiner to say he wants to break up the Ninth Circuit.
In the meantime many posts, particularly deputy positions throughout the government, remain dangerously understaffed because after several partisan purges the Trump administration has failed to even select appropriate replacements.
In a March 3 op-ed, the board begins by writing that "President Trump has appointed fewer than three dozen of the top 1,000 officials he needs to run the federal government."
It then adds, "The president seems to have lost interest in the nomination process after making his cabinet and Supreme Court picks, people involved in the transition say."
When Fox News asked Trump about 600 open positions he has yet fill, he said, "Well, a lot of those jobs, I don't want to appoint because they're unnecessary to have."
Trump then said, "Many of those jobs I don't want to fill...we're running a very good, efficient government."
Simply reducing the head count is not how you create “efficient government.” It’s how you create a dysfunctional government, because the jobs still need to get done. When there is no staff available and you haven’t implemented a viable attrition plan, the jobs don’t get done.
Factors like this explain why Michael Flynn wasn’t properly vetted, even though his $45,000 trip to Moscow (paid for by the Kremlin-controlled RT News) was already public knowledge. And the fact that he failed to disclose that trip, that cash, and the other $500,000 he received from Turkey for his work as a lobbyist during the Trump campaign in his security classification documentation—committing a potential felony—didn’t make them look twice. They didn’t even notice until he lied to the vice president about what he did and didn’t discuss with the Russian ambassador. And even then they didn’t actual react and finally fire Flynn until three weeks later.
That’s not efficient government.
There are things you can learn on the job. There are things you can pick up as you, and to a large extent every president and their staff have a steep learning curve. But Trump’s problem isn’t that he doesn’t know what he’s doing: it’s that most of his staff doesn’t know jack either, and he’s not capable of comprehending complex matters and complex issues. He only gets things on the surface, and then he’s generally wrong.
He was very likely wrong about Bashar al-Assad ordering the use of chemical weapons in Syria before he ordered a very likely illegal counter-strike bombing of the suspected airfield. He’s been completely wrong about DREAMers not being targeted by ICE as his mass deportation plan goes into effect. He was wrong about the jobs he claims to have “brought back” to Carrier. He still doesn’t fully understand why his Obamacare repeal crashed and burned, or why his second attempt and doomed tax plan are likely to land in the same burning pile of refuse.
He’s wrong about China being a currency manipulator, and also wrong about NAFTA, two things he’s apparently discovered the hard way after talks with the Chinese and Mexican presidents, as well as Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.
So if he isn’t going to go so hard on China or Mexico or Canada, then where’s he going to get all the “jobs back” from? Could it be by letting U.S. corporations dump toxic waste into our rivers and streams and having them ignore corporate wage theft as they skirt public and worker safety rules? Why yes, that appears to be the case. So how’s that really going to help the rust belt, whose desperate manufacturing and coal workers held their nose and looked away from his long history of mistreatment of minorities and women and gross ethical conflicts and corruption when they placed their trust in him?
They voted for him in order to get something specific in return while deliberately ignoring who else might be severely hurt in the process. What happens when they don’t get what they expected? What happens when they realize the bus they unleashed to do donuts over the rights of workers, consumers, women, minorities, immigrants, and LGBT people is also going to spin its wheels right over their own jobs, hopes, and dreams? The fact is that like many of the workers at Carrier discovered, Trump’s false promises, bogus clumsy claims, and outright lies far outpace the reality he leaves in his wake.
At the end of this first 100 days almost everything he’s done been a tragic mistake, has failed, or backfired so far.
There is little evidence that the next 100 days will be better than the last. Or the 100 days after that.
How many 100s it will take for his faithful supporters to come to that realization remains unclear.
But the rest of us are fully aware.
Sunday, Apr 30, 2017 · 3:23:41 PM +00:00 · Frank Vyan Walton
Let me just add as a coda exhibit A of where things went off the rails. Blue collar former Democrats who had voted for Obama twice inside the “Blue Wall” who frankly fell for Trump’s “I’ll bring back jobs” snake oil.
As I note above Trump is not going to fulfill his promises, not the ones that count particularly involved middle-class manufacturing jobs, because he can’t. These people need to transition to green energy jobs and into new emerging industries — you can’t turn back the clock. At a certain point they’re going to figure out they’ve been had, but certainly not yet.
Times are changing. There is a lesson to be learned here, one the Democratic power brokers ignores at our peril. We need to be ready with a better message when these people finally realize this guy is totally full of it.