Donald Trump is not even one turn of the screw away from crawling into the White House bunk and muttering about strawberries.
When Trump ran into Christopher Ruddy on the golf course and later at dinner Saturday, he vented to his friend. “This will be investigated,” Ruddy recalled Trump telling him. “It will all come out. I will be proven right.”
“He was pissed,” said Ruddy, the chief executive of Newsmax, a conservative media company. “I haven’t seen him this angry.”
Not only is Trump obsessed over a conspiracy of persecution that includes non-existent phone taps, a cadre of “low life leakers,” and a press eager to display his every failure, he’s also being driven (more) snot-slinging crazy by the thought that he could be compared to President Obama.
Gnawing at Trump, according to one of his advisers, is the comparison between his early track record and that of Obama in 2009, when amid the Great Recession he enacted an economic stimulus bill and other big-ticket items.
Yes, by this point Obama had proposed, negotiated, renegotiated, and signed the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. That’s on top of getting the Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Act signed within the first two weeks of his administration.
What has Trump accomplished? Well … he wrote a bunch of executive orders, one of which has already been blocked in court, and he signed a bill making it easier for energy companies to pollute both the air and water. Hows that hatey-wally thing going for Trump voters?
Trump’s young presidency has existed in a perpetual state of chaos.
Trump made a huge number of promises about what he would accomplish day one, but real governing has turned out to be harder than just screaming at a receptive crowd.
Is there a term limits amendment, either signed or working its way through Congress? Nope. A ban on former congressmen becoming lobbyists? Nope. How about a ban on foreign lobbying and on foreign lobbyists being involved in US elections? Actually, one of the first executive orders Trump signed was to make it easier for American companies to make payoffs to foreign governments in secret—an invitation to bribery that’s beloved of the oil and gas industry.
Even with an all-Republican, all-compliant Congress just waiting for his instructions on how high to jump, Trump has proven singularly inept in getting any legislation started, much less passed.
In general, Trump has come through on persecuting immigrants and protecting pollution, and … not much else.
Trump’s team is trying again to reboot this week, with the president expected to sign a new executive order Monday implementing an entry ban for some countries after the initial one was blocked in federal court. The administration also intends to introduce a legislative plan later in the week to repeal and replace Obama’s health-care law, officials said.
The rest of Trump’s legislative plan, from tax reform to infrastructure spending, is effectively on hold until Congress first tackles the Affordable Care Act.
Another reboot? Already? Just how many boots do these people own? And what better way to start than by tackling an issue where Republicans have made zero progress in seven years.
Anything Trump does is likely to be drowned by his biggest problem. That’s not Trump’s ever-simmering connection to Russia and the slowly gathering investigations. It’s Trump’s absolute obsession with President Obama, an obsession that’s driving Trump to purge competent people from government and making his problems worse.
Trump, meanwhile, has been feeling besieged, believing that his presidency is being tormented in ways known and unknown by a group of Obama-aligned critics, federal bureaucrats and intelligence figures — not to mention the media, which he has called “the enemy of the American people.”
Ahh, but the phone taps that's ... that's where he has them. They laughed at him and made jokes but he’ll prove beyond the shadow of a doubt and with ... geometric logic ... that the phone tapsin Trump Tower did exist, and he'd have produced that evidence if it wasn’t for ...
