Who Knew Trump Would Be a Weak President?

[TS]

Who Knew Trump Would Be a Weak President?
He campaigned with a lot of swagger. But his first nine months in office have
been defined by indecision, vacillation, and a reluctance to call shots.
BY ELIZABETH DREW
October 26, 2017
At his rallies, presidential candidate Donald Trump excited his most avid
supporters through displays of toughness: his calls when a demonstrator acted
up to “get him out of here”; his incantations of his reality show signature
“You’re fired”; his promises of robust actions on “Day One.” He promised his
ecstatic followers that he’d tear up trade treaties and the Iran nuclear
deal. He’d force other countries to renegotiate and he’d be tough in his
dealings with them, just as he’d been in business. And he’d show those so-
called NATO allies that the U.S. wasn’t committed to defending them—no more
of the wishy-washy deference to other nations that Barack Obama had displayed
for eight years. Also, on that busy Day One, he’d have a replacement for
Obamacare ready for Congress to enact immediately. He’d pick the very best
people but wouldn’t hesitate to get rid of someone who wasn’t up to the job.
Above all, he’d be decisive, no vacillating figurehead. He’d be a man of
action, tough and strong.

Trump not only didn’t have an alternative to Obamacare ready on his first day
in office, he never offered one. Moreover, when House Republicans presented
to him their own ideas about what should be in the health care bill, they
found him to be an easy mark. This was in part because the president didn’t
much care what was in the health care bill, he just wanted to sign one; he
told aides that would make him look presidential. He’d said in the campaign
that he’d produce a health care bill that was better and cheaper than
Obamacare, but it turned out that Trump was unfamiliar with the substance of
what was in the Affordable Care Act and didn’t grasp the import of proposed
alternatives—and this crippled his ability to be a force on the subject. Or,
as it’s turning out, most any subject. He keeps telling us what a fine mind
he has, but if so he seems loath to exercise it much. His advisers on
national security have been encouraged to put as much of their daily
intelligence briefings in pictures and charts as they can. A president who
doesn’t know what he doesn’t know isn’t in a very strong position to
negotiate with others, or to lead.

A president without proposals of his own cannot set the nation’s agenda
except in the broadest strokes (as in: next, the tax bill). Ignorant of how
the legislative branch works, he let the Republican leaders set the
priorities and was surprised that even though his party had the majority,
Congress wasn’t more deferential to him. And then, when it came to major
substantive questions—whether to stick with the Iran deal, how to resolve the
status of undocumented immigrants who came into the country as children, and,
most recently, how far to go in smashing Obamacare subsidies—he turned these
matters over to Congress to resolve.


In addition, Trump has vacillated on several issues. He publicly reversed
himself on whether he supported a compromise reached in mid-October between
Republican Lamar Alexander and Democrat Patty Murray, which would stabilize
the Obamacare markets and keep the program from being cut off from millions
of low-income people by authorizing the payments (which the president had
just ended by executive order) to health insurers for two years in exchange
for granting states greater flexibility in implementing the ACA. (The
Congressional Budget Office said this compromise would lower the budget
deficit by $3.8 billion, making it the first health care proposal this year
that got a positive rating.) First, Trump supported the compromise. Then,
eleven minutes later, he opposed it. What had happened in between was clear
enough, and by now familiar: The far right was against the compromise, both
in “principle” and because its purpose was to shore up the despised
Obamacare; conservative House Republicans (which is most of them) have zero
interest in doing anything that would prop up the health care program passed
in 2010, which they still passionately preferred to repeal and replace. The
question of where Trump will ultimately come down on the compromise is still
up in the air.

The president has also been back and forth over whether the U.S. will
participate in the Paris climate accord. First, in a Rose Garden ceremony in
early June, he announced that the U.S. would withdraw (leaving the false
impression that the goals set in the agreement are mandatory). This put the
U.S. in the same category as Syria and Nicaragua. But it reinforced the
“America First” theme of Trump’s campaign. And it aligned him with the fossil
fuel industry that had backed him and played a large role in staffing the
relevant parts of his administration. Yet various states within the U.S. have
decided to abide by the accord, while voices within the administration have
counseled against the U.S. being an international pariah. Typically, Trump
said he could stay in the Paris accord if he could negotiate “a far better
deal.” (Trump used similar language in regards to NAFTA and the Iran
agreement, as if U.S. negotiators had simply ignored the possibility of
getting more from the other side.) Trump has given some of our allies the
sense that he might be willing to reenter the Paris accord.

He’s also wobbled on whether to extend Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals
(DACA), the program pushed by Obama that protects from deportation some
800,000 undocumented immigrants brought to the U.S. illegally when they were
very young; Trump has threatened to send them to the country of their
parents’ origin, places many of them have never seen, or barely know. Trump
in mid-September ostensibly made a deal with Senate Minority Leader Chuck
Schumer and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi to extend their stay in
exchange for tighter border security (though no wall), but once again the far
right roared—and Trump backed off. So now the fate of those 800,000
“Dreamers” hangs in the balance, as their permits to remain face an
expiration date of March 5, 2018.

In yet another instance, Trump was unsure whether he’d affirm the U.S.’s
commitment to Article 5 of the NATO treaty, the all-important provision that
commits each member to aid any other that comes under attack. After
surprising even his own aides by making no reference to Article 5 in a speech
he gave to other NATO leaders at a May summit in Brussels, Trump finally
recommitted the U.S. to NATO in June.

So much vacillation on domestic and foreign policies confuses other nations’
leaders as well as U.S. citizens and politicians, and a president less
imposing physically and rhetorically would be labeled as indecisive.


Trump has left a lot of the firing of people to others or used indirect
methods. He rid himself of his checkered National Security Advisor Michael
Flynn only after long hesitation, even after a warning by the Justice
Department that Flynn had been compromised by the Russians and had lied to
the vice president about it. And Trump had no sooner fired Flynn than he
declared him to be “a wonderful man,” and began to lean on FBI Director James
Comey to go easy on him in the FBI’s investigation of Russia’s role in the
2016 election and possible collusion on the part of the Trump campaign.
Later, he fired Comey via a letter carried to the FBI headquarters by his
bodyguard, rather than face to face. (As it happened, Comey was out of town,
which no one on the White House staff had bothered to find out.)

Trump and his ineffectual Chief of Staff Reince Priebus discussed Priebus’s
departure for weeks, but Trump finally forced the issue in July by hiring as
his new communications director the noisy and vulgar Anthony Scaramucci, whom
Priebus had (rightly) opposed and who in short time drove Priebus to resign.
Scaramucci’s appointment had another victim, one whose tenure was already
uncertain: White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer, who’d been a bad fit for
the job from the outset, and who also had vehemently opposed Scaramucci’s
appointment, resigned in protest when Scaramucci was named. Then, on his
first day as the new chief of staff, retired four-star General John Kelly
fired Scaramucci, who’d been on the job for ten days. Trump’s timorousness
about firing people isn’t a sign of a confident person, certainly not the
bully boy of the rallies.

Trump’s powers to intimidate have proved limited. He tried to bully Jeff
Sessions out of his job as attorney general, but Sessions refused to take the
forceful, repetitive hints and remained in his cabinet position. For a while,
Trump tried to unnerve Chuck Schumer, but Schumer remained unperturbed and
Trump backed off. The Twitter-bully remains comfortably ensconced in the
White House, hurling his bolts, but if his intended victim pays him no mind
he drops the matter and attacks someone else. Majority Leader Mitch McConnell
was once the target of Trump’s tweets, as Trump tried to shift the blame for
his utter lack of legislative policy achievements, but more recently Trump
invited McConnell to lunch at the White House and announced afterward that
the two men were “closer than ever.”

This depiction of Donald Trump as a weak president would no doubt shock his
ardent followers, especially since Trump usually covers his retreats with
bluster. It might also be a surprise to those who have worried that he’s a
would-be autocrat. It turns out that Trump has neither the wit nor the grit
to seize power, and he may be too lazy and too uninterested in governing to
make much of it if he did. (He can, however, empower by default cabinet
officials who do know what to do with the power at their disposal—for
example, Sessions.) But, except for his use of executive orders (often to
countermand ones by Obama) and his cyber-bullying, Trump is essentially a
passive participant in his own government. His campaign against the press is
of concern, but thus far he’s not taken action to curb its independence, nor
have his threats to do so had any discernible impact on the rigorous job the
press is doing of holding his presidency to account. In fact, all things
taken together, it begins to seem as if the strongman of the rallies was a
convenient deception, a figure that Trump invented but couldn’t maintain when
it came to making actual decisions in the Oval Office.

If this approach to governing keeps up, Trump may find himself once again on
a newsweekly cover—the kind of prominence he craves—but this time with a
sobriquet that once ordained one of his predecessors: “WIMP.”

[TS]

Who Knew Trump Would Be a Weak President?
He campaigned with a lot of swagger. But his first nine months in office
have been defined by indecision, vacillation, and a reluctance to call
shots.
BY ELIZABETH DREW
October 26, 2017
At his rallies, presidential candidate Donald Trump excited his most avid
supporters through displays of toughness: his calls when a demonstrator
acted up to “get him out of here”; his incantations of his reality show
signature “You’re fired”; his promises of robust actions on “Day One.” He
promised his ecstatic followers that he’d tear up trade treaties and the
Iran nuclear deal. He’d force other countries to renegotiate and he’d be
tough in his dealings with them, just as he’d been in business. And he’d

show those so-called NATO allies that the U.S. wasn’t committed to

[Ubiquitous]

TROLL-O-METER

5* 6* *7
4* *8
3* *9
2* *10
1* | *stuporous
0* -*- *catatonic
* |\ *comatose
* \ *clinical death
* \ *biological death
* _\/ *demonic apparition
* * *damned for all eternity