Trump Is As Bewildered As A Kindergartener At A Seminar On String Theory When Anything Concerning Governance And Economics Comes Up

Late Friday, Rolling Stone ran an interview by Andy Kroll with a rare Republican congressman who is acting like he's more afraid of a 2020 Democratic challenge than he is of Trump. Will Hurd only won by the skin of his teeth in November-- 103,285 (49.2%) to 102,359 (48.7%), 926 votes-- winning at all only because the geniuses at the DCCC couldn't figure out it would have been better to run a Mexican-American in a district that is 71% Mexican-American. Hurd's district includes 820 miles on the U.S.-Mexico border and he's not in agreement with Trump about building a wall. He called Trump's claim of a border crisis is a "myth," and that "building a wall from sea to shining sea is the most expensive and least effective way to do border security. The average is $24.5 million a mile" and is a "third-century solution to a 21st-century problem."

Perhaps that was the kind of thing that inspired George Will to write yesterday that "The shabbiest U.S. president ever is an inexpressibly sad specimen." What a way to think about even an illegitimate fake "president." Will reminded his Washington Post column that "Half or a quarter of the way through this interesting experiment with an incessantly splenetic presidency, much of the nation has become accustomed to daily mortifications.  Or has lost its capacity for embarrassment, which is even worse.... Dislike of him should be tempered by this consideration: He is an almost inexpressibly sad specimen. It must be misery to awaken to another day of being Donald Trump. He seems to have as many friends as his pluperfect self-centeredness allows, and as he has earned in an entirely transactional life. His historical ignorance deprives him of the satisfaction of working in a house where much magnificent history has been made. His childlike ignorance-- preserved by a lifetime of single-minded self-promotion-- concerning governance and economics guarantees that whenever he must interact with experienced and accomplished people, he is as bewildered as a kindergartener at a seminar on string theory.”

Which is why this fountain of self-refuting boasts ('I have a very good brain') lies so much. He does so less to deceive anyone than to reassure himself. And as balm for his base, which remains oblivious to his likely contempt for them as sheep who can be effortlessly gulled by preposterous fictions. The tungsten strength of his supporters' loyalty is as impressive as his indifference to expanding their numbers.

Either the electorate, bored with a menu of faintly variant servings of boorishness, or the 22nd Amendment will end this, our shabbiest but not our first shabby presidency.

Trump had another bad day today

This kind of stuff has real effects in the real word. Early Friday, Noah Bierman answered a question, in part, about the government shut down. Why can’t Trump make deals? No one trusts him anymore. "[T]he president who campaigned as the world’s best deal-maker, vowing that he alone could fix Washington’s dysfunction, has been stymied as he looks for achievements before facing the voters again. Two years in, the man who built a political reputation as a guy who tells it like it is has lost the essential ingredients to closing deals: credibility and trust... The president’s squandered credibility, overlaid with nonstop investigations, is likely to imperil a second-half agenda that includes basic responsibilities-- raising the nation’s borrowing limit, most essentially-- as well as more ambitious goals. Among those are measures to rebuild the nation’s infrastructure, win congressional approval of a revised trade deal with Mexico and Canada, overhaul immigration laws and lower the costs of prescription drugs.

Sen. Mitch McConnell was jolted with a fresh reminder of President Trump’s capriciousness last month: The majority leader persuaded Republican colleagues to take a politically difficult vote to temporarily fund the government, but not a border wall, only to see Trump withdraw support-- initiating the longest shutdown in history.

...McConnell, having been burned, has largely left the shutdown fight to Trump. House Republicans, having lost their majority in large part because of voters’ own dismay with Trump, are now on the sidelines as he must battle House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. And Democrats, following her lead, are emboldened given their experience with the president’s unreliability as a negotiating partner.

Trump’s tactics were honed over decades. Throughout his business career, he moved from one project to the next-- real estate development, sales, casinos and branding-- often leaving scorned partners or creditors to deal with the fallout from bankruptcies or deals gone bad.

“This was all to stay ahead of his reputation,” said Michael D'Antonio, author of The Truth About Trump. But “in Washington,” he said, “you can’t escape who you are for very long. He’s proven that he can’t keep his word.”

The president has broken records for false statements, according to nonpartisan fact checkers. An increasing majority of voters-- by 61% to 34% in one recent poll-- say he is not honest. The same poll, from Quinnipiac University, found that voters also rated his leadership skills as poor, by 58% to 39%.

Complicating the problem, Trump has churned through staff faster than his predecessors. He has surrounded himself with a collection of temporary officials, family members and inexperienced advisors with little sway on Capitol Hill.

“They’re lacking some of the usual negotiating infrastructure,” said John Lawrence, former chief of staff to Pelosi. “In this White House, everything changes the next day: the personnel, the policies, the view of reality.”

Republican lawmakers’ criticism is muted, however, because even as Trump has ranked among the least popular presidents in modern history, he has consistently commanded overwhelming support from Republican voters, according to polls.

Still, the mistrust from nearly every quarter of Congress has grown each time he has broken his word, complicating efforts to pass his initiatives, according to former lawmakers, aides and close observers.

“Even things that should on paper be easy, there just always seems to be a way for him to step on his own foot,” said a former aide who requested anonymity to avoid upsetting his current employer. “Sometimes, this is unintentional-- he just says stuff.”

The act that precipitated the month-old shutdown, and has come to define it, occurred in December. McConnell received bogus assurances from the White House that Trump would sign a Senate bill to fund and keep the government open to Feb. 8 while negotiations on border money proceeded, according to a person familiar with the discussions.

After senators approved the bill by a voice vote, Trump, egged on by conservative media personalities, rejected the legislation in favor of a fight with Democrats over the wall. Without any bill funding a quarter of the government, a partial shutdown began days later.

McConnell, Republicans’ foremost deal-maker, has since stayed in the background. Other Republican senators were left vulnerable to conservatives’ charges they were too quick to cave, even as they were stuck answering for the government services unfulfilled and hundreds of thousands of federal employees unpaid, with no sense of how the president intended to win.

“It would have been great if they had told us they wanted this fight, because we would have started working on it,” Florida Republican Sen. Marco Rubio fumed as the shutdown began, three days before Christmas. “We have to deal with it now.”

Lawmakers have been dealing with Trump’s abrupt tactical shifts from his start, and at the White House he leaves the impression with each advisor who talks with him that he shares their point of view, until he doesn’t.

Anyone think any foreign leaders believe a thing he says? Yeah... maybe one.