Kamala Harris Made The Case: Trump's Presidency Has Failed

This Kamala Harris speech she gave this afternoon is good, not the greatest, not even that special-- except for one thing: it was carried live yesterday as Trump was getting ready to addressed the #CocaineConvention. Viewers of MSNBC, PBS and CNN have heard it all before. Fox viewers hadn't-- until today. Heads must have been exploding.

"Donald Trump," she explained to people who have never heard it before, "has failed. At it's most basic level Donald Trump doesn't understand the presidency. He thinks it's all about him. Well, it's not. It's about you; it's about all of us, the people... Donald TRump has failed at the most basic and important job of a president of the United States. He failed to protect the American people, plain and simple. Trump showed... a reckless disregard for the well-being of the American people. A reckless disregard for the danger a pandemic would pose to American lives, for the devastation it would do to our economy. For the damage it would do to communities of color who have been subjected to structural racism for generations. For the chaos that would upend of daily lives, make it impossible for many of our children to go to school; make it impossible to live normally with a sense of certainty. He never appreciated that a president swears an oath before God and country to protect America against threats seen and unseen. It's his duty; it's his obligation to protect us. And yes, he has failed, miserably.

Donald Trump's incompetence is nothing new. That has always been on full display. But in January of this year, it became deadly. Thats' when the threat on a virus that would endanger the world first emerged. Trump dismissed the threat... Trump still doesn't have a plan. He still doesn't have a plan... President Trump got it wrong from the beginning and the he got it wrong again and again. And the consequences have been catastrophic. And here's why Trump has been so unwilling-- and unable-- to deal with this crisis. First, he was fixated on the stock market... He was convinced that if his administration focussed on this virus, it would hurt the market and hurst his chances of being reelected. That mattered to him more than saving American lives. Second, right at the moment we needed Donald Trump to be tough on the Chinese government, he caved... Instead of rising to see the most difficult moment of his presidency, Donald Trump froze. He was scared and his was petty and vindictive."

While she was talking and while Trump was no doubt chopping up his Adderall for tonight's event, Change Research released a new nationwide survey showing that "The economy, jobs, and cost of living remains the number-one issue in the country and in the battleground. This issue was thought by many to be Trump’s strength and his best case for re-election before COVID-19, but majorities nationally disapprove of the job he is doing handling the economy (53% disapprove) and helping people’s pocketbooks (54% disapprove), and only 51% approve of his handling of his handling of the economy and pocketbooks in the battleground. While the shifts among Republicans were the most significant, the assessment and outlook of Democrats and independents also improved. 60% of battleground voters still rate the economy negatively, 59% still rate the US job market negatively, 51% are still pessimistic about the US economy in the year ahead, and 56% are still pessimistic about the unemployment rate. But this is also the first time that we have seen these economic metrics moving in a positive direction in several weeks."

That said, this is from our good friends at Brave New Films...

Iran-- Which Way Now, While Trump Is Still Occupying The White House?

An hour before Trump addressed the country yesterday, The Atlantic published a column by David Frum, Americans Aren't Rallying to Trump-- A president who writes off half the country can't expect to garner support from a crisis of his own making. Iran had to do something after Trump assassinated Soleimani but their leaders are smart enough to not do something suicidal. So they launched some noisy missiles at a couple of Iraqi bases housing Americans that didn't really target Americans. "But imagine," suggested Frum, "that Iran had gotten luckier (or unluckier) with its missile aiming. Or that the Iranian regime had chosen-- or still chooses-- a more lethal response to the killing of Qassem Soleimani. Where would we be then?"

The Trump administration and its supporters seem to have hoped for a “rally around the flag” effect from the killing of Soleimani. This did not happen. The fundamental geology of Donald Trump’s presidency remains unchanged: A large majority of Americans do not trust him, do not support him, and will not follow him. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has complained that European allies do not support the Trump administration’s actions. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell laments that Democrats in Congress will not support the president either.

The first poll after the killing of Soleimani shows 53 percent of Americans disapproving of Trump’s handing of Iran, a number similar to what other polling registered in September and October. What has changed is that 39 percent “strongly disapprove” of Trump’s policy—a number up 10 points since before the Soleimani killing. Americans do not want war with Iran, and they do not trust Trump to lead such a war if it erupts.

Trump’s governance itself is legally in question right now. The president has been impeached. Unlike the Clinton impeachment of 1998–99, this process commands the approval of a majority of Americans. On average, more than 50 percent believe the Senate should remove Trump from office. That’s not sufficient to force the Senate to respond, especially not a Senate majority that itself was elected with the support of only a minority of Americans. But it’s certainly sufficient to deprive the president of the legitimacy to lead the nation to war.

The United States finds itself in the dangerous situation of having a president in power but without authority.

He is the least trusted president in the history of polling. Two-thirds of Americans regard him as dishonest. Sixty-one percent say he does not respect democracy.

With the departure of Secretary of Defense James Mattis at the end of 2018, there is no figure left in the administration who does command broad respect from the public, Congress, or American allies-- who can credibly step forward and say, “This time, the president is not lying.”

Even the White House press secretary has given up. Unlike her two predecessors, who lied to the media’s face, the current holder of the office, Stephanie Grisham, has abandoned press briefings entirely.

The president, any president, is both the leader of his party and a representative of the entire nation. As the nation polarizes, it becomes harder and harder to combine those roles. But unlike his predecessors, Trump has never tried to do the second job. Even as he sought support from Democrats in Congress, the president retweeted one of his most provocative supporters equating Democrats in Congress to Iranian terrorists. Former Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley, ever more brazenly campaigning to replace Vice President Mike Pence on the Republican 2020 ticket, gave an interview on Sean Hannity’s radio show in which she said nobody except Democratic Party leaders and presidential candidates mourned the death of Qassem Soleimani. (Meanwhile, one of the president’s strongest supporters in the Senate, Rand Paul, and one of Trump’s favorite TV hosts, Tucker Carlson, actually spoke out in opposition to the strike.)

Trump supporters are trying to re-create the atmosphere of 2003, to claim the high ground of patriotism and defense of the nation. That can never work for them, because at every turn they and the country confront the weird hold Russia’s Vladimir Putin seems to hold over the U.S. president. Trump defenders angrily denounce the facts of the Trump-Putin connection as a “hoax,” but the country does not believe them. As of mid-summer 2019, only 35 percent of voters accepted the president’s claims of “exoneration.” A majority believe that Russia interfered in the 2016 election to help Trump; a plurality believe that Trump colluded with that effort.

A president regarded by so many Americans as Putin’s puppet cannot plausibly wave the flag against domestic opponents.

Trump himself seems to intuit the danger-- which is why he always flinches from foreign-policy confrontations at the last minute, first with North Korea and now with Iran. When you know you’re driving a stolen car, you want to avoid collisions.

But Trump’s supporters in Congress and on TV have not kept up with the times as well as their boss. They imagine it’s still 2003-- or maybe 1969. But that history has passed by. When Fox talkers call on all Americans to unite behind the president, they have to carve out mental exceptions for close to half the country. Not New York State or New York City: President Trump has said he hates them “even more than I should.” Not the state of California, home to one out of every eight Americans: “a disgrace to our country.” Not the city of Chicago: “embarrassing to us as a nation.” Not the city of Baltimore: “a rat and rodent infested mess.” Not the city of Atlanta: “in horrible shape and falling apart.”

Trump has never aspired to the job of president of all the United States. He does not understand the job. He cannot do the job. And now the job needs to be done.

Earlier in the Trump administration, it was said that the president was fortunate to have never encountered a crisis not of his own making. Over three years, however, he has contrived to make a great many crises: a trade war with China, a betrayal in Kurdistan, a diplomatic debacle on the Korean peninsula, the ongoing thralldom of Trump to Putin, and now the approach to war with Iran. National crises become no less dangerous for being the fault of the U.S. president rather than some foreign aggressor. Happily, the Iran crisis is paused, at least for the moment. None of these national self-harms will be resolved, however, until this sham president leaves office.

Just before Trump spoke Congressional Progressive co-chairs Pramila Jayapal and Mark Pocan released a caucus statement calling on Congress to reassert it's constitutional responsibility for declaring war:

The horrific escalation towards war with Iran was devastatingly predictable, brought on by Trump’s reckless military brinksmanship in assassinating General Soleimani and, before that, destroying decades of diplomacy by pulling out of the Iran nuclear deal and asserting a ‘maximum pressure’ strategy. Last night’s attacks by Iran were a warning shot, showing clearly that President Trump’s actions have made the United States and the world far less safe than it was one week ago. While we do not yet know the full toll of last night’s attacks, there’s no question this escalation has put our troops and Iraqis in danger-- a traumatic and completely avoidable result of the President’s reckless actions. 
Now, it is even more urgent than ever that Congress act to immediately pull us back from the brink of catastrophe and prevent a completely avoidable war with Iran. To protect American lives and global stability, Congress must reassert our Constitutional authority by passing a strong War Powers Resolution to ensure Congressional authorization for any military action; repealing the 2002 Authorization of Use of Military Force; and ensuring that Congress provides no funds for war with Iran without authorization.

We must not continue down this destructive military path-- we must choose de-escalation and diplomacy. Let’s be clear: If we close the door on diplomacy, that decision will haunt our nation for generations. Further retaliation will not lead to peace-- it will only entangle us in a crisis with no military solution and endanger countless lives.

The American people don’t want another war without end. Congress must act swiftly to end this cycle of violence and pursue peace before it’s too late.

One of the hottest congressional races in the country is for a gerrymandered central Texas seat-- TX-10-- that stretches, incongruously, from Austin to the suburbs of Houston. With no help from the DCCC in 2018, progressive Democrat Mike Siegel nearly beat right-wing Republican incumbent, multimillionaire Michael McCaul. This year the DCCC is panic-stricken that a progressive-- Siegel is running again-- could win a seat in Texas so they worked with EMILY's List to find a Texas version of Jeff Van Drew to run against him. She has had nothing to say about the Iran debacle. Mike sure has-- reminding voters that he's "running to replace a Trump Toadie, Michael McCaul, who fashions himself a 'national security expert' but in reality is just a follower of the Blob. To wit: last night he issued a statement condemning the Iranian missile attack, while days earlier he praised the assassination of Suleimani, but where is the recognition of cause and effect? Trump's escalation with Iran makes the United States, and the world, decidedly less safe, and makes no sense from a tactical perspective. But being a Republican means surrendering objective thinking and rational discourse, so McCaul in practice is just another empty suit. Bigger picture, we need to call out the violation of the War Powers Act and the failure of the drone assassination program. Congress has the power to declare war so that the people's representatives can determine the true public interest. Half of America is at the poverty line or just outside of it; tens of millions lack health insurance; we have a homelessness crisis and a climate crisis and failing public infrastructure. If Congress is going to take action to save American lives, there is a lot we can do with domestic programs that will be far more effective than the assasination of a foreign leader. Which leads me to the drone program: unfortunately, the U.S. populace has become numb to a program that authorizes extrajudicial killings in violation of international law. The killing of Suleimani violates the Fourth Geneva Convention, and is part of a failed foreign policy that prioritizes 'taking out bad guys' over diplomacy. Each time the President orders one of these killings, we create more enemies than we eliminate, and we further undermine any moral standing we have in the world. It will be a long road back, from the United States as a rogue 'judge, jury and executioner' to a member in good standing of the international community. But we must walk this road, not only to advance the cause of peace, but to confront the climate crisis and other global challenges that require the collective participation of every nation."

Jennifer Christie, the progressive candidate for the open seat north of Indianapolis, agreed entirely, noting that "In this moment, Congress must take back the Constitutional power to make decisions about war on behalf of the People. In this moment, we must show leadership by deescalating the rising tensions between Iran and the USA. It’s time to be the adult in the room. In the middle of his impeachment, Trump assassinated Suleimani and we have yet to hear detailed or compelling reasons for his decision to act without consulting Congress nor our allies. An endless war with Iran is not in the interest of the people of America, Iran, nor of the world. It is time for cool heads and forward thinking."

We're just starting to get to know Robin Wilt, the progressive Democrat challenging Rochester New Dem Joe Morelle (NY-25). Morelle's only critique of Trump's assassination of Qassem Soleimani was that Congress was not fully briefed beforehand. Robin believes we need strong moral positions against war, not just a procedural ones. Since Morelle was one of the Democrats to support the NRAA, I asked her how they differ on Trump's moves regarding Iran. "I oppose war with Iran," she responded clearly. "I have a brother who graduated from the U.S. Military Academy West Point in 2002-- the year George W Bush articulated his doctrine of preemptive strike. My brother was later grievously injured in Iraq by an IED and is an amputee. I also have a son who is currently a junior at West Point (Class of ’21). For me, the issue of military adventurism is intensely personal. I believe the best way to support our military is to never put them in harm’s way injudiciously. I oppose the military industrial complex perpetuating war and threatening our national security and troops. I believe we should treat our troops like the valuable resource that they are by using them only as a last resort."

Trump was all hopped up on Adderall when he made his silly address to the nation yesterday. His Regime didn't do any better when they attempted to mollify Congress with closed briefings explaining why they assassinated Qasem Soleimani. On the House side, Virginia Democrat Gerry Connolly called the briefing "sophomoric and utterly unconvincing" and added that he is "utterly unpersuaded" that the assassination was justified. It was no better in the Senate, where arch-conservative Utah Senator Mike Lee (R) was one of many who were angered by the Trumpists' asinine excuse-making. Lee went on Fox News and said the briefing was "probably the worst briefing at least on a military issue I’ve seen" and said that the Trumpist Regime was "insulting and demeaning" the Senate by telling them not to debate merits of taking military action. Fox News cut Lee off and went to a commercial. Rand Paul (R) was just as angry as Lee was and added that using the 2002 AUMF to gin up a war with Iran was bullshit. "I see no way in the world you could logically argue that an authorization to have war with Saddam Hussein has anything to with having war with people currently in Iraq" and said using it to murder Soleimani was "absurd" and an "insult" (to Congress). "Let's have the debate, and let's have some senators stand up," he said. Maybe he should mention it to fellow Kentuckian, Moscow Mitch, who will not permit any debate without Trump's OK.

CNN reported that Senator Paul is criticizing Trumpanzee's actions toward Iran, saying his decision to withdraw from the Iran nuclear agreement and last week's drone strike that killed the country's top military general have made the US less safe. "The Iran agreement wasn't perfect-- and I was a critic of the Iran agreement-- however, I think it was a big mistake to pull out of the Iran agreement. We should have tried to build upon the Iran agreement. We've now killed one of their major generals. I think it is the death of diplomacy and I see no way to get it back started until the revenge of the Iranian people is somehow sated... I hate this. I hate that this is where we are going. I have been someone who has been for engagement, but there was much less killing, there was much less violence after the Iran agreement. In fact, there was a lull, a period in which I think we were headed towards a much more stable situation with Iran, and now I think that's gone. And I think it may be gone for a lifetime... Nobody in their right mind would actually think that would lead to negotiation."

At The Current Rate Of Decline, Trump's Approval Rating Will Hit Zero In September 2020

Active Shooter by Nancy Ohanian

The L.A. Times' Cathleen Decker reported that "[m]ore than two dozen voters gathered in Phoenix this week delivered a bipartisan broadside against President Trump, Republicans and Democrats, dismissing the political class as serving its wealthy benefactors and abandoning everyday Americans. Their fiercest disappointment was aimed at Trump." One of the participants said that "said she will not vote for Trump again unless he fulfills his campaign promises-- specifically his pledge to provide better healthcare at a cheaper price. She noted that he had ultimately supported GOP healthcare plans that did 'the opposite.'" Oops... and here Trump has lived his whole life thinking that words, specifics and promises don't ultimately matter.

Even funnier, a 70 year old Republican donor in Virginia, Bob Heghmann, is suing the Republican Party for fraud. His suit claims that "the national and Virginia Republican parties and some GOP leaders raised millions of dollars in campaign funds while knowing they weren’t going to be able to overturn the law also known as Obamacare. The GOP 'has been engaged in a pattern of Racketeering which involves massive fraud perpetrated on Republican voters and contributors as well as some Independents and Democrats,' the suit said. Racketeering, perhaps better known for use in prosecuting organized crime, involves a pattern of illegal behavior by a specific group." He may sound like a crank-- and the only Bob Heghmann I found in the FEC files to have contributed to Republicans was one in New Hampshire who gave 3 contributions totaling $750 about 4 years ago-- but its easy to understand why he's so disappointed in his party. He's far from the only one.

A few weeks ago Peter Baker wrote a piece for the NY Times that could have been written any day in the last 6 months, Trump White House Tests a Nation’s Capacity for Outrage. "Remember that time," he asked tongue planted firmly in cheek, "President George W. Bush told his attorney general to investigate Al Gore for his 'crimes'? Or President Barack Obama called for a Justice Department prosecution of John McCain?"

Neither did that, of course, nor has any president in modern times sought to prosecute the candidate he beat at the ballot box. But when President Trump publicly declared last weekend that his Justice Department should investigate Hillary Clinton, his exhortation generated relatively little reaction.

Indeed, when he repeated it on Twitter on Monday, more attention was paid to the fact that he described his attorney general, Jeff Sessions, as “beleaguered”-- a condition that, if true, was due in large part to Mr. Trump himself, who last week said that he regretted appointing Mr. Sessions because the attorney general had recused himself from overseeing the Russia investigation.

After six months in office, Mr. Trump has crossed so many lines, discarded so many conventions, said and done so many things that other presidents would not have, that he has radically shifted the understanding of what is standard in the White House. He has moved the bar for outrage. He has a taste for provocation and relishes challenging Washington taboos. If the propriety police tut tut, he shows no sign of concer... [T]his is a president who refused to release his tax returns or divest from his private businesses, who put his son-in-law and daughter on the White House staff, who accused his predecessor of illegally tapping his phones without proof, who fired the F.B.I. director leading an investigation into the president’s associates and who has now undercut his “beleaguered” attorney general in public. When he talked politics, jabbed the news media and told stories about Manhattan cocktail parties before tens of thousands of children at the nonpartisan National Scout Jamboree here in West Virginia on Monday, it was hardly surprising.

Yesterday, Jonathan Chait went even further, asserting that the Trumpanzee presidency has already collapsed. And a 33% job approval rating-- a rating that drops by a percentage point a month-- and would, at the current rate, "hit zero in September 2020. (A highly unlikely possibility, though with Donald Trump, anything is possible.) Measured in less quantifiable terms, Trump’s political decline has not occurred in so linear a fashion. It has happened, as Ernest Hemingway wrote about bankruptcy, gradually and then suddenly."

After half a year of comic internal disarray, even in the face of broad public dismay, Trump’s administration had, through most of July, managed to hold together some basic level of partisan cohesion with a still-enthusiastic base and supportive partners in Congress. This has quickly collapsed.

Signs of the disintegration have popped up everywhere. The usual staff turmoil came to a boil in the course of ten days, during which the following occurred: The president denounced his own attorney general in public, the press secretary quit, a new communications director came aboard, the chief of staff was fired, the communications director accused the chief strategist of auto-fellatio in an interview, then he was himself fired. Meanwhile, the secretary of State and national-security adviser were both reported to be eyeing the exits. (Against this colorful backdrop, the ominous news that Robert Mueller had convened a grand jury barely registered.)

More disturbingly for Trump, Republicans in Congress have openly broken ranks. When the Senate voted down the latest (and weakest) proposal to repeal Obamacare, Trump demanded the chamber resume the effort, as he has before. This time, Republican leaders defied him and declared the question settled for the year. When the president threatened to withhold promised payments to insurers in retribution, Republicans in Congress proposed to continue making them. Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Charles Grassley, responding to the president’s threat to sack Jeff Sessions, announced he had no time to confirm a new attorney general. Many Republican senators have endorsed bills to block the president from firing the special counsel.

The most humiliating rebuke came in the form of a bill to lock in sanctions on Russia, passed by Congress without the president’s consent. The premise of the sanctions law is that Congress cannot trust the president to safeguard the national interest, treating him as a potential Russian dupe. It passed through both chambers almost unanimously. Trump delayed signing the bill for days, then submitted to its passage in the most begrudging fashion possible, releasing a statement that reads less like something a president would publish to commemorate the signing of a law than a petulant handwritten note a grounded teen might tape to the bedroom door. “Congress could not even negotiate a health-care bill after seven years of talking,” wrote the president of the United States. “I built a truly great company worth many billions of dollars. That is a big part of the reason I was elected.”

During his very brief tenure as communications director, Anthony Scaramucci blurted out something very telling: “There are people inside the administration that think it is their job to save America from this president.” The conviction that Trump is dangerously unfit to hold office is indeed shared widely within his own administration. Leaked accounts consistently depict the president as unable to read briefing materials written at an adult level, easily angered, prone to manipulation through flattery, subject to change his mind frequently to agree with whomever he spoke with last, and consumed with the superficiality of cable television. In the early days of the administration, Defense Secretary Jim Mattis and then–Homeland Security Director John Kelly secretly agreed that one of the two should remain in the country at all times “to keep tabs on the orders rapidly emerging from the White House,” the Associated Press reported recently.

And the insurrection appears to be creeping outward. When Trump tweeted that he would ban transgender Americans from military service, the Defense Department announced there had been “no modifications to the current policy” and that, “in the meantime, we will continue to treat all of our personnel with respect.” When Trump gave a speech to police urging them to rough up suspects, several police chiefs and even the head of his own Drug Enforcement Agency registered their public objections. The accretion of these acts of defiance is significant. The federal government has flipped on its chief executive.

Barring resignation or removal from office — which would require the vote of a House majority plus two-thirds of the Senate — we are stuck with a delegitimized president serving out the remaining seven-eighths of his term. Politically gridlocked presidencies have become normal, but for the office to be occupied by a man whose own party elites doubt his functional competence and even loyalty is, to borrow a term, unpresidented. Trump’s obsession with humiliation and dominance has left him ill-prepared to cope with high-profile failure. He seems unlikely to content himself with quiet, incremental bureaucratic reform.

And yet it is difficult to see what Trump can do to reverse the situation. His next major domestic-agenda item, a regressive tax cut, is highly unpopular. He has inherited peace and prosperity. Nobody in the administration has been indicted. It is far easier to imagine conditions changing for the worse than the better.

Chait worries that Trump could turn to trying "to gain popularity by launching (or suffering) an attack," either starting a war or manufacturing some kind of a "terrorist attack" on America. He concludes that "[a] chaotic, still-understaffed administration led by a novice commander-in-chief who has alienated American allies deserves no benefit of the doubt. Everything from Trump’s incompetent management of the Department of Energy, which safeguards nuclear materials, to the now-skeletal State Department, to his blustering international profile has exposed the country to an elevated risk of a mass tragedy. A long-term task of the opposition is to prevent the crumbling presidency from transmuting that weakness into strength."

Trump-- More Lazy Or More Ignorant?

Trump, who used to chastise Obama for taking vacations, campaigned on not taking vacations if he ever got into the White House (which he now calls "a dump") and wrote in "his" book Think Like a Billionaire (actually written by Meredith McIver for him), "Don't take vacations. What's the point? If you're not enjoying your work, you're in the wrong job." The new issue of Newsweek makes it clear why he's taking off 17 days now. The "Lazy Boy" president is in way over his head and not up to the job... not even close and not even trying. Whether Putin's well-orchestrated shenanigans won him the race or not, he's the biggest electoral mistake Americans ever made. Remember when he offered Kasich the VP job and said he could be in charge of domestic and foreign policy? When a Kasich aide asked what Trump would be in charge of, the response was "making America great again," meaning, as best as anyone was able to figure out, doing rabble-rousing rallies like the one he did for all those West Virginia drug addicted bigots in Huntington Thursday night.

The author of the Newsweek cover story, Alexander Nazaryan, pointed out that golf and television won't make America great again and was quick to point out that Trump is, basically, as lazy and incompetent as he is ignorant and unqualified for the new job he isn't growing into. He also pointed out that "Were he to reach the White House, Trump said, he wouldn’t make the same mistake for which he’d been lambasting Obama since 2011. 'I'm going to be working for you,' he told supporters in August 2016. 'I'm not going to have time to go play golf.' Now that he’s president, Trump frequently departs the White House and spends the weekend golfing at either his South Florida resort, Mar-a-Lago, or his country club in the New Jersey suburb of Bedminster. The promise he’d made a year before was discarded so quickly, you have to wonder if he even remembers making it. Politico did the legwork: George W. Bush didn’t golf for the first five months of his presidency, while Obama stayed away from his beloved links for four months following his inauguration. Trump held out for all of two weeks. He has visited a golf club 40 times since taking office in January, according to the self-explanatory site Trump Golf Count, which estimates the forays have cost American taxpayers $55 million. Another Trump tracker, this one bythe NY Times, finds that his visits to Trump-branded properties total 56 days, nearly a third of his time in office."

If the golf bothers them-- and, judging by the number of websites devoted to chronicling Trump’s excursions, it does-- it is only because they see it as symbolic of a lackadaisical approach to the presidency. “This is the laziest, most ignorant president in history,” says MSNBC host Lawrence O’Donnell. Sure, take MSNBC with a grain of nonpartisan salt, but all those who believe, as O’Donnell does, that Trump is the most ineffectual occupant of the Oval Office in the nation’s history cite, for one, his well-reported lack of involvement in congressional legislative efforts. They point to the numbers like doctors surveying grim lab results: only one solo press conference since his inauguration (he has held joint press conferences with foreign heads of state, after which he usually entertains questions from the press), and just a single foray west of the Mississippi since taking office (and that for a campaign rally). He’s visited neither Iraq nor Afghanistan.

In the first six months of his presidency, Trump found the time to send 1,029 tweets. They include accusations of Obama “tapping” Trump Tower, juvenile taunts hurled at North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, warmed-over insinuations about the Clintons cribbed from Fox News, complaints about Attorney General Jeff Sessions, complaints about “the Republicans” and endless laments about “fake news,” many of them followed by assertions that are comically untrue.

Of course, many critics want Trump to fail. To them, reports of his ineptitude may be the only good news coming out of the White House. As the editorial writer Steve Chapman of the Chicago Tribune mused in May: “The people who fear that Trump is trying to subvert democracy, persecute Muslims and dismantle the rule of law can take heart that he won't put much effort into it.”

Yet in the uncertain autumn days following Trump’s victory, there was budding hope of a “pivot” from the bluster of his campaign to the pragmatism some claimed lay underneath the spray-tanned surface. There was the $1 trillion infrastructure plan, for example. What happened to that? For the love of Lincoln, someone tell him to forget tax cuts and Muslim bans. He should be out there paving I-95, slapping fresh paint on the Chesapeake Bay Bridge.

Instead, he is playing golf and tweeting anti-CNN wrestling memes. When the weekend concludes, Trump returns to the D.C. swamp with all the enthusiasm of an office lackey slouching toward his cubicle on Monday morning. Only six months in, he seems “a most unhappy warrior,” in the words of Trump biographer and CNN commentator Michael D’Antonio. The scowl that haunts his face, the monotone he uses to deliver official pronouncements: These suggest a second-term lame duck dreaming of a lucrative post-Washington book deal.

...So he sits and stews, like Al Bundy, the shoe-selling protagonist of Married ... With Children, the sitcom of roiling white discontent that predicted Trump better than any political scientist or pundit. Unsatisfying job, ungrateful children, all around him a nation in decline. Bundy dreams of the days when he was a high school football star; Trump, of his election-night romp through the Upper Midwest.

But that was long ago. Reality is here, an unwelcome intrusion for the aging reality television star. That “reality” was fun. This one isn’t. This one has special counsel Robert S. Mueller III rooting around like a bloodhound in his personal finances and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell droning on about budget reconciliation, whatever that is, and right-wing pundit Ann Coulter hectoring him on Twitter about illegal immigration. On the television, there is always California Representative Adam Schiff, talking about collusion with Russia and looking pissed.

Is it Friday yet?

Two days before the presidential inauguration, Trump tweeted a picture of himself seated at a desk, pen hovering above a stack of papers. On his face was the faraway look of a great man lost in deep thought: Pericles pondering the Athenian dead, Churchill surveying a blitzkrieged London. The accompanying text revealed that the president-elect was composing his inaugural address at the Mar-a-Lago resort, which he’d already rebranded “the Winter White House.”

The tweet was supposed to show leadership at work, but it instead revealed the lengths to which Trump will go to foster the image of diligent leadership. It didn’t take a team of CIA digital forensicists to figure out that the Spanish tile wall behind Trump in the photograph matched the one in the reception area at Mar-a-Lago. A photograph soon surfaced of a young woman at the very same desk, looking like she was ready to confirm your dinner reservation. Further scrutiny-- that is, clicking a magnifying glass icon to zoom in-- revealed that the papers on the desk were seemingly blank, while the writing instrument in Trump’s hand appeared to be a Sharpie, not especially useful for writing out a lengthy speech. Wanting to look like a head of state, Trump instead ended up looking like a concierge-in-training.

That wasn’t Trump’s first lesson in the perils of faking it, or his last. His campaign was the most engrossing spectacle in the history of American politics, so terrifyingly entertaining that many failed to grasp its hold on the public until the returns from Florida and North Carolina started to come in on November 8. Trump’s presidency, however, has been a listless sequel, its leading man seemingly no longer interested in his role.

I raised the issue of Trump’s work ethic with White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders. “Completely false story,” she says. “The president is focused on creating jobs, securing the border, protecting Americans and growing our economy, and has been working on those issues every day.”

Every day? In April, Elaine Godfrey of The Atlantic used news reports about Trump’s well-chronicled habits to calculate that he watches about five hours of television daily. That makes him an average American; whether it makes him a sufficiently engaged American president is another matter. He seems to trust Fox & Friends more than the members of the intelligence community who brief him each morning. He certainly finds the former more compelling. “He gets bored and likes to watch TV,” as Politico summarized the insight of one White House insider.

Seemingly aware that he’s being called lazy, Trump described himself in a May 12 tweet as “a very active President with lots of things happening,” which only made him sound like a teenager informing his parents that he’d definitely done his homework. A writer for the Washington Post decided to investigate, using publicly available logs to conclude that Trump’s schedule was “awfully light…. We are left to make one of two assumptions,” the Post concluded. “Trump either is hiding a lot of his presidential business from the public, or he is not doing much at all.” Reuters, in turn, found that in his first 100 days in office, Trump “made fewer appearances outside of the presidential bubble than his three immediate predecessors,” confining himself for the most part to the White House and Mar-a-Lago.

It may be that Trump is overwhelmed. When I was training to become a teacher, veteran educators said students would use boredom to mask their inability to do the work. Is that what’s happening here? Well, to use a Trumpian construction, some people are saying so. One of those people is Donald Trump. In late April, the president confessed that he was both overwhelmed and frustrated. “I loved my previous life,” he said. “I had so many things going. This is more work than in my previous life. I thought it would be easier.” That may be the most remarkable admission ever made by a sitting American president. Clinton’s infidelities, Nixon’s paranoia: Those were the usual failings of the powerful. But a disdain for power because wielding power is harder than pretending to wield power in a reality television series? That is Al Bundy coming home from another miserable day of work at the New Market Mall, cracking open a beer and wondering when his nightmare of shoe-selling drudgery will end.



Now come the excuses. “Nobody knew health care could be so complicated,” Trump said in February. Oh, but everybody knew. That’s why Obama spent months explaining his Affordable Care Act to Americans. Trump never held a town hall to sell his own “terrific” health plan, which mysteriously turned into the less-than-terrific slop cooked up by congressional Republicans. He didn’t campaign for that either, doing nothing to remake the lackluster legislation in his own splendid vision.

There were tweets from the president. There are always tweets. But little else. He maligned the House proposal as “mean” and casually introduced his own suggestions on Twitter to compete with McConnell’s in the Senate. Eventually, those Republicans concluded it would be infinitely more effective to craft the bill and marshal support without him. “White House officials privately concede that it is actually better for Republicans when the president disengages more from being a policy negotiator,” reported The Daily Beast as the Republican health care scheme headed for predictable disaster. It’s hard to imagine them seeking his engagement on other complex legislative matters. “His idea of work is a Hollywood idea of work,” says D’Antonio, author of the biography The Truth About Trump. “He ‘works’ in the way a king would work.”

The most impressive quality of Trump’s myth is not just that it strays from reality but how thoroughly, even aggressively, it contravenes easily confirmable fact. When he was king, he was the King of Debt, and he may still owe as much as $1.8 billion to creditors. His casinos closed. His airline went bust. But even as he accrued failures, lawsuits and debts, Trump managed to turn “Trump” into a synonym for success. The letters were made of plastic, but they were dipped in gold.

In a May interview with Maureen Dowd of the New York Times, Trump biographer Timothy O’Brien explained that after the erection of Trump Tower in Midtown Manhattan in 1983, “he never cared again,” so impressed was he with that monolithic monument to his ego. “He’s fundamentally lazy,” O’Brien told Dowd. “He free-rides so many processes he doesn’t know anything about. He used to do it in the business world, and now he does it in the political world.”

Trump’s foray into politics would have been impossible without The Apprentice, which introduced him to Middle America, the onetime King of Debt reborn as a capable chief executive both ruthless and uncannily perceptive. But that was also an illusion, as we were recently reminded by Clay Aiken, the singer and onetime Celebrity Apprentice contestant. On a podcast last month, Aiken revealed that Trump wielded the show’s famous slogan-- “You’re fired!”-- at the instruction of others. The great leader of men was, at least in Aiken’s telling, a puppet. “The show’s producers from NBC made those calls,” explained a report in the Washington Post, “giving Trump instructions through a teleprompter on his desk that looked like a phone.”

...I asked Tommy Vietor, a longtime Obama campaign and White House staffer, to compare Trump’s schedule to Obama’s. “It doesn’t seem like he works very hard,” Vietor tells me. “More importantly, it doesn’t seem like there’s any structure to his day. That’s a huge problem. It takes discipline to keep yourself from getting buffeted around by events of the day.”

Trump’s activities are hard to pin down because his daily schedule includes “downtime,” for which the White House does not provide detailed descriptions. Figuring out the president’s doings is “the holy grail of reporting” on Trump, Maggie Haberman of the New York Times told New Yorker editor David Remnick. Haberman, who probably knows Trump better than any other journalist, is still on the hunt.

There have been clues. Mark Leibovich, a politics reporter for the the New York Times Magazine, recently paid a visit to the White House and was, to his great surprise, led into “a small dining room just off the Oval Office” to meet the president. It was a weekday afternoon. Trump was alone, watching a recorded episode of Fox & Friends.

When Trump hit the six-month mark of his presidency, Mike Pence, his unfailingly loyal vice president, marked the occasion with an op-ed for Fox News. Doing his best Soviet apparatchik imitation, Pence wrote that “President Trump’s accomplishments are nothing short of historic.”

Even by the dismayingly loose standards of political discourse, that is untrue. Although Trump has signed 42 bills since taking office, they are mostly minnows, whereas his supporters thought he’d be harpooning whales. An analysis by CNN found that 15 of those bills “have rolled back rules and regulations issued under Obama's administration, eight had to do with designating something or working to create a new initiative, five changed or expanded existing legislation, and 11 were related to government funding or operations.” One act renamed a courthouse for Fred Thompson, the actor and Republican senator. Aside from the ban on travelers from some Muslim-majority nations, his 42 executive orders have also been minor, undoing Obama’s legacy as opposed to creating his own. The grand gestures he promised remain the stuff of fantasy. The dealmaking he claims to have mastered remains holstered.

It’s not just Trump. The entire White House is in disarray. White House political adviser Steve Bannon once grandly boasted that the Trump administration would undertake a “deconstruction of the administrative state,” but controlled shrinkage of the federal government would have required far more focus than the exhausting disarray now at work. The Washington Post, for example, has found that Trump has done little to fill “key positions” in his administration, with only 50 confirmed so far. Another 165 have been nominated, and while the White House will blame Democratic “obstructionism,” that hardly explains the 357 positions for which no one has been nominated.

Trump has held several campaign-style rallies since becoming president. He is good at these, and he enjoys them, as do his most ardent supporters. Even non-campaign events, like his appearance at the Boy Scouts of America National Scout Jamboree in late July, tend to remind us less of Ronald Reagan battling communism than of Donald Trump battling Hillary Clinton. That isn’t an accident. During the campaign, Trump did work hard, because it was on his own behalf, the glory of rapturous crowds redounding directly to him, not to some abstract institution of government. He branded himself as the can-do outsider who’d build that wall and lock her up. He branded his opponents as crooked, lying, low energy, emasculated, corrupt, crazy. It was a marketing campaign, and to Trump’s apparent dismay, it worked just a little too well.

...Unable to take credit for his own achievements, Trump has laid claim to those of his predecessor. Obama took office during the Great Recession, when the unemployment rate was 7.8 percent and rising. Eight years later, as he prepared to leave the White House, it was 4.7 percent, a nine-year low. And yet Trump cites “absolutely tremendous economic progress,” as if he were the one who pulled the nation out of the foreclosure crisis. He brags about having quelled the flow of immigrants entering the United States illegally, but it was under Obama that illegal immigration fell to a 44-year nadir. Trump has, however, managed to keep out tourists. America has become so great, international travelers aren’t coming like they used to.

If you are one of the millions of Americans counting the days until Trump is no longer president, his failures may seem like victories. Except he is your president, and nobody wants to live in a nation in decline, a superpower devolving into a laughingstock. And while several of Trump’s proposals are either unworkable, unhinged or potentially disastrous, that’s not true for all of his ideas. There is infrastructure, above all, blessed infrastructure. The firing of 59 Tomahawk missiles at the Shayrat air base in Syria was a sign that Trump knows Bashar al-Assad is a butcher of innocents who must be deposed. So why not marshal international support to remove him? And why expend so much energy keeping out the refugees who are Assad’s victims?

“His work ethic is just fine,” says Joe Walsh, the former Tea Party congressman from Illinois who now hosts a radio show. “His problem is he's focusing on the wrong things.”



“Chicago Wine Party” was the seventh episode of the seventh season of Married...With Children. It premiered on November 1, 1992, a Sunday. The following Tuesday, the nation elected William Clinton as its next president.

Only five days later, a kind of despair had already set in, at least according to an unflattering report in the New York Times. Clinton’s supporters, wrote David Rosenbaum, “clearly recognized that the policy changes Mr. Clinton promised daily during the campaign can only take effect slowly, incrementally and painfully.”

Bundy was waging a political fight of his own. The premise of “Chicago Wine Party” involves a proposed 2-cent beer tax. About halfway through the episode, Bundy, bedecked in anti-beer-tax buttons, gives a rousing address:

The USA has been run too long by people who know the issues. People that watch the news on TV, read books, generally pay attention... well, no more. 'Cause now it's time that WE had a say in the future of America. Family...the Bundys are gonna elect a President.

It took 25 years, but the Bundys now have their man in the Oval Office. And while the election of Trump may have been a middle finger thrust at the coastal establishment by the white working class, it was also an expression of grievances legitimate and pervasive. Trump channeled those grievances masterfully for his campaign, but the urgency of those days is gone.

Trump is a fighter, but before November 8, 2016, he only fought for himself. He never served in the military. He rarely gave to charity. “He’s a terribly self-indulgent individual,” says Robert Dallek, the noted presidential historian, who doesn’t think the weight of the presidency has “fully taken hold yet.” It may never. In his firing of FBI Director James Comey, his humiliation of Attorney General Jeff Sessions, his casual disregard of ethics rules, Trump has made it clear that he sees the White House as little more than a branch office of his marketing business, the Trump Organization.

As his crude dismissal of Comey demonstrated, Trump has little interest in understanding the scope of the executive branch, of limits set by tradition and the U.S. Constitution. And he will always defend his gilded image, even when he should be defending loftier goals. There have been countless reports in recent months that Trump supporters “don’t care” about the investigations of his campaign’s potential collusion with Russian hackers and the Kremlin. What that statement-- often treated like a revelation-- misses is the obvious fact that Trump deeply cares about the Russia probes. Judging by his Twitter account, there are many days when he cares about nothing else.

Dallek compares Trump unfavorably to presidents like Lyndon B. Johnson, who endlessly “cajoled” legislators to pass landmark civil rights and anti-poverty bills. For all his dealmaking skills, Trump hasn’t shown much ability to negotiate with Congress, probably because it would require a knowledge of what members of Congress want, need and, above all, fear. And that would require doing homework. It’s much easier to just threaten Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowski on Twitter. It’s also a lot less effective.

Trump reminds Dallek of Warren G. Harding, whom he calls “the least effective president” before the current one. “He didn’t have the big picture or the small picture,” Dallek says of the man known as Wobbly Warren. “He was not very bright.”

Trump plainly wants his legacy to reflect that slogan on the baseball hat donned by his supporters. He wants to be the man who pulled America out of its postindustrial malaise, silenced talk of national decline and China’s ascent. But he can’t do that if he keeps sinking into his own debilitating malaise, weighed down by his shortcomings and an unwillingness to address them. He is entitled to rage at insults and defeats. Achilles raged, too. But then Achilles fought, leaving aside personal slights to charge the ramparts of Troy. Trump’s approach is the approach of Al Bundy. It begins in rage. It ends there, too. Both the president and the shoe salesman are driven by their unreasonable demands and unsoothable grievances to the couch, where they sit in front of the television, stewing.

An even worse cover story:

Worst President Ever Wants To Raise Taxes On The Internet To Get Even With The Washington Post's Owner

The vindictive asshole Trump's supporters elected looks like he may be headed towards letting them down again-- this time over taxes. Who ever thinks about Republicans raising taxes. An effective multi-decade p.r. effort has persuaded Americans that Republican don't raise taxes-- although they certainly do. Trump's inclination to raise taxes on internet purchases, though, does't have anything to do with economics, just with his war against the muckraking journalists at the Washington Post, which is owned by Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos.

Yesterday, at a Financial Services subcommittee hearing (Senate Appropriations Committee), Joe Manchin (D-WV) asked Trumpist Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin about internet taxes. As anyone who has bought anything on Amazon knows, Amazon does charge sales taxes-- at least in the 46 states that have sales taxes. But the Trump Regime claims that third party vendors on Amazon don't charges sales taxes. The Putin-placed ignorant and irrational asshole in the White House refers to that on Twitter as an "Amazon no-tax monopoly.

Trump is still furious at the Washington Post for making him into more of a laughingstock by exposing the fake Time Magazine covers he has hanging on the walls of his cheesy resorts and golf clubs. He;s pressuring Mnuchin to do something to cause Bezos pain.

Getting the feeling that Trump's time in the White House is likely to expire soon? BuzzFeed Editor-in-Chief Ben Smith penned a piece yesterday, Trump Is Failing As A President. But He’s Succeeding As Reality TV that gets right to the meat of the matter. When Señor Trumpanzee "was just starting out as a candidate for the presidency," he wrote, "he used to confuse ratings and polls. It was a meaningless eccentricity from a showbiz candidate going nowhere, a sign of the unreality of his campaign and of his own strange place in American culture. Now, it’s clear how badly a cosmopolitan media that may not have watched The Apprentice missed Trump’s continuous appeal. The sneers of New York tycoons who considered Trump a fraud, and of their media friends, couldn’t drown out the volume of the television, of The Apprentice and later the Celebrity Apprentice."

This isn’t an accident. Trump’s late publicist Jim Dowd recalled that, as a television actor, Trump, paid particular attention to markets in the midwest and south. "The Donald Trump post-first season of The Apprentice all of a sudden became a very popular figure on Main Street, U.S.A.," Dowd told Frontline. "So it was Wall Street before, and then it became Main Street to the point where we showed up in Denver for an event, and we had to have a separate room just for The Apprentice fans."

Jeff Zucker, Trump's erstwhile benefactor-- then of NBC, now leading #FakeNews CNN-- bet on The Apprentice in the waning days of the network's upscale, white Must-See-TV Thursday lineup, which included Friends and Will & Grace. But Trump, who Dowd said once served him and Apprentice creator Mark Burnett Oscar Mayer bologna so they could toast to a successful day of publicity with the sandwich meat, proved to have an unexpected appeal.

Trump wasn’t quite as bad a businessman as his detractors like to think-- their calculations of this return-on-investment typically leave out the staggering sums he dropped on his lifestyle. But he was a truly great publicist, and, it turned out, stellar television actor.

Now Trump is failing as a president by every measure-- popularity, global influence, a basic grasp on the levers of power. Perhaps most fatally, his incoherence has prevented him from projecting power through the federal government. He has been essentially irrelevant to the Republican health care agenda, except to draw out the process when Congress might have otherwise put the issue aside after the first disastrous attempt in the spring.

But the same instincts that have scuppered his presidency made for unbelievable, tremendous television.

"I’d be lying if I said I didn’t feel a frisson of anticipation when logging into Twitter early in the morning, knowing that the president of the United States could be tweeting about literally anything, no matter how strange or self-sabotaging,” the Trump critic and conservative writer who goes by the name Allahpundit wrote recently. "Is he going to start riffing on Obama’s birth certificate again? Might he be ready to flame Rosie O’Donnell?...Increasingly, The Trump Show isn’t a distraction from the Trump presidency. It is the Trump presidency.”

The ratings for the Trump show bear this theory out. They are, in a word, terrific: Fox News is still No. 1, even in its post-Bill O'Reilly incarnation; CNN, Zucker's kingdom, and Trump's stated enemy, keeps hitting quarterly highs in ratings; and MSNBC has directly benefited from Fox News' implosion, coinciding with Rachel Maddow's rise as the #resist hero. (Here’s a litany of other beneficiaries.) The television executives who felt qualms about syndicating the unfiltered Trump show through the Republican primaries are now cleansing their consciences with episode after episode of The Americans, produced for free by the American government.

This is classic reality television, down to its defining conventions. Perhaps the most memorable trope of reality TV-- popularized in the United States by Trump’s old Pygmalion, Burnett-- is the confessional interview. Those are the moments when a cast member directly addresses the camera, to tell us how they really feel. This is what happens on a Bachelorette date, when Rachel turns to the audience to say she needs Peter to assure her that he'll be ready for marriage at the end of this, or when one of the Real Housewives is filmed in formal dress in an ornate room and snipes about the lies of her castmates.

That moment-by-moment insight into the inner lives of the cast of Survivor: White House doesn’t always include those on-camera revelations, though Trump’s public disappointment with Jeff Sessions-- in interviews, on TV, at the White House and always with tension or even a tease about what could happen-- fits the genre perfectly.

More often, the confessionals come through leaks from the supporting characters: We know about Steve Bannon’s enmity for Jared Kushner, and his complex and shifting relationship with Reince Priebus. We know about Sean Spicer’s frustration, Rex Tillerson’s pique. Everyone is mad at Don Jr.! It’s an emotional mess.

And that twisting, ever fluid dynamic extends to each breaking news development. The country has been rapidly conditioned to wait for the drama of the emotional reaction-- the kind of torqued up authenticity on which reality TV thrives.

The White House reality show goes off the rails when it shifts into more scripted moments. In June, cabinet members heaped stilted praise on Trump for the cameras, and the audience winced.

"To me, that cabinet meeting, that was scripted,” one Emmy-nominated reality producer told BuzzFeed News. “It felt unreal, it felt fake, it felt inauthentic, it felt produced."

The ratings though-- the ratings are terrific. Better, in fact, than on The Apprentice as it aged. Jim Dowd, whose job as a publicist required he tell Trump about the show's diminished numbers, found himself unable to do it: "There’s about 10 people who cover ratings in terms of the publications that matter most," Dowd said. "And he would want to make sure I called all those 10 people and told them, 'No. 1 show on television, won its time slot,' and I’m looking at the numbers and at that point, say Season 5, for example, we were No. 72. I can’t tell that to him. I can’t say that. Maybe I should have, maybe I should have gotten Jeff Zucker involved, but he became kind of a monster when it came to these ratings."

Here, however, it’s hard to turn away.

And the recent rise of Anthony Scaramucci marks a kind of recognition that this is a show. Scaramucci is a television figure, a money manager known best for a conference he organized, and who played the role of hedge fund titan as Trump played real estate baron. A former talk show host who seemed to be working toward a CNBC show, he was hired for his cocksure grace in front of the camera.

Scaramucci recently suggested he’ll be adding an over-the-top morning show (as we say in the biz! BuzzFeed News recently announced one!) to the lineup. There could be “a desk on the White House lawn.” But that’s a crowded space. And the biggest TV show in history is already happening.

The rise of Trump has so many roots. Pundits routinely understate, though, the centrality of his television celebrity. And they miss its continuing power: Trump may not, yet, have figured out how to be president-- but he has monopolized our attention, dominated the narrative and the story, and it would be mistake to dismiss that power. A president doesn’t have to accomplish traditional things (policy, programs, reforms) to change the culture. What if once we start viewing major American institutions as players in the Trump Show, we can’t stop?

He’s failing at what used to be thought of as the presidency, but succeeding at reality television like no one ever has before. The question is whether there’s still a difference.