Trump Has No Core Economic Or Foreign Policy Beliefs

If there is one thing that could be said about Trump's second term, it's that it is chaotic. No one seems to know what Trump's actual policies are from one day to another - and that seems to be true of all his economic and foreign policy proposals.

During his campaign, Trump said he would deport 11 million undocumented immigrants, use tariffs to create a balance of trade favorable to the U.S., and lower prices on goods for consumers. He said these things so often that one could think these were core beliefs he held. But it hasn't worked out that way.

Once elected, Trump did start his deportation program. But when backlash started ti appear, he (and his administrative aides assured Americans that he was only going after criminals. Most people liked that (including Democrats), but then we began to hear of ICE agents going to schools, businesses, agricultural sites, and day labor locations - the places you would find law-abiding people, not criminals. When the business community objected (because they needed those workers), Trump reversed course and said he would avoid business and agricultural sites. Then he reversed himself again and said he would again go after workers (and children), but only in blue states. His policy has changed so much and so often that no one really knows what the policy is anymore.

The same is true of tariffs. He put a 10% tariff on nearly all nations and a higher tariff on some nations. When the stock market dropped sharply, he suspended a lot of the tariffs (except for China). Then he realized that China was banning the export of rare earth minerals and quickly lowered the tariff on them. Now no one knows what the tariffs will finally be because no nation is rushing to make a deal and Trump continues to threaten high tariffs.

The same is true of foreign policy. Trump said he would end the Russia-Ukraine war on his first day. That hasn't happened as Russia ignores his pleas (and threats) and Trump is now considering just giving up and walking away. At the same time, he can't seem to make up his mind whether to involve the U.S. military in the conflict between Israel and Iran.

As for lowering prices, that was just campaign rhetoric. He has done nothing to lower them, and in fact, his tariffs (and threats of tariffs) have insured prices will continue to rise.

This raises the question - does Trump have any core beliefs? Or is he like a weather vane - changing course with however the winds of public opinion blow? Some have said that Trump's belief is changed by whoever he last talked with. That seems like it is true. Whatever, his seeming lack of core beliefs has resulted in a very chaotic administration.

While he is chaotic on economic and foreign policy, he does seem to have a couple of core beliefs - greed (making himself much richer) and retribution. He has used his office to make hundreds of millions of dollars, and is using the federal government to attack those he doesn't like.

Unfortunately, neither of those beliefs help the American people - only himself.

Trump's Aides/Doctors Made Everything Very Clear (NOT!)

We have heard from the White House and from Trump's doctors. Did they make everything perfectly clear for you? Do you now have a clear picture of Trump's health problems? I doubt it. As with everything else about Trump, there has been more obfuscation than clarity.

The following is a good bit of satire from Alexandra Petri in The Washington Post. With her tongue planted firmly in cheek, she says everything is cleared up:

The good news in this moment of crisis is that the Trump administration has built up enough credibility that we absolutely understand what is going on right now! We have nothing to fear. The Trump team is now, and always has been, open and forthright with the American people. As President Trump said, “Going well, I think!”

In fact, it is going so well the president is leaving the hospital tonight! It is the clear, logical next step after what came before, and we, the American people, have no further questions, certainly not, “Really?” and, “Should he be doing that?” and, “That can’t possibly make sense, can it?”

“He may not entirely be out of the woods yet,” his physician, Sean Conley, acknowledged at a news conference Monday. But he will be out of the hospital — as everyone knows, after “the woods,” the hospital is the most dangerous place for patients to be during a critical time in their treatment. By the time you are reading this, he might already be back in the White House, which should not worry anyone, because the communication has been so straightforward throughout that there can be no possible cause for concern.

For instance, Conley was asked very clearly on Saturday whether the president had received any supplemental oxygen. “He has not needed any this morning, today at all,” Conley responded. Had he ever been on it? “Right now he is not.” Ever? “Yesterday and today, he was not on oxygen.” Well, I’m reassured! (“Have you ever committed any treason?” “Not this morning or literally right now!”)

This turned out to mean, Conley revealed Sunday, that he did not want to mention that the president had needed some supplemental oxygen, because that might give aid and comfort to the disease. (“I didn’t want to give any information that might steer the course of illness in another direction.”) I would never have guessed that was how diseases worked, but I am not a medical doctor.

He also reassured those who asked whether there were signs of scarring in the president’s lung tissue that they had looked into that and found “expected findings.” What are expected findings?!? Who was expecting them? What was the person who expected these findings expecting to find?

On Monday, he added that if anything had been found in Trump’s lungs, HIPAA required that he not tell us, “for his safety and his own health and reasons.” Nothing is a more compelling response to such an inquiry than, “I cannot tell you, because of reasons!” Oh, reasons! I am now at ease. I have no further questions.

In equally not-confusing terms, White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows tried to state off the record this past weekend that things could possibly be going not so well, but he then corrected himself on the record to say that things were going great. Then the president had the idea to surprise his supporters waiting outside by driving past in an SUV and waving. Usually the willingness to get into an SUV in a cloth mask and drive around would suggest that you were no longer at a stage of the disease where getting into an enclosed SUV in a cloth mask would be putting Secret Service personnel at risk, but — never assume!

The good news is that all of this is going so well and so openly that it has freed us from the oppressive notion that any information is knowable whatsoever! That’s a great place to be when you want information about your president’s medical well-being — and as a country, in general. We all know exactly what’s going on to the degree that “knowing” permits! A third of my Internet feed right now is people who think the president has an 18-stage plan to replace himself with a luminous cloud, and those are not even the people who usually believe in dangerous conspiracies.

Thankfully, if nothing is knowable, then you are not beholden to anyone and can act as you choose. Relatedly, the president added a piece of advice in his announcement of his hospital discharge: “Don’t be afraid of Covid. Don’t let it dominate your life.”

If only the 209,000 Americans people who have died of this disease without immediate access to the drugs and facilities the president benefited from had been able to be less afraid. I am sure that would have solved it. As sure as I am of anything, now.

White House Is In Chaos After A Very Bad Week For Trump

(Caricature of Trump is by the inimitable DonkeyHotey.)

Over 70% of the candidates Donald Trump supported lost their election bids. But that was just the start of a very bad week for Donald Trump and his administration. He made himself look even worse by his glum attitude in Paris at the memorial of the 100th year since the end of World War One, making himself even more isolated from other world leaders (except for Putin who got Trump's only smile). Then he caused a furor by refusing to go to the French cemetery where thousands of American soldiers were buried. He skipped the Peace meeting attended by other world leaders, and once back in Washington, refused to go to Arlington Cemetery on Veterans Day to lay a wreath on the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. He is the only president in over five decades to fail doing that.

And who was responsible for his very bad week? It was Trump himself. Once again, he has displayed his total incompetence.

Here's how Paul Waldman describes Trump's self-imposed meltdown in The Washington Post:

New reporting paints a picture of the administration descending into a thunderdome of backstabbing and resentment as staffers jockey for position or wonder whether they should get the heck out, all presided over by an erratic, unhappy president. This might sound like a familiar story, but if it isn’t already worse than it has been before, it soon will be, especially now that the midterm elections have cast a cloud over the remaining two years of President Trump’s term.

Let’s run down a few of the highlights:

• Trump’s trip to France to mark the 100th anniversary of the end of World War I was a disaster, marked by a brooding and petulant president mocked and condemned wherever he went. Angry about his party’s midterm losses, Trump has spent his time in the past week insulting reporters in terms that are unusually personal even for him, spinning out desperate conspiracy theories about stolen elections on Twitter and lashing out at Theresa May and Emmanuel Macron.
• After deciding not to attend a ceremony honoring those killed in the war because rain apparently made it inconvenient to get there, Trump grew enraged at his staff “for not counseling him that skipping the cemetery visit would be a public-relations nightmare.” Somehow he was not able to figure out for himself that doing so might not go over well.
• Trump “told advisers over the weekend that he had decided to remove Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen and that he also was seriously considering replacing White House chief of staff John F. Kelly.”
• While Trump is considering replacing Kelly with Nick Ayers, Vice President Pence’s chief of staff, “aides told Trump that appointing Ayers would lower staff morale and perhaps trigger an exodus.”
• First lady Melania Trump’s staff issued an extraordinary statement saying a top national security aide, Mira R. Ricardel, “no longer deserves the honor of serving in this White House,” making public a bureaucratic feud that stretches between the White House and the Pentagon.
• According to the Los Angeles Times, “With the certainty that the incoming Democratic House majority will go after his tax returns and investigate his actions, and the likelihood of additional indictments by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III, Trump has retreated into a cocoon of bitterness and resentment.”
• Trump’s firing of Jeff Sessions and appointment of Matthew Whitaker as acting attorney general, a move meant to protect him from the Mueller investigation, is turning out to be a mini-scandal in its own right, to the point where the president vacillates between singing Whitaker’s praises and claiming he doesn’t know him.

The root of all this is the midterm elections, and it’s hard to overstate what an impact they’ll have on the administration. Nobody likes losing, of course, but nobody hates it more than Trump, particularly after he worked so hard in the weeks leading up to the election, tellinghis supporters that “I’m not on the ticket, but I am on the ticket, because this is also a referendum about me.” It was indeed, and he was pretty emphatically rejected.

Nothing is more upsetting to Trump than being considered a loser, even temporarily. But I suspect that the prospect of having his tax returns made public has him even more frightened. We don’t know what they will reveal, but suffice to say that no sane person believes that all we’ll discover when they’re opened up is that Trump took advantage of some loopholes and did some creative accounting here and there. Everything we know about Trump’s career — not least the recent revelation that he and his family engaged in a years-long conspiracy to commit tax fraud on an absolutely massive scale — suggests that those returns will be a Pandora’s box of scandal.

So that would account for the president’s dark mood. But if you’re one of his staffers, you’re probably gripped by an equally strong sense of foreboding, or at a minimum the feeling that the fun times are over. Not only won’t there be any more conservative legislation to pass, but also Democrats will be launching one investigation after another, probing everything you’ve done for the past two years. If you’re senior enough, you may get hauled before House committees to be grilled mercilessly. You might even need to get yourself a lawyer, which can be a real burden on a government salary.

So you go to work every day wondering when the hammer is going to fall on you. Is one of your colleagues plotting against you? Are you going to get a congressional subpoena? Is today the day that the president turns his wrath on you in his endless search for others to blame for his problems and his mistakes?

When everyone around you feels that way, too, things get a little uneasy. Describing the White House right now, one former Trump aide told Politico, “It’s like an episode of ‘Maury,'” referencing the daytime TV show famous for bitter family arguments. “The only thing that’s missing is a paternity test.”

But there’s no mystery about who the father of this mess is. He’s sitting in the Oval Office, scared and angry that the accountability he has outrun his entire life might actually catch up to him.

Voters Think The Trump Administration Is In Chaos

Donald Trump tells us that his administration is running smoothly. Most Americans don't believe that. They think his administration is a chaotic mess.

Chart was made using information in a new Politico / Morning Consult Poll -- done between March 15th and 19th of a random national sample of 1,994 registered voters, with a 2 point margin of error.

Most Think Trump Administration Is Running Chaotically

A few days ago, in response to media reports, Trump tweeted that there's no chaos in the White House. Unfortunately for him, the American public doesn't believe that. Only about a third of the public (33%) thinks the White House is running smoothly, while a whopping 60% say it is in chaos.

That's the opinion of registered voters in a new Morning Consult / Politico Poll -- done between July 27th and 29th of a random national sample of 1,972 registered voters, with a 2 point margin of error. And that's the opinion of every demographic group (gender, age, race, education, income, region, etc.).

People just don't feel the Trump administration really knows what it's doing. Can new chief-of-staff Kelly right the White House ship? I doubt it. Kelly will probably be effective in better controlling staff and aides in the White House, but that's not where the chaos is originating from. It is coming from the top -- Trump himself.

It comes partly from Trump's leadership style (which pits underlings against each other), partly from Trump changing his mind on issues (many times after aides and cabinet members going out on a limb to defend the position he just abandoned), partly from Trump's narcissism (which demands loyalty, but won't return that loyalty), and partly from Trump's propensity to lie about nearly everything (even when he would be better served by the truth). How can anything other than chaos reign when you have a "leader" like that?