Two years in
Tom Sullivan
MLK Day. Two years into the Trump presidency. Is it hump day or halfway to hell? David Faris summarizes the president's first two years in one paragraph for The Week:
We know that President Trump has, perhaps permanently, transformed the presidency with his malevolence, ineptitude, and divisiveness. Donald Trump is by far the laziest and least informed person ever to inhabit the White House. In two years, he has defined deviance so far down that he may have forever altered the expectations of the office of the presidency itself. As we have learned from a thousand anonymously sourced news analyses, the president's time is largely unstructured, filled mostly with blocks of compulsive Fox News watching, an activity that he telegraphs to the public by live tweeting it. America's voters are constantly being told, by the president of the United States, to watch particular Fox programs and to applaud quotes by right-wing gadflies uttered without any serious pushback from other guests on what is now effectively Republican state television.Actually, Faris was just getting warmed up, but you get the idea. It ain't pretty. But you knew that.
So far, none of the street actions have moved the needle on removing Trump or getting furloughed federal employess back to work and paychecks. The sitting president spent Day 30 of the Trump shutdown tweeting instead of making deals. The self-proclaimed consummate deal maker is consummately terrible at it.
"It’s like McDonald’s not being able to make a hamburger,” Republican strategist and Trump critic Mike Murphy told the Washington Post. Mr. “I alone can fix it” cannot, but he can screw things up royally.
Russ Buettner and Maggie Haberman of the New York Times offer a major reason why:
His lack of public empathy for unpaid federal workers echoes his treatment of some construction workers, contractors and lawyers whom he refused to pay for their work on his real estate projects. The plight of the farmers and small-business owners wilting without the financial support pledged by his administration harks back to the multiple lenders and investors who financed Mr. Trump’s business ventures only to come up shortchanged.Trump cares about one thing: portraying himself as a winner. And he doesn't care who he screws in the process.
And his ever-changing positions (I’ll own the shutdown; you own the shutdown; the wall could be steel; it must be concrete; then again, it could be steel) have left heads in both parties spinning. Even after his televised proposal on Saturday to break the deadlock, Mr. Trump has no progress to show.