I especially love it when the moron says things are going fine......
In One Rocky Week, Trump’s Self-Inflicted Chaos on
Vivid Display
By JULIE HIRSCHFELD DAVIS and MAGGIE
HABERMAN
WASHINGTON — Minutes before Trump
was to take the stage in Nashville last week to make his case for the health
care overhaul he had promised, he received some unwelcome news that shifted his
script.
A federal district court judge in
Hawaii had just placed another stay on his ban on travelers from six
predominantly Muslim countries, dealing his order a second legal setback in two
months. As a country music duo crooned in an auditorium still filling with
adoring supporters of Mr. Trump, he fumed backstage and huddled with his staff
for a hasty re-drafting of the speech.
When Mr. Trump emerged, he decided
to relegate the health care overhaul, which he has identified as a top domestic
priority, to a brief mention more than halfway through the speech. He instead
replaced its prime billing with an angry diatribe against the travel ban ruling
and the judge who had issued it.
“I have to be nice, otherwise I’ll
get criticized for speaking poorly about our courts,” Mr. Trump said. But he
could not help himself: Trump soon suggested the court that had just ruled
against him should be destroyed. “People are screaming, ‘Break up the Ninth
Circuit!’ ”
Once again, Mr. Trump’s agenda was
subsumed by problems of his own making, his message undercut by a seemingly
endless stream of controversy he cannot seem to stop himself from feeding.
The health care measure appears on
track for a House vote this coming week, and Trump, who planned a weekend of
relaxation at Mar-a-Lago, his Palm Beach, Fla., club, is likely to receive a
large measure of the credit. But it has also become clear that Mr. Trump, an
agitator incapable of responding proportionately to any slight, appears
hellbent on squandering his honeymoon.
Instead, he has sowed chaos in his own
West Wing, and talked or tweeted his way into trouble, over and over again.
That was never more apparent than
over the last week, when fresh questions about his refusal to release his tax
returns and the blocking of his executive order sapped the spotlight from his
efforts to build support for the health measure and even the unveiling of his
first budget.
Even more self-lacerating: his
insistence that President Barack Obama authorized surveillance on his 2016
campaign, which continued unabated despite rebukes from Republicans, denials by
the congressional intelligence committees, and the complaints of the British
government, which demanded an apology after Mr. Trump’s spokesman suggested one
of its intelligence agencies had aided in the spying.
“It’s a pattern with him — he
sometimes counterpunches so hard he hits himself,” said Ari Fleischer, a former
White House press secretary for George W. Bush.
The public outbursts are mirrored by
internal tensions. With the embers of the old rivalry between his chief
strategist, Stephen K. Bannon, and chief of staff, Reince Priebus,
extinguished, a new realignment has emerged in a West Wing already rived by
suspicion and intrigue.
Gary Cohn, the former Goldman Sachs
executive who serves as Trump’s top economic policy adviser and who is
decidedly more liberal than the rest of Mr. Trump’s inner circle, is on the
rise, and has the ear of Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner. Mr. Kushner also
gained an ally on the National Security Council with the appointment of Dina
Powell, a Republican and another former Goldman official who worked with Mr.
Cohn, as a deputy for strategy.
In the newness of the
administration, the constant need to tend to internal dynamics has been a
distraction. The aides have watched each other warily and tried tending to
Trump’s base of supporters amid a sea of appointments of people who worked on
Wall Street.
Frustration in D.C.
Mr. Trump is not bothered by turf
battles in his administration. He believes they foster competition and keep any
one aide from accumulating too much power. He is even more enthusiastic about
waging war publicly, believing that it fires up his white working-class base.
Indeed, in Nashville on Wednesday
night, Mr. Trump spoke to a rapturous crowd of almost 10,000 people and his
embattled spokesman, Sean Spicer, was greeted as a star by awe-struck
supporters, who spent several minutes crowding around him for pictures and to
pat him on the back.
But in Washington, some Republican
lawmakers and officials have watched in dismay and frustration, they say
privately, because the person they are looking to for cover and salesmanship of
the health care overhaul keeps getting sidetracked.
One of those diversions came after
the judge’s ruling on the travel ban. In Nashville, Trump said he would prefer
to go back to his first, more restrictive ban and pursue it to the Supreme
Court. “That’s what I wanted to do in the first place,” Mr. Trump said, a
statement that seems destined to be used against his own lawyers in upcoming
court cases on the executive order.
For Mr. Trump, this was supposed to
be a week of pivoting and message discipline. He read from a script during
public appearances and posted on Twitter less often. He invited lawmakers from
both parties to the White House for strategy sessions on the health measure. He
scheduled policy speeches, like one near Detroit, where he announced he was
halting fuel economy standards imposed by Mr. Obama, and the rally in
Nashville, where he visited the grave of Andrew Jackson, the populist patron
selected by his history-minded political impresario, Mr. Bannon, as Mr. Trump’s
analog.
But by Friday, as Mr. Trump worked
to call attention to his powers of persuasion in securing commitments from a
dozen wavering Republicans to back the health measure, the White House was left
frantically trying to explain why Mr. Spicer had repeated allegations that the
Government Communications Headquarters, the British spy agency, had helped to
eavesdrop on Trump during the campaign.
Rather than expressing regret for a
slight of one of the United States’ strongest allies, Mr. Trump was
unapologetic.
“We said nothing,” he said at a news
conference with Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany. “All we did was quote a
certain very talented legal mind who was the one responsible for saying that on
television,” he added, referring to Andrew Napolitano, the commentator who
first leveled the charge about the involvement of the British intelligence
service on Fox News.
That did not seem to be enough for
the irate British, who had called the charge “nonsense” and “utterly
ridiculous.” Shepard Smith, a Fox News anchor, later disavowed it as well,
saying his network could not back up Mr. Napolitano’s claims.
The episode left little time for
talk of Mr. Trump’s “America First” budget released on Thursday, filled with
domestic spending cuts so deep that even his budget director conceded they
would be unpopular, or the health care measure that would affect more than 20 percent
of the economy.
“This White House is on two tracks,”
Mr. Fleischer said. “The legislative one, which has been surprisingly and
pleasantly productive, and the other one full of self-induced error.”
The problem for Mr. Trump, he added,
is that the self-destructive behavior, if it continues, threatens to overshadow
everything else.
“He has a tremendous number of
ingredients at his disposal to be very successful ,” Mr. Fleischer added, “but
he might not even get credit for it if he is so red-hot controversial.”
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