Trump's Big CON: Is the Con Up?

UPDATE IV:  "The 100-day mark of the Trump presidency is approaching, and his aides are worried that the media narrative will depict his historically awful lack of accomplishments with highly unflattering levels of accuracy. But don’t tell that to President Trump. He knows the real problem is that the news media won’t acknowledge how terrific the start to his presidency has actually been in comparison with his loser predecessors:

A new Gallup poll out this morning, however, strongly suggests that an increasing number of Americans just don’t believe Trump’s spin about his presidency anymore."

Read the Washington Post, This brutal new poll shows that fewer and fewer people believe Trump’s lies.

UPDATE III:  "Everyone in Washington is trying to figure out why President Trump’s agenda has stalled on multiple fronts and why his approval numbers are swirling down the toilet. CNN’s Chris Cillizza suggests Trump’s penchant for disruption and chaos actually works against him. (I agree.) Others point to Trump’s failure to forge relationships on Capitol Hill. . .

Still others say the problem is congressional Republicans. . .

All this has some truth to it. But here’s another overarching reason for Trump’s travails: As his campaign promises are getting translated into concrete policy specifics, Americans are recoiling from the results. What’s more, this process is unmasking the disconcerting levels of dishonesty, bad faith, and lack of concern for detail and procedure that are rotting away at the core of his agenda and approach to governing, all of which is plainly working against him. . ."

The bottom line is that the ongoing translation of Trump’s agenda into policy specifics is showing that major elements of it are unpopular, or unworkable because they are premised on lies, or both.

Read the Washington Post, Why is Trump flailing? Because Americans hate his agenda, and it’s based on lies.

UPDATE II:  Trump is "inexperienced, uninformed, easily provoked and supremely confident in his own judgment. . . .

Mere incompetence would be bad enough. But foreigners trying to understand the United States must now study (of all things) the intellectual influences of White House chief strategist Stephen K. Bannon. His vision of a Western alliance of ethno-nationalist, right-wing populists against globalists, multiculturalists, Islamists and (fill in the blank with your preferred minority) is the administration’s most vivid and rhetorically ascendant foreign policy viewpoint. How does this affect the alliances of the previous dispensation? That is the background against which Trump’s peevishness is being viewed.

Foreigners see a president who has blamed his predecessor, in banana-republic style, of a serious crime, for which FBI Director James B. Comey testified Monday there is no evidence. They see an administration whose campaign activities are being actively investigated by the executive branch and Congress. If close Trump associates are directly connected to Russian hacking, foreigners will see the president engulfed in an impeachment crisis — the only constitutional mechanism that would remove the taint of larceny from the 2016 election."

Foreigners see a Darwinian, nationalist framework for American foreign policy; a diminished commitment to global engagement; a brewing scandal that could distract and cripple the administration; and a president who often conducts his affairs with peevish ignorance.

Some will look at this spectacle and live in fear; others may see a golden opportunity.

Read the Washington Post, The American presidency is shrinking before the world’s eyes.

And just who sees a golden opportunity?

UPDATE:  "'There’s a smell of treason in the air,' presidential historian Douglas Brinkley said. 'Imagine if J. Edgar Hoover or any other FBI director would have testified against a sitting president? It would have been a mind-boggling event.'

Brinkley, who has published biographies of such presidents as Gerald Ford, Franklin Roosevelt and Theodore Roosevelt, said of Trump’s start, 'This is the most failed first 100 days of any president.'

'To be as low as he is in the polls, in the 30s, while the FBI director is on television saying they launched an investigation into your ties with Russia, I don’t know how it can get much worse,' Brinkley said."

Read the Washington Post, President Trump faces his hardest truth: He was wrong.

Read also the Washington Post, Comey’s testimony humiliates Trump, which noted that "[t]o hear the head of the FBI in essence call the president a liar or wide-eyed conspiratorialist is bracing, if not humiliating, for the chief executive. And reflecting on the morning tweet, Trump now seems desperate, childish and vulnerable. He’s been tripped up by his own grandiose lies. At some level he must know it."

"Trump continues to vaguely believe that what he tweeted will somehow be validated later, at least in some form. But at the same time, Trump himself is growing aware that his nonstop lies — or delusions, or self-deception, or whatever you want to call all of it — are failing him. And he’s frustrated by it. This is coming to us according to people close to Trump.

The way in which Trump made those charges about Obama; the way the White House subsequently handled the mess, by demanding that Congress investigate them after an internal search that turned up nothing to back them up; the way in which Trump continues to blithely dismiss the need to get to the bottom of Russian meddling in our election — all of those things are a function of something that is seeping into pretty much everything the White House is doing these days.

This bad faith — this deep contempt for process, fact-based debate and policy reality — borders on all-corrosive. It includes a frontal assault on the news media for accurately reporting on Trump’s inaugural crowd size, in defiance of Trump/White House lies about it. It includes Trump’s explicit exhortations to his supporters to disbelieve the news media and choose their own facts and reality instead. It includes the laughably slapdash process that produced the first travel ban, and the decision to delay the second one to bask in good press from Trump’s speech to Congress, even though it was supposed to be an urgent national security matter (never mind that the substantive case for it was undercut by Homeland Security’s own analysts).

It includes Trump embracing a health plan that would leave 24 million people uninsured after promising 'insurance for everybody.' . .

[T]he FBI investigation will continue overshadowing the Trump presidency. And in the present moment, the Comey takedown — a brutal institutional debunking of one of Trump’s and the White House’s highest-visibility moments of pure contempt for norms and process — has exposed the deep rot of bad faith in a new way. And this could have consequences. It could help inspire an escalation in institutional pushback — from the courts, the media, government leakers and civil society — that exercises a further constraining effect.

If the sources who spoke to the Times are to be believed, Trump is already reportedly frustrated that his showmanship and improvisational approach to reality are failing him. One shudders to imagine how he will react to more serious setbacks."

Read the Washington Post, Trump’s lies are failing him, and it is making him deeply frustrated.

Read also The New York Times, Trump’s Weary Defenders Face Fresh Worries, which noted that "it’s the obsessiveness and ferocity of Mr. Trump’s pushback against the Russian allegations, often untethered from fact or tact, that is making an uncertain situation worse. . .

there’s some evidence that the president’s magic medium is losing its effectiveness, in part because Mr. Trump’s Twitter persona seems to have shifted from puckish to paranoid."