Thursday, March 30, 2017

Trump's Big CON: He's a Loser

"President Trump's biggest weakness is that he doesn't know how to make deals.

That, as Business Insider's Josh Barro points out, seems to suggest a deep unfamiliarity with the urtext of the subject, 'The Art of the Deal.' Trump should know that “the worst thing you can possibly do in a deal is seem desperate to make it.” But that's precisely what he has done, first with health care and now with infrastructure. . .

[H]he did just about everything he could to alienate Democrats, from his, in their view, discriminatory travel ban to his attempt to undo their greatest legislative achievement of the last 40 years in Obamacare. More than that, though, Trump's inability to unite Republicans behind his health-care bill showed Democrats that they don't have to make a deal with him out of fear of him making an extremely conservative deal with the House Freedom Caucus. It turns out he can't make a deal with them at all. Kind of makes it hard to play the two sides off against each other. . .

Democrats have no incentive to help Trump pass popular legislation when his unpopularity helps them. Why turn him into the winning winner he ran as, who alone possesses the ability to break through the gridlock of Washington, when they can keep him as the losing loser he's governed as, who can't even get a bill through one chamber of Congress his party controls? They won't, at least not on terms that are remotely acceptable to Republicans."

Read the Washington Post, Trump is throwing himself into the Democrats’ trap.