Monday, October 30, 2017

Trump's Big CON: Trump Has No Principles, CONt Part 3

"President Trump's most faithful supporters like to believe he's always a step ahead of the media and the political establishment — that he's playing three-dimensional chess while we're stuck on checkers. Where we see utter discord, they see carefully orchestrated chaos.

This week should disabuse absolutely everybody of that notion.

On two issues — health care and calling the families of dead service members — the White House has shown itself to be clearly unmoored, careening back and forth based upon the unhelpful and impulsive comments and tweets of its captain.

On the more substantial issue of health care, Trump apparently told Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) to craft a deal to replace the Affordable Care Act subsidies for insurers covering low-income Americans. Trump then canceled the subsidies and explained that the money was only making insurers rich (it's not). Then he suggested he would support Alexander's deal. Then he apparently realized that those two things were completely inconsistent, and he backed off his support for the deal, leaving Alexander holding the bag and apparently (understandably) puzzled. . . 

On Gold Star families, Trump . .

    Brought this issue up of his own accord even when he hadn't called some of the very few (relative to his predecessors) new Gold Star families he's seen lose loved ones on his watch. While more than 2,500 service members were killed in action during Obama's tenure, only 20 have died in Trump's first nine months.

    Claimed “proof” that his own White House admits he doesn't have.

    Rehashed the death of his own chief of staff's son, suggesting Obama didn't call John F. Kelly when his son was killed in Afghanistan in 2010. Kelly hasn't commented.

    Put the White House in the position of disputing the accounts of Gold Star families.

If you think any of these things were planned, you are kidding yourself. . .

There is no game plan on any of this; it's Trump simply floating from one controversy to the next and making things worse by flying off the handle and saying untrue things. Trump's controversies are usually at least within the realm of plausible deniability; these examples just seem totally careless and haphazard."

Read the Washington Post, The Trump White House’s utterly unmoored week.

What do you expect from The President Without Principles.

Trump's Big CON: "He's So Pretty", Cabinet Edition, (AKA Trump is a Psycho-Narcissistic Con Man (CONt., Part 20))

Too fun, and true.

Read the Washington Post, Trump’s Cabinet is the absolute best of all time. Ever., which states:

"It’s about time somebody gives Donald Trump the credit he deserves. Even if that person is Donald Trump.

'We’re doing a lot of great things,' the president said at the start of a Cabinet meeting Monday. Further, he said, 'we are getting tremendous accolades for what we’re doing.' What’s more, 'the Justice Department is doing a fantastic job,' while the economy is growing 'phenomenally,' except for the drag from those hurricanes — the handling of which, Trump would again say Monday, earns him an 'A-plus' grade. He also boasted about his yet-to-be-passed (or even proposed) tax cuts — the 'largest tax cuts in the history of our country.'

But the highest praise of all came for his Cabinet — or, rather, his own acumen in choosing this truly exceptional group of people seated at the table around him. 'There are those that are saying it’s one of the finest group of people ever assembled as a candidate — as a Cabinet,' he said. (Trump’s candidate-Cabinet mix-up followed his Friday mishap when he praised parents who sacrifice for the 'furniture,' rather than future, of their children.) 'This is a tremendous amount of talent,' Trump continued. 'We have just gotten really, really, great people. I’m very proud of them.'

And I’m very proud of Trump for recognizing the greatness of his Cabinet. But he is being modest. This isn’t just 'one of the finest' Cabinets. There has never been a Cabinet like this before — and there probably will never be one like it in the furniture.

Sure, George Washington sat around the Cabinet table with John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, Henry Knox and Edmund Randolph. Abraham Lincoln won the Civil War with William Seward, Salmon Chase and Edwin Stanton. Franklin Roosevelt beat the Depression and the Nazis with Henry Morgenthau, Harold Ickes and Henry Stimson.

But Washington didn’t have a professional-wrestling executive in his Cabinet, nor an education secretary foresighted enough to warn the country about the danger posed to schools by bears. He didn’t even have an education secretary!

Lincoln didn’t think to hire a Cabinet secretary who proposed abolishing the very Cabinet agency he runs, as Trump has found in Energy Secretary Rick Perry. As Lincoln would have said: Oops!

FDR never had on his Cabinet someone he’d compared to a child molester, as Trump has with Ben Carson, his secretary of housing and urban development.

No matter how you measure it — billionaires, white men, oddballs — this Cabinet is extraordinary. Alexander Hamilton’s entire treasury probably didn’t have the amount of money EPA chief Scott Pruitt has spent on a soundproof phone booth, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos has spent on her security detail, and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and his wife spent taking a government jet to Kentucky, where they viewed the eclipse, or tried to spend, requesting a government plane for their honeymoon."

Do read the rest.