Don’t be alarmed by the latest headline from CNN:
Trump warns presidency is being stolen amid Mueller angst
After all, President Trump’s first half-term featured a Congress controlled by the Republican Party. He’s nominated and confirmed two SCOTUS justices in those two years, not to mention a horde of Federal judiciary nominees, some of quite dubious pedigree. He had a chance to trash the ACA, which he fatally mishandled, and managed to push through a tax reform bill that enriches the top 1% of Americans – which, if we’re to believe his remarks about himself, includes himself – while saddling the nation with an amazingly accelerating bout of debt, brought on by a fatal belief in the fallacious Laffer Curve.
And while the Mueller Report, despite Trump’s frenzied Tweets claiming complete exoneration, suggests otherwise and brings dishonor and distrust down upon an Administration which has already proven to be unusually lacking in ethical behavior, it’s had little effect on the potential efficiency of an Administration that could have accomplished a lot. So let’s just all laugh off that charlatan Franklin Graham’s suggestion that Trump get two more years. Not even GOP members of Congress would dare to rupture the Constitution in such a manner.
So what’s going on?
President Trump knows his base very well. He’s studied them, ingratiated himself with them, and thinks he knows which buttons to push, which experiences to claim he shares with them, in order to guarantee their votes, even as he indulges in trade wars which only endanger the interests of those very voters who helped put him in power in the first place.
The key here is victimization. Fox News and allied organizations have spent enormous amounts of time teaching their audience that they are victims, victims of crime, immigrants, Big Government, what have you. It’s the shared mythos, the soup they all drink. Why are times tough? Because someone’s out to get them.
And so now President Trump joins his base in being a victim. Never mind that any objective view of his situation refutes it absolutely. If he lacks in accomplishments, he can only blame his own ineptitude. If things go wrong, he can only blame his flawed ideology. If he’s honest. Given the evaluation of third party fact-checkers, he’s not.
He’s a victim. Because, well, he says he is.
Perhaps the worst of this, the most galling part of this, the abyss he’s desperately skirting, is that President Obama, whose party also controlled Congress for his first two years in office, managed to pass the ACA; and after losing control of Congress, he admitted he had made mistakes in campaigning, and then spent six years trying to work with an intransigent GOP majority with little, if any, complaints about being victimized.
That’s not to say he didn’t push his agenda in other ways. According to Constitutional experts, his unilateral action to care for the children of illegal immigrants, the DREAMERS, may have been an overstep of his Constitutional powers. It’s also true that, under his leadership, illegal immigrant counts plunged, at least to the extent that they can be measured. But it’s important, and fair, to remember that President Obama pushed the envelope of power, just as his predecessors have been observed to do, to produce results on his agenda. And Trump, much to the consternation of pundits on the left and right, has continued to do the same, but at a more accelerated rate, as I’ve occasionally discussed.
The real question is whether the American voter will tolerate Trump’s blatant incompetence, lies, etc etc, or if the GOP primary voter will deny him the nomination, replacing him with someone of more, shall we say, gravitas?
