I hope you are having fun. If not, check this out:
Conversations with some officials who have briefed Trump and others who are aware of how he absorbs information portray a president with a short attention span.
He likes single-page memos and visual aids like maps, charts, graphs and photos.
National Security Council officials have strategically included Trump’s name in “as many paragraphs as we can because he keeps reading if he’s mentioned,” according to one source, who relayed conversations he had with NSC officials.
Trump likes to look at a map of the country involved when he learns about a topic.
I also like maps.
Unfortunately, we are finding out that happy talk is not enough to fix an economy. Eventually reality sinks in. Just a few weeks after Trump touted Ford’s agreement to return a few jobs to America, they announce a 10% cut in their workforce:
Ford Motor Co (F.N) plans to shrink its salaried workforce in North America and Asia by about 10 percent as it works to boost profits and its sliding stock price, a source familiar with the plan told Reuters on Monday.
A person briefed on the plan said Ford plans to offer generous early retirement incentives to reduce its salaried headcount by Oct. 1, but does not plan cuts to its hourly workforce or its production.
The move could put the U.S. automaker on a collision course with President Donald Trump, who has made boosting auto employment a top priority. Ford has about 30,000 salaried workers in the United States.
Ford picked a good time to announce this jobs cut, as the President seems a bit . . . distracted.
Today I heard a report that White House aides offered the following two defenses:
1. That’s just the way the President talks–he wasn’t trying to obstruct justice.
2. Why didn’t Comey go to the authorities with this information back in February?
If that’s all they’ve got, then they are in big trouble. The first point tacitly accepts that the story is true (which anyone with half a brain already understands.) And the first point makes the second point moot, even if it wasn’t easily disposed of with Comey’s likely claim that he was trying to shield the rest of the FBI from intimidation.
There is no full court press from the White House that Comey is lying, which is quite revealing.
Yet in some ways the Trump scandal seems much less serious than Watergate. Nixon seemed highly intelligent, devious and dangerous. Trump just seems like a buffoon.
Yesterday, a commentator (I think it was Matt Lewis) said that Trump was basically a child—which seems right to me. He might not have even known he was committing obstruction of justice, although the fact that he told others to leave the room suggests that he knew he was crossing some sort of line. But here’s one case where “innocence” in the sense of child-like doesn’t really help very much. It makes him seem less evil than Nixon, but also far less qualified to deal with foreign leaders. He’s obviously not even close to being qualified to be President. So should he be removed through impeachment or the 25th amendment? Either way, he’s got to go.
But he also seems like the sort of guy who will try to bring down the Republican Party if they don’t support him. Even during the campaign, it was obvious that the GOP had a tiger by the tail. If they had stiffed him at the convention he would have told his supporters to not vote for the GOP nominee. I don’t see any scenario where 2018 is not an historic GOP disaster. Any tax cut for the rich is going to be repealed in two years or four years, it’s just a matter of time. And if it’s President Sanders, the rich will see even higher taxes.
In other words, I told you so.
PS. Last October I was premature with this prediction:
We are currently in the circular firing squad phase. I eagerly await the “Hitler was so pissed the generals let him down that he decided to destroy Germany when he knew that he was going to lose” phase.
But I still think that’s coming. When a political party has been naughty, there’s a high price to pay. And the GOP has been very, very naughty.
PPS. Some anti-Trump people claimed that I was too complacent in claiming that America’s democracy was strong enough to push back against Trump authoritarian tendencies. I think we are seeing a pretty strong pushback already. Even if Trump stays in office, he will be on a very short leash—Congress will not tolerate any more of this stuff (and I’m not even sure he’ll survive this.)