Sunday, January 14, 2018

Sunday Week in Review

What else did Donald Trump do this week?

Wall funding. Almost immediately after taking office, Trump began retreating from his campaign mantra that Mexico would pay for his proposed border wall. But this week, he took the retreat a step further: not only would the United States pay for the wall, but it would pay for it out of money set aside from existing border patrol activities that actually work.

Clinton obsession. On Wednesday, Trump surrogate Kellyanne Conway went on CNN to make this claim: "We don't care about her. Nobody here [at the White House] talks about Hillary Clinton."

While that is probably true of most White House staff, Trump himself remains visibly preoccupied with Clinton. Just this Monday, he departed from a scripted speech to riff about how grateful he imagined agribusiness executives were that she wasn't president. He brought her up during his Thursday interview with the Wall Street Journal, publicly brags about his electoral college victory over her about every five days, and has tweeted about her at least 83 times since taking office.

"Good relationship" with Kim Jong-un. In that same interview, apparently granted as part of a week-long effort to portray Trump as mentally engaged and in command of his own staff in the wake of doubts raised by Michael Wolff's book Fire and Fury, Trump said this: "I probably have a very good relationship with Kim Jong Un of North Korea. I have relationships with people, I think you people are surprised."

Trump has never spoken with Kim, and most of what has passed between them has been at the level of schoolyard insults. (Trump so enjoys using his most recent nickname for Kim, "little rocket man," that he seems unable to use the word "rocket" in any context without free-associating his way to North Korea.)

That said, there have been times when Trump has swerved to the other extreme, complimenting Kim for his ruthlessness in eliminating his political opposition and calling him a "smart cookie." This may have been what Trump was focusing on in his imaginary relationship with Kim.

This morning, the White House belatedly pushed back on the transcript of that interview, claiming that Trump had really said "I'd [I would] probably have a good relationship," which would make Trump merely ridiculously overconfident about the future rather than delusional about the present. Both the White House and the Wall Street Journal released audio. It is difficult to hear anything in either that supports Trump's claim.

Dianne Feinstein. On Tuesday, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) released transcripts from the Senate Judiciary committee's interview with the founder of Fusion GPS, the firm that hired former British intelligence officer and Russia expert Christopher Steele to investigate the Trump campaign's ties to the Putin regime. Republicans on the committee had refused to release it, in spite of the fact that it was not classified and Fusion GPS has been openly calling for it to be made public.

Trump lashed out at Feinstein in response:
There are at least three lies in this, although as usual it is difficult to know when Trump is knowingly misleading or simply confused.
  1. Feinstein has never said that there was "no collusion"--or, more accurately, no evidence of a criminal conspiracy against the United States between the Russian goverment and the Trump or his campaign. This is not the first time Trump has tried to put that claim in the mouths of, as he put it, "virtually every Democrat."
  2. There is nothing illegal or "possibly illegal" about Feinstein's act.
  3. As such, Feinstein did not need "authorization" to do what she did, either from the committee as a whole or (as he may have meant) from Trump himself, the subject of the investigations.
Poll bragging. In what is becoming an odd, if inadvertently honest, habit with him, Trump once again boasted about a poll that contained almost nothing but bad reviews of his presidency. On Thursday, he tweeted (correctly) that 66% of Americans said the economy was "excellent" or "good" in a recent Quinnipiac poll.

What he neglected to mention (and may not have been told by his staff) was that a majority of Americans credit President Obama rather than him for that good economy. Other findings in the same poll include:
  • Americans believe that Trump is "not level-headed" by a 69-28% margin
  • Almost twice as many Americans think he is "not honest" (63-34%)
  • 65% of Americans think he does not "share their values," vs. 32% who do.
  • His overall approval rating was 36%, with 59% of Americans disapproving of his performance in office.

Why do these things matter?

  • Presidents who find themselves unable to keep their campaign promises shouldn't sabotage their own government's effectiveness just for appearances.
  • It's bad when a president is obsessed with his enemies to the point that he's still talking about them more than a year after the election.
  • Presidents who imagine relationships with hostile foreign powers that don't exist in reality aren't mentally fit for office.
  • Evidence that doesn't say what you want it to won't convince anyone.
  • Things are not illegal or "sneaky" just because they hurt a president politically.
  • Past a certain point, cherry-picking poll numbers is evidence of either dishonesty (63%) or a pathological need for affirmation (69%).