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Trump Timeline ... Trumpocalypse
- Thread starter CdnGuy
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For all his bluster, Donald Trump is generally seen by presidential observers as a shockingly weak president. Brought to office in an election in which he lost the popular vote, his approval ratings have remained consistently low. Even with his party in control of the White House and Congress for two years, beyond a typical Republican tax cut, Mr. Trump failed to secure a signature legislative accomplishment.
The president may seem weak, but the presidency remains strong. Mr. Trump has illustrated that even a feeble commander in chief can impose his will on the nation if he lacks any sense of restraint or respect for political norms and guardrails. True, Mr. Trump has not been able to run roughshod over Congress or ignore the constraints of the federal courts. But he has been able to inflict extensive damage on our political institutions and public culture. He has used his power to aggravate, rather than calm, the fault lines that have divided our country.
His “wall” government shutdown is the latest example of his misuse of executive power. To end this essentially pointless standoff of his own making, he is exploring the use of national emergency powers to build a wall Congress and a majority of the public don’t want.
The Trump administration has provided a new example of an old concept: the “imperial presidency.” That term, famously used by the historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. in 1973 to describe the excesses and abuses of the Nixon White House, fell out of use almost as soon as President Richard Nixon fell from grace. The reckoning of Watergate and the first-ever resignation of a president seemed to show that the executive branch was not as uncontrollable as it had once seemed.
Senorman
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If you are one of 800,000 federal workers about to miss a paycheck, then yes, the sky is falling for you.
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“This is the stupidest day in American history,” wrote Matt Christman during the Donald’s inauguration, “a record that will be broken by every subsequent day in American history.” PolitiFact says: Mostly true. But it feels especially true these days, in the swampy mire of one of the dumbest policy debates in the history of American politics. I’m speaking, of course, of the matter of The Wall.
The Wall started as an applause line at President Donald Trump’s campaign rallies. It was an effective rhetorical tool not because it made any degree of practical sense, but because it was a symbol of Trump’s showy commitment to a hard line on immigration. The wall was emphatically not like the vehicle barriers and fences that already dot the U.S.-Mexico border, which Trump surely did not know existed at the time. The Wall would be built coast to coast, it would be beautiful — maybe as high as 40 feet — and it would be fully paid for by Mexico, making it a double humiliation for the “enemy.” It was clear from the beginning that it was a simple expression of racial resentment.
Then he won, and essentially forgot about it for two years. Of course, he talked a lot about The Wall, but he clearly didn’t care enough to do much about it. With one of the largest GOP congressional majorities in recent history, he failed to secure funding for the kind of wall he had promised in the campaign, because even Republican lawmakers understood that The Wall was a boondoggle. At the end of that two years, with an incoming Democratic majority in the House, Trump has partially shut down the government.
Trump is doing this because he wants to have a fight; the substance of the thing doesn’t matter. But in the process of having that fight, The Wall has gone from a stupid idea to a vortex of stupidity that’s sucking in everything it touches. In the intersections of these various stupidities, and our ability to watch them bounce off each other in real time, The Wall actually helps clarify some truths about Trump’s first term.
Why is the idea of a coast-to-coast wall stupid? No one who has visited Big Bend needs this explained, and support for The Wall is lowest in border communities, where people actually understand what day-to-day life is like there.
Senorman
Well-known Member
$5M from farm bailout will go to Brazilian-owned meatpacking company: report
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