Vanity Fair: It Only Took Trump One Month to Derail His Own Presidency

[highplainsdem]

http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2017/02/donald-trump-derail-presidency

It took less than a month for Donald Trump to squander whatever political capital he had when he took the oath of office. As the first Republican president in more than a decade to preside over a united government, hopes ran high in Washington for the unconventional president to finally enact the congressional Republicans’ legislative wish list: lowering corporate and individual tax rates, dismantling the regulatory state, rolling back environmental regulations, and repealing Obamacare. Instead, the first several weeks of the Trump presidency have been mired in unprecedented scandal. The White House’s first big executive order, banning immigration from seven Muslim-majority countries and entry for all refugees, sparked nationwide protests and was suspended by a federal judge—a decision that was upheld on appeal. The president’s national security adviser, Mike Flynn, resigned under a cloud of Russian intrigue that now threatens to implicate at least three other members of the Trump campaign. Meanwhile, the bureaucracy of the federal government has ground to a halt as dozens of top-level national-security positions remain unfilled. The State Department, which under President Barack Obama held daily press briefings, has gone silent as career diplomats struggle to make sense of the president’s vague and often contradictory foreign-policy agenda.

It has been a rude awakening for Trump, who came into office vowing to rapidly transform the federal government, and for the Republican lawmakers who cautiously—and then ecstatically—embraced him. The effort to repeal Obamacare has run aground the political reality that there is no market-based alternative to the Affordable Care Act that will not either raise costs to consumers, resulting in millions of people potentially losing insurance coverage, or blow a hole in the federal budget. The timeline to implement a replacement plan has already been pushed back from “immediately” to as long as three years as Republicans spar over the details of legislation that could become an electoral albatross.

-snip-

Much of the oxygen in Washington has been sucked up by Trump himself, whose daily Twitter tirades dominate the national conversation and can reset administration priorities on an hourly basis. While Obama had already passed an $800 billion stimulus bill at the same point in his presidency, Trump spent much of his morning Thursday railing against the media, vowing to prosecute leakers, paradoxically insisting that the leaks were also fake, extolling the size of his electoral victory and claiming that Democrats “made up” the Russian scandal to distract from the election.

Republicans, despite holding both houses of Congress, have been left reeling. “Our agenda is full,” Senator Jerry Moran of Kansas told Politico. “So anything that’s added as a result of the storyline that’s evolving with Russia intrudes on the ability to pursue the agenda that we set out for us: regulations, Obamacare, and the tax code.” Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, among others, have begged Trump to stop tweeting and focus on governing. Trump’s approval rating would be “10 to 15 points higher if he allowed himself to stay on message,” he told The Weekly Standard. “What he’s saying makes everything harder.”

[Auntie Bush]

1. Month! I'd say a week.

[captain_democratic]

2. russia clouds his admintration

President TRUMP IS A SITTING DUCK, I hope midterms the democrats win every senate seat.

[yallerdawg]

3. One day closer to resignation!

Resignation is the equivalency of settling out of court - he's on a roll, let's keep him rolling!