‘Who Knows’: Staffers, Aides At ‘Wit’s End’ With Trump After ‘Head-Spinning’ Week
So on Friday morning, we asked a simple question:
"Trump’s Veto Threat: Political Gambit Or Imbecile On Parade?"
Then, about four hours later, we were able to provide an answer:
"Update: Both"
As you're aware, Trump inexplicably decided to threaten a veto on the $1.3 trillion government funding bill Congress had worked all week to pass, ostensibly because it didn't mention DACA and didn't fully fund that goddamn "see-through" monument to xenophobia he wants to build along the southern bord
This isn’t quite right. Trump wants emphasis to have no idea what he is going to do. Apparently his method – and it is a method – is to “let the day come to him”. He wants chaos. He thinks it’s good for him, as it unsettles everyone especially his opposition; when they are rattled, he can exploit their hesitation as “what is he going to do now?”
Trump does have a rough ideology. It’s nonsense, but it’s an ideology. To defeat it requires endless return to its basic premises, as you do. The main this is to deny him wriggle room. This is less easy than it may seem.
Fortunately, the American people are not the idiots he thinks he is exploiting. His time is drawing to a close. The danger is that he will realise this just as much as others may, and take the kind of action that causes millions of people to suffer even more than they are already.
it’s funny how people from New York who have actually been around him in the business world all say the same thing. something like this: “stop pretending like there is a method to this and stop buying into his contention that ‘chaos’ is a strategy. Trump is, was, and always will be a complete moron.”
This is as blatant as it is obvious to anyone with a tenth of a brain cell. The part that troubles me deeply is that a metric fuckton of people back in November 2016 thought the opposite somehow AND despite overwhelming evidence to its contrary continue to think it.
…and I will drink to that.
Mr. Trump (honorific of elected office omitted) appears to be a comically ineffective executive; his mismanagement of complex and nuanced relationships is killing my net worth!
However, regarding the 301 sanctions, what ARE we supposed to do about Chinese IP transfer policy? I’ve watched closely as my older brother’s company has been eviscerated by patent theft from Chinese engineers, the pricing power created by their hard-earned innovations cut by up to 90% by clever knock-offs made in China. I have spent approximately 3 months of my life in various Chinese cities, and encountered thriving markets for counterfeit goods in all of them. “Copy? You wan’t copy?” the salesgirls would whisper. The counterfeit goods come with certificates of authenticity, UUID control numbers, registration numbers, RFID tags, every type and method of origination control that any Western designer or OEM can imagine…
So, yes, I am certain that Mr. Trump’s trade pivot will end in disaster and despair for many (most). But at what point do we decide that the pain of the enduring this rigged game is greater than the pain of trying to change it.
Was Trump’s threat to veto the $1.3T spending bill a political gambit or an imbecile on parade? Maybe both.
Then again, look at what he’s dealing with: 435 swamp rats – I mean “congressmen” – in the House of Representatives and another 100 in the Senate. Sitting across the table from lowlifes like McConnell, Pelosi, Ryan and Schumer, he should use every gambit in the book to create opportunities for negotiation. At least that’s what he’s good at.
Having said that, I don’t trust The Donald and have no idea what he’s up to. He has probably become what he beheld.
His veto threat might have been a way to get one of his own pet projects stuffed into the bill at the last minute. At +2K pages, the thing is a massive pork barrel of earmarks and cronyism. We’re already getting blitzed with a media campaign about the jobs it’s creating in everyone’s neck of the woods, the projects it’s funding, the $ it’s pumping into your “local economy” etc. Of course they’ll leave out the part about how it will wreck the U.S. economy. It’s funny how that works…
Gotta love the DC sausage machine! God knows we keep paying for it; and they’re still just getting warmed up.
Big Stevie: from your posting — “We’re already getting blitzed with a media campaign about the jobs it’s creating in everyone’s neck of the woods, the projects it’s funding, the $ it’s pumping into your “local economy” etc.”
hahaha! that must be the crap commercials I have seen recently – his grand self-promo’s for his re-election campaign in 2020! How sick-o is that??!!
YOU HAVE THE POWER. GO VOTE.
What evidence have you seen that Trump has successfully negotiated ANYTHING, other than the tax cuts. I have yet to see some fantastic unilateral trade deal, solving the DACA problem, Mideast peace, or even his ridiculous wall. Mostly I see tons of Executive Orders, most of those just cancelling previous EO’s from prior administrations. Get over it….he’s a fraud.
George C Scott “ten, twenty million dead tops, Mr president” (Dr. Strangelove 1964)
If you listened carefully , he once alluded to DACA being tied to funding for THE WALL. The average Trump supporter would not be able to pick up that fact.