On the menu: Partisan divide on NATO; Funky foliage; Dems clash over youth movement; McConnell replacement primary ugly already; Nobody comes out clean
The late, great Charles Krauthammer famously told us that "bungled collusion is still collusion." But bungling does count for something.
Dr. K was talking about the reversal by the Trump family after six months of abject denials that anything improper had happened between it and Russians peddling dirt on then-rival Hillary Clinton. When the emails eventually came out, it was revealed that Donald Trump Jr. was a knowing and enthusiastic participant.
"It is not merely stupid," Krauthammer wrote. "It is also deeply wrong, a fundamental violation of any code of civic honor."
Fair enough, but the stupidity did matter. The doofiness of the effort — the goofball, "Spy vs. Spy" nature of it all — was perhaps comforting to voters in its own way. If these were not serious people, maybe it confirmed their amateur status. The Trumps were show business folks unfamiliar with the ways of politics and government: ambitious outsiders who got tangled up in Washington's game of power and deceit.
That revelation was an essential ingredient in the formation of what President Trump calls "Russia, Russia, Russia," his name for the long-running investigation into the Kremlin's effort to meddle in the 2016 election. Trump blames the probe for everything from Russia's invasion of Ukraine to his son's divorce.
But while one couldn't say that the probe "cleared" the Trumps, it did explode the ideas put forward by Democrats that the family and its political team were part of some sophisticated, long-running "Manchurian Candidate" plot to take down the U.S. government from within. After years of "bombshell" reports and promises that the "walls were closing in" on the Trumps, the conclusion was, again, that these were unsophisticated amateurs who couldn't run a White House effectively, let alone orchestrate an elaborate scheme to dismantle the world's oldest democracy.
It was much the same with President Trump's effort to steal a second term and the Jan. 6, 2021, riot that tried to disrupt the certification of his successor. One did not look at Rudy Giuliani, Sidney Powell and John Eastman and think that the new Whiz Kids had come to town. The evidence confirmed that while the then and future president had certainly tried a soft coup to remain in power, the effort was often preposterously, hilariously incompetent. And while there is lots to prove that right-wing agitators planned to turn Trump's mob at the Capitol into a riot, there was no case to be made that the president or his team planned the violence that occurred. Trump encouraged what happened that day by a combination of reckless incitement and willful neglect, but no one could say it was a master plan.
That was certainly the message Republicans carried forward into Trump's second impeachment and 2024 campaign. The bungling of the effort was essential to the defense against the Democrats' charge of insurrection. The story of an unsophisticated amateur and his team of misfits who sincerely believed in pandemic-fueled election fraud and ended up crashing into the sturdy barricades of the constitutional order turned out to be pretty easy to swallow. Trump acted on his bad impulses, but, ultimately, the system held.
Trump's bungling has been an essential ingredient to his success. If one believes, as most Americans do, that our system is broken, then having a bungling disruptor might be even better than having a ruthlessly effective one. Sending someone to shake up the bipartisan establishment and provide a credible — but not too credible — threat to the way Washington operates could be a good thing. Trump may act like a toddler, but maybe he is keeping everyone on their toes, right?
Both the president's supporters and opponents told us that this time would be different, though. Trump, steeled by the failures of his first term, was prepared to be not just a disruptor, but to build a new order with an experienced team, an effective transition and a well-thought-out playbook ready to go. Sharpened in purpose by his criminal prosecutions and near death at the hands of a would-be assassin, Trump 47 would not be lost in a welter of self-defeating distractions the way Trump 45 had been.
The idea of the ruthlessly effective Trump has had a very unhappy April.
Current Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and his affection for insecure communications stand out as very Trump 1.0 stuff. Is Hegseth systematically dismantling the Western alliance from within, or is he an overconfident amateur in way over his head? A man with a plan or another show business guy who got tripped up in Washington?
What about Trump's Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) boss, Elon Musk? After an expensive and embarrassing loss in a Wisconsin state election on April 1, the tech billionaire has been publicly feuding with the mothers of some of his many children, slashing his own estimates of the government savings he and his team could achieve, seeing embarrassing details of interadministration defeats fed to the press and playing contrite CEO as car buyers and investors brutally punish his biggest company for his forays into politics. Is this the leader of a corps of shock troops reinventing government, or a clumsy effort by a famous businessman?
And then there's Trump himself. He started April with the most audacious move of his second term so far: massive, far-reaching tariffs that we were told were designed to inflict intense economic pain, pain that Americans would have to endure to fundamentally remake the global economy. Business leaders, investors and consumers, who had heard for months about how "this time is different" with Trump, believed him and responded accordingly.
One week later, Trump shelved most of the tariffs for three months but then jacked up the tariffs on China. A week or so after that, he exempted the largest category of imports from China and is now trying to make Americans think that the Sino-U.S. trade war he said would revive American manufacturing is well on its way to a quick resolution. He's preparing the "termination" of the chair of the Federal Reserve. He "never did" intend to fire him. Oh.
A similar story has emerged this month on Trump's biggest foreign policy gamble. The president and his team convinced Americans and the world that he was prepared to feed Ukraine into the hungry maw of Russian expansion because Ukraine "started" the war. The message from the administration was clear: America was out of patience, and if Ukraine didn't accept Russia's terms for peace, Trump was prepared to let Russian President Vladimir Putin crush his neighbor. Putin also apparently believed that "this time is different" with Trump and responded in the logical way, ignoring ceasefires and intensifying his attacks on Ukraine. Now, Trump is sounding uncomfortable with the whole ruthless thing since it means looking like a patsy for the guy who was the villain in the whole "Russia, Russia, Russia" affair. Will Trump ditch NATO and let Putin humiliate the West? Or will he flinch and stay stuck in the stalemate he inherited? We know what Trump 45 did. Is Trump 47 really a different animal?
From "the Epstein files" to the DOGE firings and rehirings to the botched deportations, there is a great deal of evidence that Americans are, in fact, getting what many swing voters who backed Trump expected: often-bungling amateurism from a disruptive outsider. Trump 2.0 is looking increasingly like the original version.
The danger for Trump and the nation, though, is that with fewer guardrails in place this time, he may stumble into serious, lasting trouble.
A pair of polls out this week, one from Trump's alma mater, the University of Pennsylvania, and another from the Pew Research Center, confirm that as much as voters think the system is broken, they want those guardrails to hold.
While it's not surprising that Republicans take a more sanguine view about expanding presidential power with one of their own in charge, the University of Pennsylvania survey still found broad bipartisan consensus that presidents should not be able to ignore court orders or enact policies without congressional approval. The Pew study was even more pointed: Just 19 percent of respondents said Trump could ignore a lower court ruling against his administration, and only 9 percent said the same of the Supreme Court.
The "this time is different" folks in Washington are responding to the administration's suggestion that it might trigger a constitutional crisis by refusing to comply with court orders. If you thought Trump was sensitive to the backlash against a trade war, a Fed takeover and letting Putin slaughter Ukrainians, imagine what would happen if he declared himself explicitly above the law.
Political gravity is setting in for Trump, sending his approval ratings down to levels similar to those earned by former President Biden when he limped out of office, not because of the bungling but because too many people believe that he actually might really be able to do the things he's long threatened.
It's a very unusual kind of crisis of competence.
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