I watched the news snippet about Trump’s visit to President Obama today, a segment with the two men in the Oval Office after their private meeting of about an hour and a half, and something jumped out at me:
As he sat there listening to the President speak, then made his own remarks, Trump seemed subdued, flattened, weighted down, even. To my eyes and ears, at least, gone was the cocky bravado, the arrogant insouciance of Trump the Winnah!!!!
Indeed, as he ended with speaking of seeking counsel — counsel! — from Obama, it hit me: Trump looked like a man who is beginning to realize he’s made a terrible mistake.
One wonders what Obama said to him about the burdens and constrictions of the Presidency, how trammeled its seeming powers are in reality, how soul-crushing the daily grind is, how impossible to satisfy the kaleidoscopic jumble of competing demands, how thoroughly it consumes one’s life and obliterates one’s privacy. One wonders what pants-shitting dilemmas Obama outlined for him, yawning chasms of potential catastrophes he’ll have to negotiate, with no straightforward pathways to even modest success.
I daresay, given his apparent ignorance of the very office he’s pursued and won, Trump likely never did have more than the vaguest notion of what being President would be like; just a hazy impression of power and glory. Well, now he’s beginning to find out what the job actually involves, what’s turned President Obama’s hair so very gray, so very quickly. I suspect, given what I saw today, the taste of victory is turning a bit ashen in his mouth.
Or at least that’s how it seemed to me. I could of course be totally wrong. But I wonder….
At first blush, Trump saying he’d seek counsel from Obama seems crazy, doesn’t it? Even as a pro forma politeness. But who else in all the world other than a former U.S. President really understands the job? It’s an exclusive club with an insanely high entry fee.
In less public moments, it could be seen that Trump wasn’t without the ability to be polite.
I’m more inclined to suspect that Trump is still in shock that he won. Unlike Romney, doubt that his confidence was other than for show and he and his team had accepted a loss before election day. Right in line with all the smart guys.
He surely knows that Reagan and GWB didn’t sweat the job. Reagan wasn’t even conscious for much of his tenure. His big decision is who will he assign to do the work for him. And how will he tell his fifth rate lackeys that it won’t be them.
Trump may have been ragging on Obama on the campaign trail, but he knows Obama is very sharp, genuinely wants the country to succeed, and can certainly give him a lot of good advice. And who else would he ask? It’s not as if he has good relations with the Bushes or the Clintons.
And then there’s this:
http://www.cnn.com/2016/11/11/politics/donald-trump-obamacare-interview/index.html
Of course, this being Trump, he’s all over the map on this too:
So who knows what the hell will finally happen when the new Congress gets to work on it. Probably nothing good.
Still, wouldn’t it be something if, with Obama’s behind-the-scenes guidance, what Trump signs into law actually takes what’s good about Obamacare, fixes what’s bad, and puts in place a better system? Hell, to save lives I wouldn’t care if he claimed full credit and called it “Trumpcare.”
The thing that baffles me is watching journalists who covered the creation of Obamacare talk about retaining the pre-existing conditions and parental domicile provisions without wondering how these were to be funded. Are we more content-free than ever?
Yes.
Ryan and Trump won’t repeal the ACA. What they will do is ‘adjust’ it by removing the mandate and call it ‘improvement’. But without the mandate (and other ‘improvements’) it will slowly fade away, and this will allow the republicans to claim that the law, as they predicted, was flawed and doomed to failure.
Of course the media will report the republican side.
Once it’s gone it will be twenty years before we see anything like it.
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If they pull the individual mandate, we might want to start calling it Trumpcare. It will be substantially different from Obamacare.
Well, he could ask
WCheney.Without even getting into policy, there are the public relations issues. The constant, every day meeting with groups who somehow deserve a meeting with the POTUS. While campaigning, Trump claimed he would delegate lots of it to Pence. But these groups expect the President, not the Vice President.
Perhaps Obama showed Trump his schedule. Not one minute of free time, everything scheduled and planned out. Trump strikes me as a spoiled, lazy man, so I doubt he wants anything to do with that part.
Then there is the appointments. He’s deep in those decisions, and now he’s having to decide. Gingrich or Josh Bolton for SOS? Rudy for Attorney General? LOL!
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Pence does policy.
Trump does “Making America Great Again”
Wonder if Obama asked him how exactly he was going to do that.
You must be very pleased these days, Tar.
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Nal, That’s a piece of bitchiness that has no place on this blog! Delete it.
I’ve often wondered if Trump isn’t his own Max Bialystock; a lot of his casual risk-taking in the primaries and the campaign would be easily explained by a strategy of brand-building through defeat.
Another thing I think has been mentioned but perhaps overlooked is that Trump is preternaturally vindictive. He has already caused a lot of damage. Democrats are going to have to think about how they react to a show trial against Hillary, for example. We strongly suspect, by his own admission, that Guiliani was in touch with a rogue posse of Trump-supporting agents in the NY FBI office around the time of the disputed Comey letter. We better be prepared for the worst.
I kinda’ suspect he is going to be a comedy of clusterf*ck but I am also expecting Nixonian levels of domestic security shenanigans; in other words invasive and insidious. We perhaps will soon come to regret the provisions of the oft-renewed and misnamed PATRIOT Act.
Probably more than a bit of “Max” in Trump’s choice to run for POTUS.
On your second point, if Clinton didn’t do anything wrong, she has nothing to fear? Isn’t that what we plebes are told every time the USG takes away any of our rights? Now if she did anything wrong, I’d support a preemptive move on this in the next sixty days. Full acknowledgement of what was done, contrition on her part, and a blanket pardon from Obama. Not because I have empathy for her, but because it will spare all of us from having to endure another full blown circus sideshow.
Doesn’t it require a certain level of skill and expertise to be Nixonian, Cheney/Rumsfeldian, or Clintonian? No evidence that such competence exists in the Trump camp — he just managed to hit a good vein in the electorate and his opponent didn’t have the right stuff to inspire the number of voters needed to add to those that are reliable and consistent Democratic voters regardless of the nominee.
I applaud your cheerful interpretation and earnestly hope you are right; never attribute to conspiracy what can be explained by mere incompetence. But as they say, the jury is still out.
I am convinced, however, that Trump is genuinely vengeful and vindictive. He traffics in shame and domination and uses them as props in his little passion plays. So we’ll see how the dynamics of that play out.
Maybe I’m just too old to go to that doom and gloom place again. That intense sense of fear and foreboding I felt in 1968 and 2000 is escaping me this time. Possibly because it wasn’t helpful to figuring out what to do next and clearer heads would have done much better.
In the immediate aftermath of 9/11 I refused to panic. Panic give the opposition or enemy what serves them best. And through their panic, my fellow Americans walked right into a very costly fine mess, didn’t they?
I don’t know, Marie, but I am seriously troubled by the rural numbers Booman posted. When Trump inevitably fails to deliver for these people, the only way to satisfy them is to ratchet up the white nationalism, further entrenching his support. I don’t know how to break this loop, but we need to take steps to protect ourselves and our communities. This could soon get very ugly.
When Trump inevitably fails to deliver for these people,…
Skilled opponents would already have set the stage so that he had no place to run, hide, or jump back on that gravy-train he rode to the WH.
What we’ll be seeing soon enough is the return of the Bush gang and long-term GOP hanger-ons. There are simply not enough alt-right folks around to staff an administration. And some that he sends up to the Hill for confirmation hearings can be sliced, diced, and filleted if Dem Senators do their freaking jobs. If they don’t, then they are enablers of everything bad that TrumpCo delivers. (Should never have overlooked, much less forgiven, their collusion with BushCo.)
This can be reduced to a slogan — Fourth Bush term, only worse.
It may be helpful to recall that authentic outsiders to a party struggle in DC unless they arrive with a huge voter mandate. Trump doesn’t have that mandate. And if, contrary to his campaign organization and rhetoric, if he’s not really of, by, and for the entrenched GOP institutional power base and doesn’t quickly pivot and begin taking orders from them, he will crash and burn faster than Carter did.
She emailed discussions of NYT articles. There’s nothing wrong there. She won’t be prosecuted unless they can set up a kangaroo court because they’d be laughed out of court once the evidence was submitted. Comey has been trying to ice her for 20 years. The fact that he chose not to prosecute shows there’s no case.
If there were a case, a pardon wouldn’t help, because then that would become the circus. They’d be yammering about it for 30 years like they did with Carter’s sweater speech.
Give it a rest. The election is over. Voters made their own decision on this matter and for most it may have been no factor at all.
It’s indisputable that she created and maintained her work email communications in her own private domain. Inaccessible to administration oversight and FOIA requests. If she’d had any intent of turning them over after she left office, she would have done so before being ordered to turn them in which happened a year and a half after she left office. And can any comparisons with Powell who didn’t use a server under his control and didn’t subsequently run for elective office or sought another political appointment. Also, no comparisons with Rove either. He wasn’t a cabinet secretary or even assistant secretary. He was a GWB’s hired political operative and he resigned when his email issue came to light.
You’re free to see nothing wrong in this and others are free to disagree with you.
Maybe it’s a question of which circus would be larger and be a national distraction for longer. I’m not fond of short-circuited a normal legal process for the benefit of a particular individual. Disagreed with Ford’s pardon of Nixon, but can’t disagree that it put the matter off to the side where it could cool down and reduce the level of rank partisanship on the matter. With the pardon, only the most diehard Nixon supporters and Republicans could maintain a belief in Nixon’s innocence and the rest of us could move on. The moving on part was a good thing, but I still think that had he been held legally liable for his crimes, that would have happened as, or nearly as, quickly. Letting him off the hook sent the wrong message to those that succeeded him. Now they don’t concern themselves with the possibility of being held accountable for their criminally wrong-doings.
Yet, here I am on the other side wrt Hillary. Perhaps because I don’t expect another officeholder will attempt such a scheme in the future. I couldn’t say the same wrt to Nixon’s and I was right about that. Perhaps because Hillary is older than Nixon was in ’74. Perhaps because it was somewhat unique for a SOS to have such an obvious conflict of interest with the Clinton family foundation and a pardon could be sufficient warning to anyone else that we won’t tolerate a similar conflict of interest from anyone in the future. Perhaps I’m just weary of the Clintons and this would quickly close the book on that chapter.
No, it’s not over. Trump has control of the FBI now, and he will use it ruthlessly to manufacture scandals. 30 years of manufacturing scandals on the Clintons has worked; now they’re going to try it everywhere. Anybody who’s a threat to Republican control is going to get hit with these “scandals”. Seriously, if they could make a scandal of this magnitude out of this email business they can make a “scandal” out of anything.
It’s imperative that leftists learn to not catapult the right’s propaganda.
Yes curt, give it a rest! Now that the election is over we no longer have any need for those 100’s of diaries about emails. Best to forget the past and what wankers we were. It’s was just a coincidence that we repeatedly parroted republican talking points…..over and over.
Nothing to see here…move along, move along.
It’s funny how relaxed I am now that a republican is POTUS, with a republican senate and house. Nope, no panic with me!
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There was a defector from Trump’s camp who said exactly that – Trump was running to create a media brand for disaffected Republicans.
If he is vindictive, going after the whole DNC on corruption charges for the donations for positions thing is possible. I don’t know the law here (but neither does Trump) and I am sure the Republicans are just as bad, but I’m not sure that would stop him. Going after the Democrats on corruption would also look good and let him continue his position as outsider.
Just a thought.
That sounds so Russian; think he is taking advice from Putin on this?
Eh, no?
I just figured if he is as vindictive as he appears to be, it would make sense. Also running against corruption, but ignoring the structure that causes corruption, is becoming a standard re-branding tactic of European right-wingers to appear to be in opposition to the right-wingers in power caught with the hand in the cookie-jar.
I’ve been thinking the same thing, and hope somebody told him that he’s gonna have to pay all his taxes now. Not many smart people run for that job.
He’s the dog that caught the car. I just hope I can tear myself away from the spectacle.
I totally agree. Watching that I thought “this is a man who just realized he is COMPLETELY in over his head.”
On a scale of 0 – 100, I have 0.01 units of hope that a Trump presidency will result in anything remotely resembling anything good. That 0.01 unit is based entirely on his seemingly bottomless need to have people like him, and his obsession with polls and ratings.
Of course, he is surrounding himself with a nightmare cadre of advisors and sycophants who will insulate him from that. So the only real hope is that when his approval ratings bottom out at record lows that he says “you know what, F you guys, you’re ruining me and my legacy, I’m going to listen to some actual experts.”
It’s a pipe dream. But it’s all I’ve got right now.
It is the pattern of authoritarians to try to moderate and normalize their image when they first take power.
Trump is 70. The campaign is exhausting. Fatigue.
Reality sucks when it is told you by a Kenyan Muslim Socialist.
Bankruptcy is not traditionally an option to escape the responsibility of President.
Protesters in 25 cities, numbering in the hundreds of thousands total are telling him that “Trump is not my President.” The fans don’t like him. He has to figure out how to get even 10 times over.
The US intelligence community thinks he is a Putin proxy.
He has insulted the military brass who are in command when he takes office.
Need I go on?
You could probably go on for quite a while, in fact. I wonder just how much of that has already managed to penetrate the sycophantic shell he’s used to living in?
This is not going to be nearly as much fun as he thought.
I also wonder just how much Melania will come to resent (if she doesn’t already) the sort of life this campaign has and presidency will impose upon her? And how much grief she’ll give him over it?
Listen up.
Mr. President Trump probably recently had a “no-choice” sitdown with someone (or some several ones) who told him in no uncertain terms what the limits to his power are going to be plus the existence of real threats to his survival, the survival of his family, the survival of his business empire and…last but certainly not least…the survival of this country should he choose not to play ball.
I remember well when Obama looked very similar to Trump shortly after he won in 2008.
Deep State reality has a way of crashing every presidential celebration party.
Bet on it.
Always remember Rove’s little talk to Ron Suskind:
Faith, Certainty and the Presidency of George W. Bush-Ron Suskind, Oct. 17, 2004
I repeat:
“We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”
The most salient words in that little spepech”
“…all of you.”
From presidents to pisspot emptiers.
“…all of you.”
Bet on it.
Deep State don’t care.
It doesn’t exist.
Not anywhere it can be found, it doesn’t.
Bet on that as well.
AG
Rove in an imbecile who had been drinking his own pee.
But…
A winning imbecile.
Just as the RatPubs are now.
Just as were Nixon, Reagan and the two-headed Preznit Bush II/Cheney.
You do not need to be smart to win a fight to the death.
Just vicious.
AG
Recalling that you’ve mentioned this incident a few times I think we have a different spin on it. You seem to be taking it as a reveal of received wisdom among the elite; me, I just see a used-car salesman trying out his next, far-fetched pitch on a handy, and apparently dumbfounded, test subject.
I don’t know about “revealed wisdom of the elite,” Shaun: I just know what I see. Every time the so-called reality-based community thinks it has a good balance regarding what is up, someone/some thing pulls the rug right out from under them.
It happened with JFK; it happened with MLK; it happened with RFK; it happened with Nixon; it happened with Clinton I; it happened with Bush II, 9/11 and the Iraq War; it happened with Obama and now it’s happened w/Trump vs. Clinton II.
If Rove was just an ignorant used-car salesman hyping a vacuous client, he sure did get lucky, because that’s exactly what has been going on in the U.S. since the assassination years as far as I am concerned.
Every time we think we have a handle on something, the door opens on another, totally unexpected room….the very definition of Rove’s spiel.
Like dat!!!
ASG
So you’re saying Rove was a poet not a prophet?
No.
Neither.
He was just a talented little hustler who so well understood his masters’ hustle that he was confident he could speak it right straight out and it wouldn’t really do much good for those who were…and are still today…being hustled.
He was right, too.
ASG
So in your world-view now that Trump has had his little chat with the oligarchs he’ll be a good little neoliberal; just a spicier flavour? Not saying that’s impossible.
Lee Fang – The Intercept — Donald Trump Recruits Corporate Lobbyists to Select His Future Administration
Get a clue — don’t read their lips — follow the players entering and exiting the DC revolving door. That’s how power operates in between the national election spectacles.
Saw that.
Maybe. If his hot temperment does not seriously get in the way.
AG
But I reckon if he establishes a traditional fascist dystopia the post-modern Permagov notion can be retired.
Naaaaahhhh…
If that actually happens, as long as they remain in power and profitable they’ll be the enforcers.
AG
This just in: Mike Pence is taking over from Chris Christie as head of the transition team.
Wonder if they’ve got warning of a Bridgegate indictment about to come down?
We can only hope. While it would be a bit like nabbing Capone for tax evasion, I’ll take Bridgegate as a means to knock Christie out of the game forever.
But must temper my desire to see Christie go down as a possible reason for this assignment change. Probably no more than Trump hearing that Pence knows the DC players’ circuit and Christie doesn’t.
You may be right as now Trump is getting way out in front of it (or doing some heavy-duty hedging). Market Watch — Trump said to be `disgusted’ with Chris Christie
Enhances Trump’s reputation as one not to give his folks a pass. Good for the show and for a relatively cheap price. (Did Crispie really think Kushner was into letting bygones be bygones?)
He might resign. While the rest of you are probably fine with that, my blood runs cold at the thought of a Christian fanatic as POTUS. I’d much rather have an egotistical rake.
Agreed, and my gut feeling is that, either through resignation or death, he’s not going to serve his full term.
Then we’re even more screwed, as Pence could easily win re-election, especially given the radical vote suppression that will be in effect by then.