If 45 has lost The Weekly effing Standard, then he is toast.
It is a little more than six months into the Trump administration, and there have been things to praise. The president has begun rolling back the aggressive regulatory state that grew up under Barack Obama; enforced his predecessor’s red line in Syria; abandoned the failed North Korea strategy of the last three administrations; and appointed strong conservatives to the lower courts along with, of course, Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court.
These stand out because they are exceptions to the daily turmoil and dysfunction of the Trump White House. As president, Donald Trump has not risen to the occasion. There was no pivot to normalcy after his turbulent campaign. No hidden statesman has emerged from inside Trump, and he has not, as he recently suggested he might, become “more presidential” than anyone other than “the late, great Abraham Lincoln.”
So far, the president is the picture of a failed leader. His administration is a disaster.
In just the past two weeks, Trump only reluctantly signed a Russia sanctions bill that passed overwhelmingly in both houses of Congress (98-2 in the Senate, 419-3 in the House). He tweeted a policy reversal on transgender individuals serving in the U.S. military that neither the Joint Chiefs of Staff nor the secretary of defense knew was coming. He allowed his communications director falsely to accuse his chief of staff of committing a felony by supposedly leaking a document that was already officially public—and then, after the fallout consumed his administration, dismissed them both. He repeatedly attacked his attorney general for his necessary decision to recuse himself from the probe into Russian interference in the 2016 election. He gave a highly inappropriate speech to 40,000 boys participating in the Boy Scouts’ 20th National Jamboree—a speech for which the organization felt compelled to apologize. He followed that up with a speech to law enforcement officials in which he suggested it was okay to rough up accused criminals. Police departments across the country and the acting director of the Drug Enforcement Administration publicly rebuked the president.
Read it all here; http://www.weeklystandard.com/playing-defense/article/2009135
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