Which perfectly symbolizes the dangers, diatribes, disaffection, discrimination, disillusionment, dissembling, dithering, and dysfunction that have characterized his first year as president of the United States.
In the final moments leading up to Friday’s midnight deadline, Senate Republicans and Democrats were unable to agree on a stopgap funding measure to continue government services. …
Whoever works for agencies and departments that are considered nonessential, including agencies that pay out small business loans and process passport requests, will cease to work effective immediately until Congress is able to agree on a bill for the federal budget.
(CNN, January 20, 2018)
Every president since Harry Truman (1945-53) has made a show of intoning his famous mantra for presidential responsibility:
The buck stops here!
Trump, however, has distinguished himself by passing the buck whenever something goes wrong. He is relatively new to Washington. But nobody plays its ritual blame game better than this congenital shyster.
In this case, Trump is leading the chorus of Republicans blaming Democrats with shameless abandon, so much so that you’d never know he and Republicans control the White House and both houses of Congress, respectively.
In fact, a government shutdown under such one-party rule is so incomprehensible, this is the first time it has happened in US history.
Mind you, when he isn’t shifting blame, he’s shirking responsibility. He threw this into shocking relief early in the year when he began publicly begging the Chinese president to no avail to get the North Korean president to stop threatening to nuke the United States. I commented on his humiliating and unprecedented dereliction in “’Leading from Behind’ — Trump Depending on China to Protect US from North Korea,” April 21, 2017.
That said, it’s worth bearing in mind that Trump is the self-proclaimed master of the Art of the Deal. More to the point, he convinced the American people to elect him primarily by claiming that he alone could negotiate deals that would preclude such shutdowns.
But nobody should be surprised that it has come to this. After all, this first year has seen him botch a series of negotiations, including those on the Paris Climate Change Accord, the Trans Pacific Partnership, peace in the Middle East, and the Iran Nuclear deal.
Frankly, Donald Trump is to deal making what Homer Simpson is to parenting.
I shall spare you the sausage-making reasons for this epic shutdown – except to note that it has everything to do with Trump’s “wall” of discrimination against Mexican immigrants. As you consider assigning blame, however, I suggest you ignore Trump’s blame-shifting, self-serving tweets. Instead, just consider what he said in 2013, during the most recent government shutdown.
Obama was president. Republicans controlled both houses of Congress. But they used that control to force a shutdown. They hoped in vain that this would further their open and notorious conspiracy to make Obama a failed president. Trump duly piled on:
When [historians] talk about the government shutdown, they’re going to be talking about the president of the United States, who the president was at that time.
They’re not going to be talking about who was the head of the House, the head the Senate … I really think the pressure is on the president.
(Fox News, September 30, 2013)
This is why never before in the history of politics has it been more deserving for a politician to eat his own … “sh*+.”
Bon appétit, Mr. Trump!
NOTE: Apropos of every president since Truman, Trump seems determined to be the first to alienate his predecessors so much that they all shun him like the plague. Mind you, it would probably suit the congenitally insecure Trump well to complete his entire term without even a phone call, let alone personal contact, with any of them. His tweets actually give the impression that he fears anything Obama related as if it were kryptonite to his presidency.
Nonetheless, for the sake of his legacy, his advisers should prevail upon him to assign them ex-presidential missions that none dare reject. This would enable him to appear presidential while fulfilling this customary fraternal requirement.
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