The photo of President Trump looking out on the day he was inaugurated is worth a thousand words. It is reminiscent of Howard Beale, the crazed protagonist in the classic movie "Network". This is Donald Trump a few months before all of his legislative dreams may well be bound to enter the same meat-grinder that just spat out his doomed Trumpcare effort. What are we to make of this? Can it really be the case that the party of no is also the party of no-can-do?
Robert Draper is a journalistic heavy and he dominates the New York Times today with a sweeping account of what Trump is facing as he seeks to rebound from the healthcare debacle.
He begins by pointing to a meeting of Paul Ryan and Stephen Bannon where they come to an apparent agreement on a direction for the country.
Renewing American industry
That direction is either economic nationalism if you are Bannon or economic responsibility if you are Ryan. The underlying impulses may be at some variance. Bannon is viscerally opposed to anything that looks like an acceptance of globalism or multiculturalism, Ryan not so much. But as Draper suggests, the Bannon-Ryan notion also resonated with President Trump who speaks of forgotten Americans and heralds a return to the US being an industrial behemoth.
Settling in?
The initial months of the Trump administration look more unsettled than the desired picture of a calm, forward-looking operation, or as the President once suggested, a "well-oiled machine".
Without recounting the Flynn disaster, the ongoing Russia issue or the embarrassing wiretap charges by Trump against President Obama, the health care failure serves as the curtain-raiser for a series of unbroken losses.
Trump vs. Congress: Now What? https://t.co/E3sKhbNjOr
— Stephen C. Rose (@stephencrose) March 26, 2017
Losing is not the same as winning
We have a President who is constitutionally opposed to losing, to the point that he does not acknowledge losing, ever.
We have a city where two political parties know from decades of daunting failure that the government is broken. It is a problem Trump vowed to fix. Maybe the dealmaker has something up his sleeve. If not it's going to be a long four years.
