With President Trump revoking the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) in the first week of Congress' return to Washington, the reaction from Congress was appropriate. Democrats were outraged, while Republicans mostly didn't show particular interest in saving the program, applauded the President's actions. Americans also played their roles appropriately, with everyone falling into place for their sides. This included the media, which has been primarily focused on DACA, Hurricane Harvey and wondering how Washington lawmakers were going to legislate before the end of the year.

For the most part, everything appeared to be back in order. But details of what drove the President's decisions this week, still show that Trump doesn't know what he's doing.

President's decision on revoking protection for DREAMers

In one OpEd piece titled: "Opinion | Nobody knows what Trump is doing. Not even Trump" by the Washington Post explained that before Trump had his attorney general Jeff Sessions make the announcement to rescind DACA, Trump's advisors suggested that the President not act against the program. It was reported that one of these advisers was his chief of staff Gen. John Kelly, who told President Trump that he could wait to stop the program. The reasons for this were due to Hurricane Harvey hitting Texas whose attorney general Ken Paxton, threatened to take legal action if the White House did not kill the program by Tuesday.

Kelly's suggestion was that Paxton would be too busy to take legal action.

Gen. Kelly's advice came from his experience and is fully vetted enough for Trump to take him seriously. Kelly was the former Secretary for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) right before he reluctantly became the President's chief of staff. DHS is currently leading the way on the Trump administration's immigration crackdown along with the Justice Department.

Along with his advice, came the advice of others who suggested he not rescind the program, but Trump did it anyway. Hours after the announcement, Trump seemed to double back tweeting that he would "revisit the issue" if Congress ran the clock as he had given them six-months to come up with a replacement.

Siding with Democrats

The Washington Post article also referred to when House Speaker Paul Ryan said on Wednesday that the Democrats' idea of a three-month debt ceiling was "ridiculous." Republicans who have been aggressively legislating for Trump - and are the political party of his choice - expressed their concerns to the President about the Democrats' plan. However, they were frustrated by Trump's decision to side with Democrats. There was no indication beforehand that Trump would accept a deal from the Democrats at all.

The view is that Trump wanted a "win" no matter what the consequences might be and so he accepted the deal, also, without any clue that he knew any of the details. The deal was passed on Friday.

Despite the fact that the landscape appears a bit different now, given the set of very real priorities presented to keep the government running and funding disaster relief aid, President Trump's inability to make decisions remain the same. It was opined last month that with the President's statements about Charlottesville, that he defied all advice and in his series of statements, the push and pull between Trump and his aides was obvious. Even with the White House becoming more organized, the presidency is still very much compromised.
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