The border crisis is a reminder that Trump has no idea what he's doing

https://www.vox.com/2018/6/21/17483494/family-separation-trump-incompetent

The border crisis is a reminder that Trump has no idea what he’s doing
Faced with a problem Mitch McConnell can’t solve for him, Trump is flailing.
By Matthew Yglesias@mattyglesiasmatt@vox.com Jun 21, 2018, 8:30am EDT


Donald Trump has largely skated by as president, deferring to the policy consensus in Republican Party circles. He’s served as a rubber-stamp signatory of tax legislation he wasn’t involved in crafting and judicial nominations in which he had little say.

But sometimes things happen — like a surge of families with children arriving at the border to press asylum claims — that require leadership in the executive branch and don’t have obvious solutions.

Trump’s response to the crisis at the US-Mexico border — where toddlers are in internment camps and older kids are in tent cities at frightening expense while children sob, health deteriorates, and the long-term damage of toxic stress accumulates — reminds us that he does not know anything about public policy, diplomacy, constitutional law, or legislative strategy.

So you get instead what he’s delivered over the past two weeks — aggressive hostage-taking, lying, trolling, chaos, dissembling, and cruelty — none of which is going to advance Trump’s legislative goals or address the underlying issue of the northward flow of asylum seekers. Even the executive order he signed on Wednesday raises more questions than it will probably solve.

All presidents are tested now and again, and Trump is failing massively. It’s not quite the first time, and it certainly won’t be the last. Being president of the United States is a difficult job, and Donald Trump has no idea how to do it.

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His tenure has been marked by an extraordinary level of drama, but on some level, relatively little has actually happened in reality. But when things have happened, Trump has been unequal to the task of handling them. Last year’s hurricane season created a catastrophe. The return of Central American asylum seekers to their pre-Trump level immediately devolved into a humanitarian crisis. America’s relationships with its traditional allies are in tatters for no real reason. China is relaxing its enforcement of sanctions on North Korea, and Iran is opening a new nuclear facility.

And even though Trump is remarkably skilled at taking advantage of the news cycle’s tendency to move on, reality is less forgiving. Another hurricane season is coming. None of Trump’s border antics are going to stop people from coming north. Some trouble or another — whether in the realm of the economy or foreign policy — is essentially inevitable. And when the trouble comes, America will be facing it isolated and discredited, led by a team with no credibility or integrity, headed up by a man who can’t be bothered to put in a moment’s thought or hard work on even the topics he proclaims himself to be focused on.