Hey, Im President!Donald Trumps All-Madness, No-Method Administration

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2017/05/08/hey-i-m-president-donald-trump-s-all-madness-no-method-administration


‘Hey, I’m President!’—Donald Trump’s All-Madness, No-Method Administration
Trump believes in Trump winning. Everything else, though, is up for negotiation. Sad!
Margaret Carlson
05.08.17 1:00 AM ET


It may look like Trump’s governing is a result of which side of the bed he gets up on before tweeting, but two themes are emerging.

The first is he must be as removed from life’s losers as possible. Everything, even his own words, pale next to winning, on whatever terms—as we saw with the House health-care vote last week that revealed his prior promise to provide better insurance at a lower cost while covering pre-existing conditions as a sham.

The second is his belief in flattery as a means to winning. That, too, was at work in Trump’s all-out effort to erase his first legislative defeat with a steaming mess that strips health care from millions, a “win” so bad that it’s headed for a mercy killing in the Senate.

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Trump switches positions like others change ties. If it’s Monday, he’s loving NAFTA, after hating on it for years. But on Tuesday, he may well be feeding the treaty into the shredder. Or not. It’s no shocker that by evening, Trump shouts out his approval for the sort of health-care system he’d just blithely cheered stripping away from millions of Americans in a bill that vastly favors life’s winners, with the savings going to fund tax cuts for the upper 10 percent.

As erstwhile populists have always done, Trump is tossing crumbs to the base: pro-life appointees to Health and Human Services to kill funds for family planning; Dr. Ben Carson, who believes slaves were happy immigrants, to cut assistance to the poor to save them from becoming soft; and hiring every fossil fuel advocate in America to bolster the claim that climate change is a hoax.

Trump won by convincing voters that he might be rough around the edges, slip into locker room talk, and not know what the nuclear triad is, but that was all part of being real. After a hundred rocky, feckless, bombastic, inconsistent days, it’s fair to ask who’s faking it now.