Friday, February 24, 2017

"You know, Mandrake...."



We are five weeks into the Trump Administration, and not one bill has passed through Congress and landed on his desk for signature.  In fact, there's perishing little evidence ANY bill is being considered by Congress and headed toward the other chamber or a joint committee for reconciliation.

And yet Donald Trump is going to build a wall between the U.S. and Mexico, and, to hear Digby tell it, inevitably start World War III.

Please.

Donald Trump has accomplished one thing:  he signed an executive order that threw international travel into chaos, an order that was halted in almost every court that reviewed it, and was tossed out by the 9th circuit.  All indications are the "new, revised" order is the same thing as the old order, just with a clarification excluding green card holders, which puts Stephen Bannon in the corner, or something.

Otherwise, nothing.  Trump still has some 500 appointments to make and get approved by Congress; he doesn't even have names for those appointments.  He is busy keeping his Cabinet officials from picking their own staff because their choices are considered insufficiently loyal to Trump or worse, said unkind things about once upon a time.

This is the guy who's going to get Congress to fund a massive wall that, as Seth Meyers notes, most of the Texas delegation doesn't want (have you seen how much of that border is in Texas?)?  Not to mention the costs are expected to double when eminent domain proceedings have to start to condemn private land so a wall can go up.

And what is Trump doing to get that legislation moving through Congress?  He's tweeting about who should be the new head of the DNC, finding out that slavery was bad, mkay?  And blathering on about "fake news" and the immigration problems of Sweden.  Which, quite frankly, makes this hilarious, rather than disturbing:

“If you think they’re going to give you your country back without a fight, you’re sadly mistaken,” [Stephen] Bannon said. “Every day there is going to be a fight.”

Bannon denounced the “corporatist, globalist media” for being “adamantly opposed to an economic nationalist agenda” the president is pushing. He repeated a reference to the media as the “opposition party,” and bashed it for being “always wrong” about the workings of the administration.
How is Trump pushing an economic agenda?  By tweeting about the closing of a factory?  By falsely declaring the replacement Air Force One was going to cost $4 billion before he whacked $1 billion off the price tag? (The entire AF budget for AF1 is $1.9 billion, by the way.)  What workings of the Administration are evident?  Have they figured out the light switches at last?  Have Priebus and Bannon (as PBS reported tonight) figured out the pecking order of the White House staff?  And what is an "economic nationalist agenda" anyway?

Don't tell me, I don't want to know.  I know more about the "alt-right" than I want to know, already.  But how will they implement this agenda?  Strength of will?  Purity of essence?  Take over an Air Force Base?

Week five, and he hasn't signed one bill into law; and there doesn't seem to be anything moving through Congress, not even Trump's nominees.  Week five, and they still don't understand they are part of a government, not party of a reality TV show or a children's version of the adult world, or the Masters of the Universe.  Week five, and even Trump's magic will exerted against companies to keep jobs isn't working all the time.

Perhaps he's expecting to sign a bill making his Tweets into legislative action.....

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