TOO PRONE TO FAIL. We Are Truly Living Through the Amateur Hour Presidency
This White House is more interested in controlling the news cycle than in nuclear diplomacy. And it’s showing.
MICHAEL TOMASKY
05.24.18 12:59 PM ET
What an amateur show.
Virtually every step of the way, from the moment when Donald Trump surprised even his own staff by announcing a summit with North Korea, it was obvious, I mean achingly obvious, that the president had no idea what we he was doing. You hear that laughter? It’s the world, and they’re not laughing at Princess Beatrice’s hat.
Let’s retrace. It’s the evening of Thursday, March 8—an otherwise normal day in Trumpland, in what has become of the United States. The administration was scrambling to stave off a ballooning crisis that it created by announcing steel and aluminum tariffs with nearly zero forethought and actual preparation. They’d caught most people totally off guard, including a good number of Republicans who were saying, “Hey, wait a minute here, are we sure this is a good thing?”
On that day, The New York Times reported: “More than 100 Republican lawmakers implored President Trump to drop his plans for stiff and sweeping steel and aluminum tariffs as the White House prepared to formalize the measures on Thursday afternoon.” That’s when the administration started to backtrack and say, well, maybe we can find a way to carve out some exemptions for certain countries after all. That was crisis one that day (that day!!). Crisis two was arguably even bigger.
The Times reported that Michael Cohen had obtained a temporary restraining order against Stormy Daniels to prevent her from speaking out about her relationship with the president. This was a big development in the Stormy saga and catnip for cable news (this is before we knew Trump re-paid Cohen the $130,000 in hush money fees). That was now Topic A that day. And then, in the late afternoon, after meeting with South Korea’s national security adviser, Trump dropped the bombshell. As CNN wrote it up:
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