Trump, the president without a plan

[Boats]

TRUMP, THE PRESIDENT WITHOUT A PLAN
By: Brian Karem - Playboy News - 06-25-20
Re: https://www.playboy.com/read/trump-t...without-a-plan

He has insults, threats and rhetoric to spare—but no coherent vision or plans. Why should Joe Biden waste time debating him?

Most of us love a good debate between two sane people discussing policy. Normally you would want to see the presidential nominees in such a debate. But these are not normal times. And there is nothing normal about the 2020 presidential race.

In the early hours of Sunday morning, President Donald Trump exited Marine One, the presidential helicopter, and took the short walk to the White House. Wearing a blue suit and a white shirt with his red tie undone, he saluted no one in particular. (He wore no mask.) In his left hand he held a red MAGA hat. He switched it to his right hand, adjusted his coat, made a grim face, took a misstep, then switched the hat back to his left hand, waving with his right before giving a thumbs up.

Still looking grim, he appeared to mutter to himself, then waved once more before walking into the residence.

He looked, as his own supporters and staff told me, like “a loser.” As if he had just walked out of Studio 54 after being turned down for a date.

Later that morning Trump took the press pool on a ride to his Virginia country club, where he apparently put in a round of golf before heading back to the White House. According to several staffers, Trump was “pissed off” and spent the rest of Sunday yelling at anyone in earshot—probably also at the walls and his personal mirror.
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Trump's Tulsa rally—his first since the pandemic—was a disaster.

He has a variety of reasons to be angry. He’s been effectively locked down at the White House since March because of the coronavirus pandemic. His Tulsa rally—his first since the pandemic—was a disaster and the immediate cause for his discomfort, but not the only source.

Trump’s ennui came at the end of a week in which Senate Republicans at first refused to support the firing of Geoffrey S. Berman, the U.S. attorney in Manhattan whose office has pursued cases that often angered the president, including investigating two of Trump’s personal lawyers. Berman was the target of U.S. Attorney General William Barr.

First Barr lied and announced last Friday night that Berman quit. Berman called his bluff, forcing Barr’s hand—so the attorney general fired him, telling Berman, “I have asked the President to remove you as of today, and he has done so.” Trump’s reaction was typical. He answered a few questions before he told a depleted press pool on Saturday, “Well, that’s all up to the Attorney General. Attorney General Barr is working on that. That’s his department, not my department. But we have a very capable Attorney General. So that’s really up to him. I’m not involved.”

It sounded like a line from The Godfather. It was an implausible attempt at plausible deniability, and it failed miserably. (Or, Trump didn’t know and Barr lied to him—either way, it wasn’t pretty.)

That same day, Trump suffered another body blow when a federal judge refused to block the publication of The Room Where It Happened, former national security advisor John Bolton’s book about his time in the administration.

After he hired Bolton in 2018, Trump was full of love and praise for him. But Trump came to see Bolton and his Mark Twain–like mustache in a much different light after he broke up with the president.

“I gave John Bolton who was incapable of being Senate confirmed because he was considered a wacko, and was not liked, a chance. I always like hearing different points of view. He turned out to be grossly incompetent, and a liar. See judge’s opinion. CLASSIFIED INFORMATION!!!” Trump tweeted on Monday, presumably after stewing over Bolton all weekend.

The president didn’t explain why he had hired a “wacko” in the first place.

Trump also says Bolton lies in the book. If Bolton lied, Trump might be able to sue him for libel. But he can’t have both lied and released classified information—there’s no such thing as classified lies.

“If you’re looking for logic, don’t look here,” a former Trump official explained Monday morning.

Bolton, who refused to testify during Trump’s impeachment proceedings, is no one’s hero. But he gained some apologists after he described Trump as a “danger for the republic,” to ABC News on Sunday.
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Trump has even more problems.

At his Tulsa rally he admitted that when it came to the coronavirus pandemic, he wanted to “Slow the testing down, please.” The anti-Trump, Republican-run Lincoln Project savagely mocked this stance in its new ad, produced in record time and seen by hundreds of thousands the first day it went live. As the overwhelming majority of health officials agree, more testing means a better chance at saving more lives.

But that doesn’t play inside Trump’s head, where he attempts to create his own reality. Tuesday he doubled down in a tweet: “Cases are going up in the U.S. because we are testing far more than any other country, and ever expanding. With smaller testing we would show fewer cases!”

Under that logic, not testing for cancer means you don’t have it. Or you could only be pregnant if you are tested.

Then, as Trump left the White House Tuesday morning, he told the in-house press pool on the South Lawn what a great job the U.S. is doing with testing.

The president remains haunted by what he saw in Tulsa. He stared in horror at empty seats and could not come to grips with a reality he cannot control: Even those who support him apparently avoided a large public gathering out of fear of becoming infected with the coronavirus he downplays.
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Trump risks major gaffes in front of a national audience, with little possible gain in return.

Trump has lost his grip. To him, it doesn’t matter if people get sick. What matters is they didn’t show up. That kills him. We’ve seen his displeasure with this type of scenario before—ever since the second day of Trump’s administration, when Sean Spicer marched out to the briefing room and lied about the size of Trump’s inaugural crowd. Why? His staffers have told me on background Trump can’t handle sitting in the White House day after day. He needs a release—and golf isn’t going to cut it. He needs a crowd.

What he doesn’t want is a crowd of protesters. Monday night it got nasty again outside the White House in Lafayette Square as some tried to tear down the statue of President Andrew Jackson.

Trump? He remained inside, having tweeted earlier in the day about “PRESIDENTIAL HARASSMENT!” and mail-in voting. As protesters and police clashed in Lafayette Square, the Secret Service removed the press from the White House, with Trump tweeting out threats for anyone who defaced the statue or St. John’s Church. (“10 years in prison under the Veteran’s Memorial Preservation Act. Beware!”)

He has threats. He has retorts. He has insults. He can tweet those all day long. What he doesn’t have is a cogent plan, policy or strategy—about anything. He’s flying by the seat of his pants. No president has come close to being as dangerously irrational as Donald Trump.

Which brings us back to the Biden campaign. Presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden plans to debate Trump at least three times this fall. Why?

Two rational people debating policy differences is one thing. But a Trump-Biden debate won’t feature two rational men. It will be between an unhinged president and Joe Biden. It would be worth watching in the same way some people like to watch YouTube videos of pimple-popping.

Conventional wisdom has it that any candidate who pulls out of a debate will appear weak, lose votes and thus risk losing the election.

What good would it do any of us to watch one man trying to discuss policy while the other screams “Presidential harassment!” Or says things like what he tweeted Tuesday morning: “Washed up Creepster John Bolton is a lowlife who should be in jail, money seized, for disseminating, for profit, highly Classified information. Remember what they did to the young submarine sailor, but did nothing to Crooked Hillary. I ended up pardoning him - It wasn’t fair!”

You also have to wonder why anyone in Trump’s campaign would want the president debating Biden. If past is prologue, there is little Trump could say or do in a debate that would win over a Biden supporter.

Trump risks major gaffes in front of a national audience, with little possible gain in return. Were he to bow out of the debates, he would merely face public scorn. But he would spin that scorn. Essentially, debates in the 2020 election are superfluous.

Lincoln-Douglas. Kennedy-Nixon. Those were debates. Anything with Trump on the marquee is just an insane reality show.

If we have to suffer through a debate, make it only one. And I’ll moderate it.

[reconeil]

What's Biden's: "Plan" for everything???

Neil