Trump’s unsettling start to 2018
In a White House marked by a string of high-level comings and goings, an extraordinary level of palace intrigue and unpredictability, there remains but one constant.
That is the disorder at the centre, perpetrated by a president who continues to break the norms of his office. It’s the reason 2018 could eclipse 2017 for political turbulence. The first week of the year was breathtaking: a presidential tweetstorm of personal animus and policy provocation that overshadowed positive news about the economy. That has become the story of the Trump presidency: a chief executive whose behaviour has become its defining feature.
The tweets were in response to renewed discussion about the President’s mental fitness prompted by the portrait of Donald Trump in Michael Wolff’s scathing Fire and Fury.
Wolff’s portrait of chaos and dysfunction inside the White House is consistent with the reporting by White House correspondents at the Washington Post, the New York Times, Politico, cable networks and others, almost from day one .
Is that portrait exaggerated? Some insiders insist it is, that the White House, under Chief of Staff John Kelly and after the departure of Stephen Bannon and the lowering of Jared Kushner’s profile, day-to-day operations are less chaotic than they were during the first half of 2017. Routine activity gets done. Major policy activity is taking place. Judicial nominations are being pushed to Capitol Hill. A tax bill has been signed into law.
That ignores the elephant in the room, which is how the President operates and the degree to which he manages to overshadow everything else. Wolff’s book offers a worrying portrait of an incurious president with a short attention span, a volatile chief executive who rails against his critics and who at moments appears isolated by his frustrations.
Trump came to the presidency with no background in government or policy. He has repeatedly behaved as has no other modern president, and that’s based just on things the public has been able to see.
Where this all leads remains in Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s hands, but if Trump thought the Russia probe was near its conclusion, he was fooling himself. Perhaps that’s what turned the beginning of the new year into one so unsettling.
Trump wants the public to focus on things such as the rising stock market, which just saw the Dow break through 25,000, and a jobs report that showed the unemployment rate in the last month of 2017 at a 17-year low. The tax bill, he argues, will accelerate those trends. Perhaps. But despite all that, Trump continues to make himself the issue.