Trump fails to learn on the job
Shortly after news surfaced detailing President Donald Trump’s attempts to influence former FBI director James Comey’s investigation into the Trump administration’s ties with Russia, an exasperated Speaker of the House Paul Ryan spoke to reporters. “The president’s new at this,” Ryan said. “He’s new to government. And so he probably wasn’t steeped in the long-running protocols that establish the relationships between DOJ, FBI and White Houses.”
“He’s just new to this,” Ryan added once more for emphasis.
Of course, Trump wasn’t particularly new at trying to put his finger on the scales of justice. Just months earlier, he had tampered with a judge overhearing a case involving Trump University, suggesting U.S. District Judge Gonzalo Curiel had a conflict of interest because he had Mexican parents and thus wouldn’t approve of Trump’s immigration plans.
Nevertheless, the idea that Trump was some sort of unfrozen caveman president, bewildered and confused by the modern levers of government, persisted among his supporters. Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.), at one time in charge of investigating Trump’s evidence-free assertion that his offices had been wiretapped by the Obama administration, excused the current president at the time by calling him a “neophyte.”
Even Trump himself has sought sympathy for his lack of preparation, at one point saying “nobody knew health care could be so complicated,” and opining for the simpler days before he took office. “I loved my previous life,” Trump said in April. “I had so many things going. This is more work than in my previous life. I thought it would be easier.”
But “the president isn’t remotely ready for this job” isn’t a particularly inspiring nor convincing defense. It’s not as if he’s a new hire at Chipotle who hasn’t gotten the hang of the proper bean-rice ratio. He’s a 71-year old man who has observed and operated within legal constraints his entire adult life. He has just become accustomed to circumventing them without penalty. (It is almost certainly why Trump knew enough to pull Comey aside privately to make his pitch for ending his investigation.)
Further, the incompetence defense flies directly in the face of Trump’s campaign boasts, in which he promised dozens of new reforms within his first 100 days in office. Granted, this is typical — it’s not as if George McGovern’s slogan was “elect me and maybe a few months into my tenure I’ll get the hang of it.”
But having been the head of a “billion dollar” corporation, Trump argued that he singularly was qualified to enact reforms to turn America around. (Among them, new ethics reforms to drain the swamp and reduce the corrupting influence of special interests on our politics. Yet the swamp’s water level is now up to Trump’s ears.)
And it’s not as if other presidents didn’t quickly figure out the protocols and relationships needed to stay within the lines. During their first presidential campaigns, both George W.
Bush and Barack Obama each had “experienced” opponents who lambasted them for being political newcomers, and yet both learned the rules swiftly. This was, in part, due to each having seasoned staff and advisers on hand — Trump has access to many of the same people but chooses to go it alone.
That’s why the “Trump is still learning” excuse is complete nonsense. This week, he gave a speech to thousands of Boy Scouts in which he took political shots at Obama and bragged about the size of the crowd there to see him (when in fact he was there visiting them, not the other way around.) On Wednesday morning, he announced a major policy agenda — banning transgender individuals from serving in the military — in a series of vague tweets, leaving it unclear what he meant.
If this were a president interested in “learning” anything, these errors would be corrected. But they keep happening, over and over. They are not the mistakes of a man unaccustomed to his job — they are an intentional subversion of decorum and protocol by a man indifferent to the hard work of learning.
At this point, saying Trump is still getting the hang of being president is like a 50-year-old man claiming he’s “prematurely” balding. That excuse set sail long ago and it’s never coming back. Trump’s buffoonery isn’t a temporary condition — it is the kind of deep ignorance one can only master after seven decades of practice.