He’s orange, but … he’s not exactly cheesy. However, Trump does seem to be standing alone when it comes to taking, reversing, and re-reversing positions. As the Washington Post reported on Tuesday, in the middle of a stream of just plain gibberish, Trump is also stating positions on everything from health care to border security that he seems incapable of maintaining from one sentence to the next. Trump insisted on making Republicans sign on to a fresh round of attacks on Obamacare, then while they were still trying to get organized to charge up the hill on which they died in 2018, Trump decided that it wasn’t something he wanted to deal with after all. And then, Trump decided that the whole Republican Party should run on health care in 2020, but not on any healthcare plan. Instead, they should run on a healthcare plan that they would think up after the election. All of this, in about 48 hours.
Meanwhile, Trump has been threatening to close the border if Mexico doesn’t step up operations on their side. Republicans have tried to explain to Trump that closing the border would be a billion dollar a day disaster, but since he is Mr. “My daddy got me into a good college without even pretending I could play a sport,” Trump feels he understands trade and economics better than everyone else. He’s not listening. Besides, a series of tariffs that have absolutely smashed the American farm haven’t dented Trump’s numbers in farm states. Why shouldn’t he do something that’s massively destructive so long as it keeps his name in every headline?
And, of course, Trump has wrecked a disaster bill that could help the farmers he set up for failure with his tariffs because that bill would also help Puerto Rico. Trump’s not done being mad at Puerto Rico. If a few million people have to pay because he thinks a mayor somewhere said something mean about him, why should Trump care?
As Bloomberg points out, Trump’s willingness to act unilaterally isn’t a strength, it’s a weakness. Without a strategy that goes deeper than “look at me!” he’s unable to align the forces necessary to use the power he is. An executive with the Senate in the bag and a Supreme Court heavily weighted in his favor should have the leverage to push through issue after issue, even if that means throwing some crumbs to an opposition House to secure the edge he needs. But Trump isn’t willing to plan. He’s not willing to strategize, not even with his own team.
Republicans have been willing to go along with anything Trump says, because they see going against Trump as a sure ticket to being killed by the ravenous beast they’ve created at the core of their own party. They taught tens of millions of people to hate the media, disdain education, and disbelieve science. But Trump has leashed that beast, and now it’s not really Trump standing alone. It’s the rest of his party.
As the Bloomberg article points out, most of what Trump is talking about is only that—talk. He’s not actually proposing legislation, or signing bills, or even scribbling his name on a memo. He just … says things. For example, when people noticed that the budget Trump sent to Congress wrote off Special Olympics, Trump left Education Betsy DeVos hanging out there to defend the policy, allowed his surrogates to step in with talk about how the program was already “well funded through donations,” and then declared that he had reversed what was in his budget and “just authorized funding.” Except Trump never acknowledge that he was the one who put his name on a budget destroying the organization’s funds in the first place, and in reality he did nothing. Trump didn’t sign an executive order, he didn’t call up Mulvaney and tell him to change the numbers, he didn’t actually do anything at all. He just said he had.
That’s a huge problem for a party that’s basing themselves around a man who is willing to lie at the drop of a red hat—and also willing to drop it. There’s no predicting what Trump will say. Or what he will say after that. It’s a recipe for a party that either spends all its time chasing its tail, or simply takes their minute by minute prompts and acts as a series of repeaters from wherever Trump has momentarily set his dial.
It’s hard—no, make that impossible—to feel sorry for party leaders who did everything they could to lay the plate for Donald Demagogue. They created a party that would reliably chase the loudest noise on AM radio and Fox News, without apparently realizing there were plenty of people louder than them, and plenty of people willing to take the thing they’d built and march it over a cliff.
It’s wrong to say Trump is standing alone or acting unilaterally. Because he’s acting with the tacit, if not the overt, support of every Republican politician in Washington. Claims that he’s squabbling behind the scenes with Mitch McConnell or anyone else are about as valid as the votes these Republican “leaders” are casting against Trump.