A Trump White House official told Politico, “I kind of pooh-poohed the experience stuff when I first got here. But this sh*t is hard.”
Here it is, all that you feared about the Trump White House.
President Trump invited a pair of Politico reporters into the Oval Office to sell them on his success narrative and this is what happened when they tried to corroborate his claims.
“But interviews with nearly two dozen aides, allies, and others close to the president paint a different picture – one of a White House on a collision course between Trump’s fixed habits and his growing realization that this job is harder than he imagined when he won the election on Nov. 8,” the Politico team of Josh Dawsey, Shane Goldmacher and Alex Isenstadt reported.
“From the indignity of judges halting multiple executive orders on immigration-related matters—most recently this week—to his responses to repeated episodes of North Korean belligerence, it’s all been more complicated than Trump had been prepared to believe.”
“If you’re an adviser to him, your job is to help him at the margins. To talk him out of doing crazy things,” a Trump confidante told the reporters.
Trump is using his mixture of threats and wooing but it’s not working. In fact, Trump’s entire team’s lack of knowledge about Congress caused the embarrassing moment when Trump had to pull his Obamacare replacement bill that he ran on.
What have they learned? Not to listen to anyone else. Referring to Speaker Ryan, one senior administration official told Politico they aren’t listening to “anyone else” on taxes. Also, Trump is huddling with Matt Drudge in the White House, due to his desire for better media coverage (talk about a bad idea, wow).
Politico reports on the “melodramas” in the Trump White House, including that various administration officials have their own PR representatives now, due to the infighting and backstabbing.
They were even upset about not getting credit for pulling off the Easter Eggo Roll. Are things so dire that we are to give the Trump administration credit for pulling off an Easter Egg Roll? I’m not sure it’s possible to lower the bar more than that.
But Politico assures us, Trump is learning.
This might be true, but as I pointed out in a piece on what I see as the Trump Doctrine of Act Now Ask Later, Trump acts first, and learns later — on every issue. Also, unlike most intelligent people, he doesn’t apply what he’s learned in one situation to another. For example, only after publicly falsely accusing former President Barack Obama of wiretapping him did Trump bother to ask how wiretapping worked. He takes it one thing at a time and learns only by failing on that specific task or issue, about that specific task or issue.
There’s a general understanding that if you think a thing you haven’t done and know nothing about is easy, you’re a fool. And that applies here.
A smart person looks at a job they haven’t done and is a bit intimidated and afraid of the responsibility and learning curve. A person who isn’t smart enough to realize that just like the job they already do has things people must learn, so do other jobs, assumes they can do any job.
The Trump Administration is just now learning that this “sh*t” is hard.
Sarah has been credentialed to cover President Barack Obama, then VP Joe Biden, 2016 Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, and exclusively interviewed Speaker Nancy Pelosi multiple times and exclusively covered her first home appearance after the first impeachment of then President Donald Trump.
Sarah is two-time Telly award winning video producer and a member of the Society of Professional Journalists.
Connect with Sarah on Post, Mastodon @PoliticusSarah@Journa.Host, & Twitter.
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