Trump is failing, and the White House is covering it up with lies
Trump is failing, and the White House is covering it up with lies
By Greg Sargent October 5 at 10:20 AM
(Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)
THE MORNING PLUM:
President Trump cannot fail. President Trump can only be failed.
Trump and his allies tell us so. He can only be failed — by the filibuster (never mind that no GOP repeal bill got 50 Senate votes); by the “Fake News” media, which fails to honestly report on his smashing successes; and even by Republican congressional leaders, who have let the Russia probes get out of hand and secretly oppose his agenda.
The Post and the Washington Examiner have remarkable stories this morning that portray the Republican Party as gripped by an internal war of recriminations over the fact that Trump has not signed any major accomplishments.
The Post reports that Republicans believe religious-right extremist Roy Moore’s victory in the Alabama GOP Senate primary was driven by an angry grass-roots backlash at Congress’ failure to realize Trump’s agenda, and they expect more to come. As Sen. David Perdue (R-Ga.), a Trump ally, puts it: “People are upset that Republican senators are not backing the agenda of this president.”
The Examiner, meanwhile, reports that congressional Republicans are raging because a top aide to Vice President Pence told a gathering of GOP donors that the GOP Congress is selling out the president and that disloyal Republicans should perhaps be removed in 2018. He said: “If we’re going to be in the minority again, we might as well have a minority who are with us as opposed to a minority who helped us become a minority.”
This entire narrative is a fiction. Or rather, this entire narrative contains a large truth wrapped in fictional packaging. The truth this story line contains is that Trump is not racking up any major accomplishments — which is to say, he is failing. This is the tacit admission of Trump’s own allies. But this admission of failure is packaged in a fictional explanation: that Trump is failing because GOP leaders (or the “Republican establishment,” as Stephen K. Bannon puts it) want his agenda to fail.
But what has really happened is not that congressional Republicans have sold out on some supposed Trump agenda that is different from theirs. Rather, Trump and Republicans have jointly failed to deliver on the agenda that they agree upon. Trump went all in on every version of Obamacare repeal-and-replace that was pushed by Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan. Those failed not because the GOP establishment didn’t want what Trump wanted, but rather because a handful of GOP senators balked at the manner in which repeal-and-replace was constructed, while still supporting that general goal. Similarly, Trump is campaigning hard for the huge tax cuts for the wealthy that McConnell and Ryan want, and if there are any disagreements, they mostly reside in the details. (What about trade and infrastructure, you say? It remains to be seen whether Trump even has any serious agenda on either front.)
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https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/wp/2017/10/05/trump-is-failing-and-the-white-house-is-covering-it-up-with-lies/?utm_term=.3fdf19cfc4a0
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they get SO MANY to vote against their own interests!!!! 
