It started out like any other normal day in the White House.
President Donald Trump had a big energy policy speech to deliver. He had a meeting to attend with South Korea’s president on North Korea’s nuclear plans. On Capitol Hill he had “Trumpcare,” as critics were calling the Grand Old Party’s push to repeal and replace President Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act, better known as Obamacare.
But first, before the president would face these earth-shaking issues, his advisers and allies had to cross their fingers, hoping the day’s agenda would not be derailed by an early morning Twitter tantrum.
This was not their lucky day.
This was to be a morning in which the president would blast two tweets that would seize the day’s political conversations. Aimed at MSNBC “Morning Joe” hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski, they were unusually gross, even by this president’s juvenile standards.
Combined, they read: “I heard poorly rated @Morning_Joe speaks badly of me (don’t watch anymore). Then how come low I.Q. Crazy Mika, along with Psycho Joe, came to Mar-a-Lago 3 nights in a row around New Year’s Eve, and insisted on joining me. She was bleeding badly from a face-lift. I said no!”
After those tweets instantly went around the world, you could forget about the serious matters that we expect serious presidents to tackle. Instead, we have Donald Trump, who still sounds astonished that he won the job. (On that, he’s not alone.)
I was prepared to blast our president’s stupid behavior, but an abundance of prominent Republicans and other sane conservatives beat me to it — with gusto.
Winner for brevity: commentator Bill Kristol, editor-at-large of the conservative Weekly Standard: “Dear @realDonaldTrump, You are a pig. Sincerely, Bill Kristol”
A bit more elegantly, presidential historian Michael Beschloss tweeted a distinguished voice from the past: “George Washington wrote John Adams in 1789 that a President of the United States must ‘maintain the dignity of Office.’ ” Good idea. I wonder what’s happened to it.
But after responding with alarm to past Trump Twitter tantrums, I have learned from experience to react with a question of my own: From what is he trying to distract us?
Trump’s ability to maintain Twitter silence at the right moments, such as the recent congressional testimony of James Comey, the FBI director Trump fired, tells me that his impulses are not completely out of control.
Could his “Morning Joe” tirade come in response to the hosts’ on-air chatter about whether the president’s engagement with his own agenda is, at best, deeper than a coat of suntan lotion?
In an MSNBC video clip on the show, a reporter asks Sen. John McCain, R.-Ariz., whether he had “confidence that the president understands the details and complexities” of the Senate’s stalled ACA repeal-and-replace bill. McCain, who was still undecided on the measure, replied with less than a ringing endorsement: “I don’t know if he does or not.”
That sound bite followed a New York Times story a day earlier, headlined “On Senate Health Bill, Trump Falters in the Closer’s Role.” The story quoted an unnamed Republican senator as saying the president “did not have a grasp of some basic elements” of the GOP’s health care plan.
When Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell was asked by reporters whether the president “had command of the details of the negotiations,” the Times reported, “McConnell ignored the question and smiled blandly.”
A report in Kristol’s magazine said earlier that “several” Senate Republicans who’ve spoken to Trump found he had “little apparent understanding of the basic principles of the reforms and virtually no understanding of the details.”
Presidential spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders resolutely pushed back at her boss’s critics with a straight face. “I think the president would love for us all to focus on the legislative agenda a whole lot more,” she told reporters. But who believes that, when he so casually scuttles chances for his agenda to be enacted?
With Republicans deeply divided over how best to overhaul the nation’s health care system, presidential leadership can go a long way to bridge such divides. Unfortunately Trump is not much into the business of bridge-building. Feuds with media stars may come and go, but his self-defeating lack of interest in details or impulse control appear to be here to stay as long as he does.
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