TRUMP'S VISITING THE STATES ARE ONLY FOR HIS MASSIVE EGO

…Trump incorrectly says at the rallies that Dems don’t want to work with the GOP

 

The Health Care bill they celebrated in the Rose Garden, the president now says it has no heart and is “mean, mean, mean”.

 

Boy oh boy, the narcissist Donald Trump just can’t get past his 2016 win and the continuous public adulation that keeps him alive and keeps him tweeting.

 

Just as he still says his inauguration crowds were the largest, (which they weren’t), he has since been back to Ohio, Wisconsin and Florida, the swing states that put him in office.  These visits were for more campaign style rallies.  And now, for another campaign style fix, he’s heading to Cedar Rapids, Iowa, for another injection of his needed crowd dependent ego.

 

With all the political battering his self-inflicted efforts have caused, all Trump seems to know is first, to strike out at his enemies, then to open his mouth and insert his foot, or he goes into campaign mode for his political survival.

 

God forbid that he would take all that energy for learning how to properly govern the greatest nation on earth.

 

As usual, we all know that the GOP has never been very proficient at governing.  Oh, they know how to shoot down their competition and to win elections with dirty tricks and innuendo, but they have no clue for doing what is needed for their constituents.   Oh, but we must first, give giant tax breaks for the top 1%.

 

Trump’s political advisers seem to think that these injections of the crowds from the mid-west states are just what the president needs.  The concept is that, according to these advise-givers, they “…. think it’s a good strategy because it drags reporters with him, and the one thing the Washington press corps still hasn’t gotten is why people in Youngstown….or pick your favorite city in the Midwest….still like him.”  This is all per Mr. Barry Bennett, who served as a political adviser to Trump during last year’s election. “That gets him into friendly audiences, but I also hope when he gets out there he talks about jobs, jobs, jobs and nothing else, because all of his power is going to be derived by the rising economy.”

                                                                                                                            

So, instead of working with those in the capital city for actually getting the job done through good decisions and new legislation, let’s instead spend the tax-payers money on trips that just talk about “jobs, jobs, jobs”.   Then just forget doing what it takes to make all those jobs happen.

 

To date, most of what Trump has done is to issue a bunch of executive orders, but to not work on long-lasting legislation for the nation’s infrastructures, better health care, or tax reforms.  And when his party does work on real business for the American people, they do it behind closed doors.  Up to today, not one Democrat in Congress or many Republicans in Washington has had any clue as to what is in the Senate Health Care Bill.  From what has been discussed, the reason no one knows what is in the new bill is because it is possibly even worse than the House bill that the president himself says has no heart and is “mean, mean, mean”.

 

So, what has all of this effort to date done for the new president?

 

Well, the public opinion surveys have continued to show that Trump has the lowest job-approval ratings of any president in modern history. In a new CBS poll released this week, his approval rating was 36%, with 57% disapproval.  This is the lowest mark in this network’s surveys since Trump became president.

 

Trump’s up-coming rally in Cedar Rapids will be his first official open public event since his late-April appearance in Pennsylvania, which was another swing state Trump had narrowly won.  And that trip marked the president’s 100th day in office.

 

Now, just over 150 days in office, no former president has been this low in the their approval ratings and this far into not fulfilling some of their key campaign promises.

 

Issuing executive orders is not the same as putting in place the people that get the jobs done and for getting the legislation started.  So far, there are still just under 2000 open positions for those where former Democratic nominees had been installed by President Obama’s transition team.  Today, there aren’t Democrats working in those positions, instead, no one is working.

On another issue, you may also recall that Trump had promised that he was going to totally reverse the decision that President Obama had made about opening up the relationships with Cuba. 

 

That Obama decision was at first, seriously questioned by many Cuban-Americans in Florida because of the problems with Cuba’s human rights issues.

 

However, since then, many of the opinions have changed and there is more and more acceptance that over time, the opening of the relationship with Cuba will be a positive situation.  Instead of it being a bad decision as Trump has said, Obama’s decision that “the former 50 years hadn’t worked, so let’s try something else” was probably a good idea.

 

Well, last week the Trump organization had to look long and hard to find a location in the Miami area where the president could go to announce the changes he was making to the opening of Cuba, and a place where Trump would be greeted positively.

 

They eventually found a theater in a Miami area called “Little Havana”.  When he arrived he said: “I am so thrilled to be back here with all of my friends in Little Havana, I love it. I love the city.”  But the changes he announced were minor compared to a major reversal of Obama's decisions on Cuba.

 

Outside the theater, “Make America Great Again” hats and other Trump paraphernalia were available, but not for free, only for purchase.

 

“A lot of these areas are safe places for Trump,” said Rick Wilson, a Florida-based Republican consultant and frequent Trump critic, who added that his travels appear to be part “nostalgia tour” and “part personal reassurance”.

 

“He loves rallies,” Wilson said. “He likes big, cheering crowds. These are things that make him feel everything is under control and everything is going to be okay.”

 

“It would be easy to say this was a visit with an eye to 2020,” Said Dennis Goldford, a political science professor at Drake University in Iowa.  “But I think by all accounts, the president gets energized by appearing in front of supporters. He gets to say things in person that he says on Twitter. He is just getting reassured and his batteries recharged.”

In other words, they are nothing but big ego boosts.

The president’s travels also offer a chance to reminisce again about the 2016 election. Trump traveled to Ohio, ostensibly to talk about his plans to invest in the country’s infrastructure. But the president devoted a major portion of his remarks to complaining about resistance from Democrats in Washington.  “Every single thing is obstruction,” Trump said, adding that “if I was in that party, I would not do it that way. I’d be doing positive things. That’s why they lost the House, it’s why they lost the Senate, it’s why they lost the White House.”

 

The president, meanwhile, is very suspicious of strangers, so he still keeps in contact with his old aides from the campaign.  He also stays with those from his former political orbit, including Corey Lewandowski, his controversial first campaign manager, who he eventually fired.  Also David Bossie, his deputy campaign manager; and Roger Stone, a longtime Trump confidant and former political adviser.

 

Trump’s reliance on former aides reflects his relatively small circle, his comfort level with longtime loyalists and his hesitancy to trust newcomers.  It’s very strange for the man elected to be the representative of the people of a major nation like the US.

 

“There is no ‘out’ with the president — there’s just ‘not being in’, but eventually you can work your way back in,” said an adviser who did not want to be named. “His circle of friends, the people that he knows, is so small that when you only know 50 people in Washington, you really can’t throw one out.”

 

If this is really true about our president, the situation is much worse than I had thought.

 

As a nation, we may now already be in very deep do-do.

 

Copyright G.Ater  2017