DONALD TRUMP’S CRAZY PRESIDENTIAL ADMINISTRATION

…What Trump’s Strategy Forum looked like before the CEO's began leaving in droves.

 

The Treasury Secretary, Steve Mnuchin was asked by his former Yale classmates to resign as secretary.

 

“It is unlikely that any smiling executives who posed for photographs with the president this spring at the first meeting of the White House Strategic and Policy Forum and the Manufacturing Jobs Initiative had been enthusiastic supporters of candidate Trump,” Reporter Steve Pearlstein wrote this for the Washington Post. “Publicly, most CEO’s had opposed the president’s positions on immigration, trade, climate change and gay rights. Privately, many thought him unsuited for the job. Nonetheless, the president’s economic advisers had convinced the executives that they would be able to help shape the administration’s economic program. And the executives were previously eager to lend their support and legitimacy to the administration efforts to boost their profits by lowering taxes and reducing regulation. …

 

But risking their stock prices falling, many chief executives still spoke out against the president after his atrocious comments after the Charlottesville riots last week. By the end of the week, the manufacturing council, the president's Strategy & Policy Forum and an infrastructure council had all been what Trump called "disbanded". 

 

Trump bizarrely and falsely actually claimed that he had been the one to disband the councils, not the other way around. The net effect was another cut to Trump's image as a leading figure in the business world who obviously did not command the respect of his fellow chief executives.

 

Those elites, who did tie their fortunes to Trump are now on the defensive, and they are under severe pressure from fellow business executives to also back out.

 

From North Korean threats and Charlottesville blaming, to the firing of his Chief White House Strategist, President Trump packed a lot of negative headlines into his recent stay at his New Jersey golf course, while the White House was being refurbished.  Here are more looks at what was going on while TRump was on his so called, "working vacation."

 

The president on Aug. 15 falsely said that “there’s blame on both sides” for the violence that erupted in Charlottesville on Aug. 12. 

 

Then, coming from a whole other direction, more than 300 individuals who had graduated from Yale University in the class of 1985, as did Trump’s Treasury Secretary, they urged the Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin to resign.

 

“We understand that graduates of Yale College have served the United States proudly … and that rarely, if ever, have any of us made such a request of a classmate, whatever our differences in political opinion have been,” they wrote in a letter. “We do so today because President Trump has declared himself a sympathizer with groups whose values are antithetical to those values we consider fundamental to our sacred honor as Americans, as men and women of Yale, and as decent human beings. … We can disagree on the means of promoting the general welfare of the country, on the size and role of government, on the nature of freedom and security, but we cannot take the side of what we know to be pure evil. … We know you are better than this, and we are counting on you to do the right thing.”

 

Then on the following Saturday, the Treasury Department issued a 500+-word response to the Yale letter, apparently from Mnuchin. In it, Mnuchin strongly condemned the racism and hatred that was on display in Charlottesville. “As someone who is Jewish, I believe I understand the long history of violence and hatred against the Jews and other minorities and circumstances that give rise to these sentiments and actions,” Mnuchin wrote. “While I find it hard to believe I should have to defend myself on this, or the President, I feel compelled to let you know that the President in no way, shape or form, believes that neo-Nazi and other hate groups who endorse violence are equivalent to groups that demonstrate in peaceful and lawful ways … I don’t believe the allegations against the President are accurate,” the secretary concluded, “and I believe that having highly talented men and women in our country surrounding the President in his administration should be reassuring to you and all the American people.”

 

The Mnuchin letter generated a great deal of pushback from many US exec's over the rest of the weekend, including the following from a former US Treasury Secretary and ex-Harvard President, Larry Summers.

 

Former Secretary Summers stated that the current Treasury Secretary Mnuchin is squandering his credibility by supporting President Trump's unorthodox tax proposals. 

 

Per Mr. Summers: "Some of the most difficult moments for any Cabinet officer comes when the president fails to respect his department’s desire to do serious policy work.  When political circumstance forces the repudiation of the president’s past statements, and when he has to, only out of loyalty, support absurd propositions. All three of these things happened to Secretary Mnuchin this week,” Summers said this in a Washington Post op-ed column.

 

Summers had previously served as the head of Treasury under President Bill Clinton.  Summer’s said, pushing up the announcement of the tax plan, originally scheduled for June, that compromised Mnuchin’s credibility.

 

“Instead, the treasury secretary was asked to lend his prestige and that of his department to a ridiculous one page [tax proposal] document that would have been judged too skimpy on detail even if it were only a campaign proposal. I can only imagine how demoralized the Treasury tax staff, a group that rightly prides itself on its professionalism and analytic seriousness, must be,” Summers wrote. “The treasury secretary’s credibility is an important national asset that could be needed at any moment. I am very sorry to see it squandered on behalf of a tax reform proposal that is at best, nothing but a bargaining position,” he continued. 

 

Mnuchin had previously said that the administration is committed to making sure the middle class doesn't pay higher taxes with the new reforms, but added that, he can't "make any guarantees."  So, what’s the point?

 

"I can't make any guarantees until this thing is done and on the president's desk," Mnuchin said during an interview on ABC's Good Morning America. "But I can tell you, that's our number one objective in this."  Sounds exactly like more Trump verbal B.S..

 

The White House had announced its plans to lower tax rates for individuals as well as businesses, claiming it would be the biggest tax cut reform in American history.  (Whatever Trump claims, is always called “the biggest”.)  While many Republicans support cutting taxes, some GOP lawmakers worry Trump’s one-page proposal would be too little, too late, and that it would also increase the federal deficit.

 

I am offering all this bizarre bunch of crazy, unprofessional Trump issues that continue to be offered up by this president and his strange presidential administration. 

 

Last week was stated by a number of media outlets as “President Trump’s worst week so far in his presidency.”

 

Based on what continues to occur with Trump’s bizarre administration, and where the Robert Mueller investigation is going, I would suspect that there will be more weeks that are much, much worse.

 

Copyright G.Ater  2017