Hobbling along with a bully president
But White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders dutifully said she saw "nothing but roughly 40-45,000 Boy Scouts cheering the president on throughout his remarks."
--Without warning, the president tweeted a Wednesday declaration that transgender troops will no longer be allowed to serve openly in the military. Despite his claims to have spoken with "my generals and military experts," Pentagon brass responded that they only follow official directives, not tweets.
--On that same day, Trump tweeted that fellow Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska "really let the Republicans and our country down yesterday" with her opposition to the latest Obamacare repeal bill. Hours later, Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke called her and fellow Alaskan Sen. Dan Sullivan, who voted the other way, to say her vote "had put Alaska's future with the administration in jeopardy," according to the Alaska Dispatch News.
But bullying can't entirely make up for Trump's inexperience. Murkowski, for example, chairs two committees that make her the top appropriator for the Department of the Interior -- and she doesn't have to run again until 2022. On Capitol Hill, she who controls the purse carries the clout.
That's how the balance of powers between the three branches of our government is supposed to work. The Framers of the Constitution knew that concentration of too much power in the executive branch would invite despotism and dictatorship.
Yet the bullying approach to governance is so baked into Trump's style that it reappeared quickly in his new communications director Anthony Scaramucci. His first sit-down with The New Yorker's Ryan Lizza began with his threatening to fire his entire White House staff if he was not told who leaked a piece of inside gossip to Lizza. Welcome aboard, Mooch. You'll fit right in.
In some ways, then, I am relieved when Trump's attempts to bully his way to autocracy are stymied by his own incompetence. But our government should function well because of its leaders, not in spite of them.
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(E-mail Clarence Page at cpage@chicagotribune.com.)
(c) 2017 CLARENCE PAGE DISTRIBUTED BY TRIBUNE MEDIA SERVICES, INC.
