Clarence Page: It's hard to hide the dysfunction of the Trump White House

Clarence Page, Tribune Content Agency on Dec 22, 2025

Will someone please tell President Trump that he’s not running against Joe Biden anymore?

That much should be obvious, even to casual observers, but, halfway into his second term, he can’t seem to let his former opponent go.

"Eleven months ago, I inherited a mess, and I am fixing it," Trump said at the start of a televised speech last Wednesday intended to reassure Americans with messages he has been pushing through months of sloganeering.

But happy days are not here again in Trump's latest polling numbers. In the latest PBS News/NPR/Marist poll, 57% disapprove of the job he's doing on the economy. Just 36% of poll respondents approve, a record low for both of his terms.

Yet Trump did his best to argue that down was up. I was reminded of then-Vice President George H. W. Bush’s use of Bobby McFerrin’s song “Don’t Worry, Be Happy” in his 1988 campaign for the presidency. Bush was elected, even though a lot of voters were not exactly feeling happy with the economy at the time.

Trump’s version of happy talk is not an anodyne ditty but rather a fact-stretching harangue. “When I took office, inflation was the worst in 48 years, and some would say in the history of our country," Trump claimed. “Inflation has stopped, wages are up, prices are down, our nation is strong.”

That’s how Biden sounded in the spring of last year, as he tried to convince skeptical voters that the struggling economy was something closer to robust. But neither Biden nor his eventual Democratic replacement on the electoral ticket, Kamala Harris, could overcome the lived experience of millions of voters whose strained household budgets told them otherwise.

Trump's promises of lower prices for American consumers helped him to beat Harris. But now the shoe is on the other foot. Prices rose 3% in the 12 months ending in September, and consumer spending on big-ticket items fell markedly, partly because of Trump’s tariffs.

Trump isn't just trying to downplay the negatives of his management of the economy, he's betraying a need for adulation that can almost be called pathological.

"We’re the hottest country anywhere in the world, and that’s said by every single leader that I’ve spoken to over the last five months," he said. Have world leaders told him that in earnest, or are they playing to Trump's mountainous self-regard?

Speaking of vanity, as Trump was overselling the fruits of his economic stewardship, another controversy was boiling up on another front.

Rep. Joyce Beatty, an Ohio Democrat and ex officio member of the Kennedy Center board of trustees, was disputing the White House’s claim that the board had voted unanimously to rename the performing arts center to the Trump-Kennedy Center.

It was another in a long chain of episodes that late-night TV hosts could hardly make up. And it gets worse.

In a short video post on the social network X, Beatty said she tried to voice her opposition to the name-change decision but was muted on the call and not permitted to speak.

Yes, even before old-school traditionalists like me could get our heads around Trump’s rebranding of a landmark as historically significant as the Kennedy Center, Trump’s impatience with Washington procedures and protocols managed to hammer a new wedge into the city’s political and cultural divides.

Coincidentally, could this be another controversy for Trump’s savvy Chief of Staff Susie Wiles to help sort out?

The widely talked-about interviews that she gave to Vanity Fair would be viewed as a scandal that would end careers in a more conventional administration.

Among other fuel for gossip, or worse, she described Trump as having an alcoholic personality, acknowledged that Trump uses prosecutions as a means of “score settling,” described Budget Director Russell Vought as a “right-wing absolute zealot" and described Vice President JD Vance as “a conspiracy theorist for a decade.”

Yet, strangely for super-serious Washington, neither the president nor the other parties named by Wiles were eager to treat this flap as anything more serious than business as usual.

Maybe they saw no point in disputing what we've all observed.

For example, ”alcoholic personality” doesn’t mean that she thinks Trump, a well-known teetotaler, is a secret drinker. As the experts at the Hazelden Betty Ford Foundation elaborate, “Generally, alcoholics seem to have the same kinds of personalities as everybody else, except more so.”

Symptoms can include “low frustration tolerance,” impulsivity and hypersensitivity in interpersonal relationships, and a low rejection threshold, among other traits.

Wiles defended herself by claiming that Vanity Fair omitted "significant context" in order to create "an overwhelmingly chaotic and negative narrative." While we can all feel for her, "chaotic" and "negative" are two words a lot of voters would agree do a nice job of summing up the Trump administration.

(E-mail Clarence Page at clarence47page@gmail.com.)