WaPo's Jennifer Rubin rips into Trump.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ri ... 366f1f11a0The long and short of it is nobody can negotiate with Trump because nobody knows what the hell he wants.
On Friday, Minority Leader Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) was asked to come to the White House and spent 90 minutes with the president. He and Trump seemed to come to agreement on a general outline: “Schumer agreed to increase defense … spending to the level in the National Defense Authorization Act numbers, above what the White House had requested,” ABC News reported. “Schumer also agreed to consider the full amount the White House had requested for border security — above the amount included in the DACA proposal worked out by Senators Dick Durbin, D-Ill., and Lindsey Graham, R-S.C.” Then, Schumer suggested a short-term extension to keep the government open, to which Trump seemed amenable.
Then Friday afternoon, Chief of Staff John F. Kelly “calls Schumer and complains that the outline that Schumer and Trump had discussed was too liberal. Full funding of the President’s border security request would not be enough, on its own, to strike a deal giving legal status to the dreamers.” Is this what Trump wants or what Kelly does? It’s impossible to know or even to understand what it means for Trump to want something (for the moment? Unless convinced otherwise?).
I'm sure there are a lot of contractors who can commiserate. How can one negotiate with someone who constantly changes his position, has little to no idea about how the shit he's trying to negotiate actually works, and who's greatest joy in life is screwing-over as many 'losers' as possible, even if is self-defeating?
On the floor of the Senate on Saturday, Schumer sounded exasperated. He first reviewed the sequence of events. “The bottom line is simple: President Trump just can’t take yes for an answer. He’s rejected not one but two viable bipartisan deals, including one in which I put his most prominent campaign pledge on the table,” he said. “What’s even more frustrating than President Trump’s intransigence is the way he seems amenable to these compromises before completely switching positions and backing off. Negotiating with President Trump is like negotiating with Jell-O.”
The same article notes it's not just the Democrats. Trump is not being a sly fox working-over the opponent in the role of bad cop as a set-up for the Republicans to sweep in and save the day.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) has also been frustrated at times. On Wednesday, he grumbled, “I’m looking for something that President Trump supports, and he has not yet indicated what measure he is willing to sign. As soon as we figure out what he is for, then I would be convinced that we were not just spinning our wheels.” We really have no idea what that might be, even after the government has shuttered.
As the article notes, even after the shutdown has started, nobody knows what the hell Trump wants, other than "everything, maybe?".
Much the same can be said about the NAFTA negotiations.
http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/montrea ... -1.4496387The Canadians are pretty-much figuring the only way to make a deal would be to give everything away. Trump doesn't want the negotiations, which he requested, to succeed. Even the Americans are referring to a group of their requests as "poison pills". How the hell do you negotiate with that? He wants to trigger the six-month warning before pulling out of NAFTA. He doesn't care what it will screw-up because that would be impossible; you can't care about things which you don't know exist.
Again, this is a guy who has demonstrated a lack of detailed knowledge about
every policy every topic he comes across. There are plenty of vacuous people out there, but Trump is a perfect vacuum of knowledge; he's a veritable black hole of knowing things. There is no way he has an appreciation of tax policy, government funding, trade agreements, health care, immigration, the environment, or border security. While he loves to talk about what a great builder he is, the reality is the only thing he's good at is doing is tearing shit apart, you know, like those super-dense thingies in space.
Trump's default setting is, "If I didn't do it, it sucks," and every day he's finding different stuff he didn't do. If he didn't make it, it must be destroyed. If he doesn't understand it, it must be stupid. If he doesn't know about it, it's not worth knowing.
Make no mistake, no matter how much heat Trump gets for this, he will declare it a victory. That's easy to do when you have, quite literally, absolutely no idea what the hell is going-on. How do I know this?
https://www.cnbc.com/2018/01/21/eric-tr ... cally.html"I think it's a good thing for us," Eric Trump said of the government shutdown that was triggered at midnight on Friday by the failure of congressional negotiators and the Trump White House to reach a deal to fund the government. The public, Eric Trump said, would blame Democrats for the paralysis in Washington, and for the forced furlough of hundreds of thousands of federal employees, who would be sent home without pay.
And how does Eric know this?
During Saturday's call-in with Pirro, Eric Trump sought to explain why Democrats deserve the blame for the current shutdown by highlighting how many Democrats voted against a bill to fund the government.
"If you looked at the vote, you had 269 Republicans who voted to keep the government open. And you had 230 Democrats who voted to close government," he said, "and they'll say Trump wanted to close the government. ... It doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me. And I'm pretty good at math."
Yet in the House, 230 Republicans voted for the measure, while in the Senate, 45 did, for a total of 275 GOP votes – not 269, as Trump claimed. On the Democrats' side, 197 voted against the spending bill in the House, while 44 Democrats opposed advancing the measure in the Senate for a total of 241 – not 230.
A quantum state of signature may or may not be here... you just ruined it.