Trump faces critical decisions amid 1st presidential crisis
Mark the time and date: At precisely 12:40 p.m. on Feb. 14, on the 25th day of the Trump administration, a Democrat dealt from the bottom of the deck to play the Watergate card: “What did the president know and when did he know it?” demanded Maryland Rep. Elijah Cummings.
It wasn’t a question. Cummings was trying to turn the departure of Michael Flynn into a club and use it to batter President Trump like a baby seal.
The White House is shrugging off the cheap shot, but the coast is far from clear. Combined with mistakes and in-house dissension, the necessity of removing the top national security aide less than a month into the job signals that Trump is now face-to-face with his first presidential crisis.
The resistance against him is emboldened, yet there’s no silver bullet because there is no single problem. Here are two areas Trump must address to regain momentum and keep faith with the public.
First, better control of his White House staff is essential to stop damaging leaks and circular firing squads. One especially strange example came when a Trump friend publicly criticized Chief of Staff Reince Priebus as “in way over his head” soon after meeting with Trump.
And Kellyanne Conway, who was extraordinarily effective guiding Trump’s campaign and articulating his agenda, looks exhausted and off her game. Her glib assertion that the public “go buy Ivanka’s stuff” was clumsy, and she did nobody any favors by claiming that Flynn still enjoyed Trump’s confidence just hours before Trump fired him.
A second potential pitfall for Trump is that Paul Ryan’s House of Representatives seems to be all talk and no action. Jobs, jobs, jobs will not come back with jawboning corporations and regulatory relief alone.
Tax reform is key, yet Ryan seems to think that speeches and tweets will keep the public and his members happy. Trump needs to light a fire under him.
None of this is meant to suggest the sky is falling. It is simply a recognition that, while every new president goes through a shakeout period, Trump’s fumbles take on exaggerated importance because the opposition media and Democrats are united in trying to thwart his presidency.
It’s been that way since the election, which is why, if you blinked, you missed the new president’s honeymoon. Recall that 70 Democrats boycotted his inauguration.
Now comes the Flynn fiasco, a gift to those who hope it will let them drive Trump from office. On cue, The New York Times echoed the Watergate smear in a front-page headline soon after Cummings spoke.
Any suggestion that the incident starts the clock ticking on impeachment is absurd. Flynn was cut loose not because he talked to the Russian ambassador but because Trump believed he could no longer trust him after Flynn misled vice-president Mike Pence about whether sanctions were discussed on the call.
Given the forceful ways aides described Trump’s mind-set, it might be the case that Flynn also lied to Trump.
But that’s a very different scenario than the one the Dem-media complex is trying to spin. They want to link the call to the ambassador to their larger accusations about Trump having secret alliances with Vladimir Putin.
In their fever, they conveniently ignore the reason why the Justice Department reported Flynn’s call to the White House: to wit, officials believed Flynn’s lie to Pence, and thus to the public, made him a potential target of Russian blackmailers who knew sanctions were discussed.
Against that backdrop and because of his lack of trust, Trump’s decision to fire Flynn clearly is the right one. Moreover, Flynn carried extra baggage because he was paid for an ill-advised trip to Moscow in 2015 where he had dinner with Putin.
Still, even if Flynn’s departure is the end of the incident, it’s not the end of Trump’s troubles. As the president said yesterday, he has been plagued with leaks to the media of important conversations that should have been private, including the one involving Flynn.
Plugging those leaks won’t be easy, so it shouldn’t be the president’s top priority. He’s got to stay focused on the big picture — delivering on his major promises of controlling immigration, renegotiating bad trade deals, reforming taxes and rebuilding the military. His top aides also must be single-minded about that agenda, in messaging and execution.
While Trump quickly took fast steps with executive orders, they are limited and implementation is just beginning. The most important one, which suspends visas from seven Mideast countries and Syrian refugees, is blocked by the courts and faces an uncertain fate.
The last thing the president needs is to get bogged down with any one issue. Perception is everything in running the government, and danger follows the image of being beset by outside criticism and internal squabbling. Lost momentum is hard to regain when supporters are demoralized.
To see an example, Trump need look no further than Barack Obama’s first two years. Immensely popular at first, he rammed ObamaCare down America’s throat, and promptly suffered a shellacking in the first midterm election when the GOP took the House. After that, Obama never got his domestic agenda back on track.
Trump is far from that cliff, but there is little time and even less political capital to waste. In Washington, success is never inevitable.
Bill’s bills to pay
Mayor de Blasio’s sketchy scheme to raise money from donors to pay his criminal defense lawyers is raising hackles from ethics watchdogs. They rightly argue that it looks like a replay of the political slush fund that put prosecutors on his tail in the first place.
Here is my modest suggestion about what the mayor should do — and I offer it free of charge: He should use his own money to pay his legal bills.
He can do that by selling the two privates homes he owns in Brooklyn. He leases them out for more than $100,000 a year to private tenants, while taxpayers house the mayor and his family in Gracie Mansion.
The mayor’s properties carry a combined estimated market value of about $2.5 million. Although both are mortgaged, he could still realize a handsome profit and use it to pay his lawyers.
Here’s the best part: The idea is aboveboard and perfectly legal. That’s probably why de Blasio didn’t think of it himself.
Over time, it can be fixed
It’s the definition of insanity.
Year after year, top overtime earners among state workers double and sometimes triple their salaries, and 2016 was no exception. At least five workers pulled in more than $134,000 in overtime alone, with an IT worker topping the list with nearly $180,000.
Tell me again why this can’t be fixed.
Wish you secess
Headline: “China buying more Hollywood”
Another reason to support the Golden State’s secession.