The only one Trump can blame for this latest disaster is himself

Why the long faces, Trump supporters? There’s good news. The president’s humiliating defeat on the government shutdown Friday afternoon distracted attention from his confidant Roger Stone’s arrest that morning by the FBI, which in turn distracted attention from NBC’s Thursday night news that White House security specialists had recommended that son-in-law Jared Kushner not receive a security clearance because of “potential foreign influence on him.” Only a genius such as Donald J. Trump could possibly have orchestrated events with such fiendish cleverness — and only a few analysts with an unswerving commitment to “Make America Great Again” could possibly have seen through all the “fake news media” analysis to fully appreciate this master class in political maneuvering.

Christian Broadcasting Network analyst David Brody tweeted, in the midst of the record-setting and utterly pointless government shutdown, that “Pelosi is playing checkers. Trump is playing chess.” After the shutdown ended with nothing to show for it, YouTube star Bill Mitchell tweeted that "Trump’s intuitive mind is a super-computer. … He is a strategic savant. Instead of wasting energy on things like tact, his brain focuses on strategy.”

You have to be a savant of sycophancy to imagine that Trump actually had a strategy during a shutdown that did nothing to bring about a border wall but did real damage to his political standing. (He’s down to 37 percent approval and 57 percent disapproval in CNN’s poll of polls.) But that is the kind of person that Trump surrounds himself with. When the president appeared on Friday afternoon in the Rose Garden to announce a shutdown-ending “deal,” his senior staff and cabinet actually applauded. It’s as if Napoleon’s ministers had cheered a great victory after he returned from Russia. Sure, the Grande Armée was decimated, but the emperor has his enemies right where he wants them. N’est-ce pas?

A more honest assessment came from, of all sources, the author of that literary masterwork “In Trump We Trust: E Pluribus Awesome!” “Good news for George Herbert Walker Bush,” Ann Coulter tweeted. “As of today, he is no longer the biggest wimp ever to serve as President of the United States.” You have to be pretty twisted to imagine that a war hero who was shot down at age 20 was actually a “wimp,” but her assessment of the incumbent rings true.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/01/27/only-one-trump-can-blame-this-latest-disaster-is-himself/?utm_term=.8f36088be090&wpisrc=nl_rainbow&wpmm=1