The President's chaos theory of management, rule by threats, focus on pleasing his political base and policy-lite sloganeering are being exposed as ill-suited to effective governance as the nation wrestles with two perennial controversies given new life this week: health care and immigration.
With a bewildering avalanche of tweets and comments in recent days, Trump has sent his surprised aides scurrying to understand his intentions and assess the implications of his ad hoc policy making.
The tumult has strained an unorthodox and rudimentary policy-making process, highlighted confusion in the administration and government agencies, and left his own staffers admitting they have no idea what the commander in chief will do next.
In the slimmed-down West Wing, the struggle to contain or prepare for the reverberations of Trump's impulses seems to have replaced the rampant backbiting that went on before senior officials, like former chief of staff John Kelly, who tried to impose discipline and cohesion left.
Trump's outbursts in recent days also forced his Republican allies on Capitol Hill to struggle to dissuade him from the implications of his actions -- over his threat to close the US-Mexico border and igniting of a new legislative battle over Obamacare.
Often, the President appears to react in the moment to a problem, adopting a position that gets him through a photo op or to the end of the day -- even though he's weighing in on issues that deeply affect people's lives and in normal administrations would merit days of strategizing.
For example, a Justice Department decision last week to back a court challenge seeking to eradicate Obamacare -- a clear play to Trump's base -- quickly morphed into a 2020 campaign gift for Democrats. Trump, apparently stung by a political backlash, then asked the Senate GOP to make another bid to replace Obamacare before the election. But Republican lawmakers, who have no appetite for any new and draining effort to make up for their failure to kill off the law, spent the weekend talking the President down, leading to his vow to tackle the issue after what he sees as his certain re-election.
"He has some big ideas and to his credit wants to solve problems. That's what leaders do," Republican Sen. John Thune of South Dakota said Tuesday.
"But you run into that wall of reality at some point, and, I think, trying to convey what the obstacles are to getting done what he wants done, done in the next two years, is something a number of our members conveyed to him."
By Tuesday, it was as if last week never happened: "I wanted to delay it myself," Trump insisted to reporters, before touting a Republican health care plan that at this point seems mostly to be a mirage.
"The health care is good, really good. ... It's much better than Obamacare."
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell was asked whether he and the President were still at odds on health care. "Not any longer," the Kentucky Republican said with a smile.
But the climbdown did not head off a potential crisis, since if the Supreme Court takes up the case backed by the Justice Department and rules Obamacare unconstitutional -- likely next year, months before the election -- millions of Americans could lose their policies in a health care Armageddon, with the GOP committed to not providing a replacement until 2021 at the earliest.
This is just one example of how Trump's impromptu method causes confusion, catches even his allies flatfooted and often seeds future chaos.
Border brinkmanship
A similar process is playing out over the President's threat to shut the southern border over a spike in asylum claims that is overloading the system.
It's an irresistible play for Trump, as many of his supporters sincerely believe his graphic claims that America is being overrun by a tide of criminal migrants.
It's yet another example of how the President uses vehement threats of terrible consequences that could hurt everyone -- against Mexico over its policing of migrant caravans and against Democrats demanding immediate concessions on immigration -- to try to fulfill his goals.
But even members of Trump's own administration have warned that shutting the border could be catastrophic, biting deeply into trade, shuttering the automobile industry and quickly causing shortages of fruits and vegetables at shops all over America that could turn into a huge political problem for the President.
McConnell is again being called in to cool things down.
"Closing down the border would have potentially catastrophic economic impact on our country, and I would hope we would not be doing that sort of thing," McConnell said on Tuesday.
His comments were reminiscent of his warnings to Trump before the President initiated the longest government shutdown in history in December, apparently fearing that his base -- amplified by the criticism from conservative media -- would not want him climbing down on a demand that Congress fund his border wall.
McConnell also warned that Trump's plan -- which the President eventually followed through on -- to declare a national emergency in order to divert financing for other projects to wall construction was not a good idea either.
The wily Senate majority leader could not stop Trump then, so it's not clear he can do so now, especially since the President acknowledged the economic cost of a border shutdown -- and suggested he was ready to inflict it on Americans for a deeper purpose.
"We have to have security in this country. That's more important than trade," Trump said.
Still, the President did open a face-saving way out for himself by claiming -- without offering any evidence -- that for the first time in "decades" Mexico had started to apprehend "thousands of people" on its territory from Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras.
Spinning wins out of losses
This presidency is so unusual that it's likely that if Trump does step back from his threat about the border he won't see it as an embarrassing erasure of a line in the sand.
That's because often, for Trump, having a fight is a political win in itself. It galvanizes his supporters, allows him to burnish his tough-guy credentials and often ends -- like the partial government shutdown -- with him spinning an alternative reality of victory.
With Trump, the chaos is the point. Complaints about tumult from the media and professional politicians just cement his credentials as the disruptor in chief. This kind of discombobulation is what he promised to bring to Washington and why his die-hard supporters love to see him tearing at the institutions of governance and a political establishment they disdain.
But Trump's reliance on governing for the sizable minority of Americans who elected him, and who he needs to come out in fired-up droves next year, has necessarily limited his ability to accomplish the things he wants to do in Washington.
The GOP failed to eradicate Obamacare partly because it had few credible alternatives while it retained a monopoly on power on Capitol Hill, but also because the President was unable to lead his troops to victory.
And despite Trump's claim Tuesday that he could fix the immigration crisis in 45 minutes, the polarization on Capitol Hill has meant there have been few real advances toward solving genuine problems on this issue since he has been President.
Immigration and health care cannot be overhauled without Democratic and Republican buy-in. But Trump has failed to create conditions that could foster such an unlikely compromise. Democrats have also dug in their heels, but the presidency comes with extra power -- and extra responsibilities.
The previous two presidents -- George W. Bush and Barack Obama -- failed to overhaul immigration too. But at times under Trump there have been signs that a deal is possible -- to tighten borders, ease the plight of people brought illegally to the US as kids and pour resources into dealing with problems like a glut of asylum claims. But the President, more concerned about politics than a governing legacy, has pulled back.
Trump's inability, given his combative campaigning style, to persuade those who don't agree means he has little option but to rely on threats and coercion to get his way.
However, it is beginning to look like such an approach will leave him frustrated and with a legacy devoid of many significant legislative accomplishments. It will also raise questions about the central pillar of his outsider appeal, the "I alone can fix it" message around which he built his 2016 Republican National Convention speech.
For Trump's supporters, such critiques miss the point -- and fail to take into account successes like the passage of the biggest tax overhaul bill in decades, along with his fulfilled promises to build a conservative Supreme Court majority and pull out of international agreements like the Paris climate accord and the Iran nuclear deal.
But as this week's fights over Obamacare and the border show, it's also a recipe for more months of perpetual crises and political stalemate that are likely to stretch right up to the 2020 election, and possibly beyond.
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