POTUS does not understand the limits of his power.

Donald Trump  is frustrated in his inability to move legislation.  He said in a recent interview that the form and function of the US Constitution are "archaic" and should be restructured so that it would be "modern."  He also says that he would like to change the libel laws, evidently for the purpose of controlling dissent.  So far as I know there are no federal libel laws.  They are all state laws.  The federal constitution protects freedom of speech but the law, so far as I know, does not offer the opportunity to sue for defamation in the federal Article Three courts.  Does DT not understand that he does not control the state courts or legislatures?  He is frustrated with his inability to move legislation in the US Congress?  By analogy, if he were still in business, the response by a CEO type to a business plan for the company that obstructed his planning would be to seek to change the business plan at a stockholders meeting.  Well, pilgrims, the US Constitution is not a business plan and the US Congress is not a stockholders' meeting.   The US Constitution contains provisions for its own modification through amendment or a constitutional convention.  Neither of these processes is anything like a stockholders' meeting.  In fact the constitution was designed to make its modification difficult, and not easy at all.  An amendment required 2/3 approval in BOTH houses and 2/3 ratification by the state governments.  This was necessary in framing because a number of the original states would not have ratified the document without that approach.  Yes, that means that the Union is an agreement among the states.

The extent to which DT understands the US government system is, IMO, doubtful.  He appears to this lay observer of humans to have a number of learning disabilities; a form of Asperger's syndrome perhaps, ADHD, and dyslexia are among the possibilities.  The comedian Hassan Minhaj told the press at the White House Correspondents; Dinner on Saturday that their responsibility is greater now than it has been in previous administrations because this president does not read briefing papers, cannot endure protracted oral briefings and has little knowledge of world affairs in his mental "library."  It seems to be the case that he gets his information from 24/7  TV news .   That is really unfortunate since most 24/7 news is merely a mouthpiece for someone's information operations whether left or right.

At the same time he has watched a lot of movies  What a combination of influences!  pl

Comments

[Brunswick]

In the Corporate World, when an Idiot demands idiot options on an impossibility,

You spin it out as "investigating the options".

You might even go so far as creating a "commitee" to drink coffee, eat donuts, kibitz, while not really "investigating the options".

You spin it out as long as you can with out results in the hope that the Idiot, forgets his/her idiocy, eventually.

With the "Flynn" vetting, Prebius ensured that he can't walk away from Trump, unscathed.

[Fred]

Eakins,

If Trump gets convicted by the Senate maybe Pence will fire him.

[crf]

I know the US system is vastly different than a westminster parliamentary system. But when one party in the US controls all the federal levers of power, as is the case now, it certainly is possible for a guileful President to approach or even exceed those granted to a Prime Minister.

What's surprising to me is that it's the Republicans who are mostly keeping DJT in check. Trump clearly thought he could order the republican party around like a big boss: not so. Over the summer, I expect there will be a President/congressional Republican caucus meeting, where a legislative agenda will be proposed and agreed upon. It'll be rammed through next winter, even at the expense of the filibuster.

[trinlae]

I dont know what ppl here think of RD Steele, but he mad a summary roundup of DT's performance to date including good, bad, & ugly:

https://youtu.be/f49OBFEM8Q0

[trinlae]

I often have wondered the sacriligious thought that the US would operate much more effectively if it had split into two smaller nations, (albeit with other problems remaining to be resolved)

[Keith Harbaugh]

Various commentators, in this post, and all over the Internet and media,
are deploring Trump and “the system” which resulted in his election.

We need to take a step back and note that
his supporters voted for what he said,
not who he was.
I think there is ample evidence for that.

So the real questions are, or should be:
“Why was such a flawed exponent of popular ideas chosen?
Was there not a less flawed exponent of those ideas available?”

Well, there certainly was another exponent of those ideas.
See the article:
‘The Ideas Made It, But I Didn’t’
Pat Buchanan won after all.
But now he thinks it might be too late
for the nation he was trying to save.
By Tim Alberta
http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/04/22/pat-buchanan-trump-president-history-profile-215042

So why has Pat Buchanan been so marginalized,
both politically and in terms of media reach?
If his ideas won, why didn't he?

I think there can be no doubt whatsoever about the answer to that question:
His statements about Israel
(e.g., “Whose War?”,
http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/whose-war/
published 2003-03-24)
made him unacceptable to the American Jewish community.

As clear proof of that, see the article:
Fear rises that Bannon could bring the ‘alt-right’ into White House
Trump’s decision to appoint the Breitbart executive his chief strategist stokes warnings across the political spectrum.
By Katie Glueck, 2016-11-14
http://www.politico.com/story/2016/11/stephen-bannon-breitbart-backlash-231371

The relevant quote from that article:

Lamented a Republican Jewish strategist ...
“We spent a long time expunging
the Pat Buchanan wing from conservative politics,
but that wing and what it represents
is back.”

For another example of their antagonism to Buchanan, see
http://turcopolier.typepad.com/sic_semper_tyrannis/2008/09/palin-buchanan.html

[SR Wood]

The latest Atlantic has a good article titled "Why Was There A Civil War". I find their reasoning quite good.
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/05/why-there-was-a-civil-war/524925/

[Macgupta123]

Pardon me, but aren't both Trump and Clinton WASP?

[AEL]

There is also an actual mutual defense treaty between China and North Korea.

Buckle up, things might get bumpy quickly.

[MRW]

Colonel,

As you know we were better off when WASPs and other elites ran the country. pl

I remember someone suggesting this bumper sticker:

Bring back the WASPs! At least they put America first and didn’t want to start WWIII.

[optimax]

McMaster and Lady Graham have no qualms about the millions of SoKos who will die if we attack NoKo preemptively because they are years away from developing a viable threat to the US. Russia would be a better ally to SoKo than us.

[Barbara Ann]

Apologies, won't happen again.

[johnf]

Aspergers/ADHD is very fashionable in current artistic portrayals of Borgist intellectual superiority. The Nritish version of "Sherlock" starring Benedict Cumberbatch and his portrayal of Alan Turing, Jonny Lee Miller's American portrayal of SH in "Elementary", recent incarnations of Dr Who.

The Scandinoir TV series "The Bridge" - and I'm only talking about the Danish version - treats Aspergers on a much more tragic and profound level. Saga, the Swedish female detective, I see mainly as an angelic being, interested purely in abstract justice. But she is also aware of her unnatural distance from ordinary humans and her isolation. In trying to integrate herself she fatefully decides to follow the worldly advice of her compromised Danish co-detective. He teaches her how to lie. Her lying, to please him, in turn leads to the death of his own beloved son.

I think the Anglo-Americans co-opted the superficial comic and entertainment potential of Aspergers from the the Saga Scandi model while entirely ignoring its tragic and dangerous elements.

[English outsider]

Eric Newhill - this has to be right:-

"All the stupid gaffs, seeming ignorance of history and Constitutional processes and self-centered impetuousness were always a known feature of The Donald. Like a lot of supporters, I didn't care about any of that as long as he stuck to his guns ..."

As long as he stuck to his guns. It's as if Michael Collins had said at the height of the conflict "I'm not that bothered about Ireland, now it comes to it." All Trump really had to do was stick to his guns. Not as if he hadn't got them lined up.

He stood head and shoulders above the PR politicians. How could he not, when you look at Obama, Merkel, Cameron, Hollande and the rest of the fakes? The media gave him no cover so he did look stupid a lot of the time, but however he blundered about - maybe because he blundered about - he had the rare gift of being authentic. That he threw away by playing the PR game over the Syrian episode. Unless he was genuinely hoaxed by the neocons, which is difficult to believe.

Now he's played the PR game, now it looks as if he's joined the fakes, there doesn't seem to be a lot going for him. But maybe, as you say, he's crazy like a fox. He'd have to be, I suppose, to get anything past the rest of them.

[Nancy K]

I think he is playing the buffoon because that is what he is. The emperor has no clothes.

[turcopolier]

nancyK

What is it about him that you do not like? pl

[LeaNder]

To meet with them wouldn't be something new, it seems. But surely Kim Jung Un coming to the US to meet Trump. Just as Trump wouldn't meet him in North Korea. Was there ever a president that did? ...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Korea%E2%80%93United_States_relations#Post-Cold_War_to_Present_.281991-_.29

******
Scroll down a little, the initial alarm around USS Carl Vinson has been reduced to faux news on Wikipedia by now.

[SR Wood]

Personnel Reliability Program (PRP) for the presidency?
Bruce Blair, a research scholar at the Program on Science and Global Security, at Princeton, told me that if Trump were an officer in the Air Force, with any connection to nuclear weapons, he would need to pass the Personnel Reliability Program, which includes thirty-seven questions about financial history, emotional volatility, and physical health. (Question No. 28: Do you often lose your temper?) “There’s no doubt in my mind that Trump would never pass muster,” Blair, who was a ballistic-missile launch-control officer in the Air Force, told me. “Any of us that had our hands anywhere near nuclear weapons had to pass the system. If you were having any arguments, or were in financial trouble, that was a problem. For all we know, Trump is on the brink of that, but the President is exempt from everything.”

(I guess we can't hold Presidents to these standards.)

[William P. Fitzgerald III]

He may have been recalling Andrew Jackson's stance during the nullification controversy. Jackson was vehemently against any attempt by any of the states to usurp the authority of the national government. By implication, had he been president instead of Buchanan, secession and war might not have occurred. That Trump had this in mind is pure supposition on my part. It seems similar to the "tens of thousands of Moslems" celebrating in N.J. on 9/11 which could have come from his recollection, such as it was, of the incident with the mossad agents.

WPFIII

[Eric Newhill]

English Outsider,
One more point I should have included; Trump has a gotten a good man appointed to the Supreme Court and will likely have the opportunity to make two more appointments; certainly at least one.

Even if Trump fails to deliver on everything else he promised, appointing solid originalists - or as close to originalist as possible - to the Supreme Court will be enough. Without that, the USA would be kaput in 20 years; a victim of destructive leftist activism like Venezuela. So Trump will have saved the country regardless of what he does in the foreign policy arena.

[turcopolier]

WPF III

The man is poorly educated and IMO somewhat handicapped. I understand what he meant about Jackson and so do you. Would secession have occurred if Jackson had been president in the late 1850s? Probably not. He lacked Buchanan's inhibitions. pl

[Nancy K]

It would be easier to say what I like. He seems a devoted father. He appears to have a good work ethic.
I find his demeanor unpresidential, his speech inarticulate. His admiration of dictators frightening. I am unsure where he stands on most issues and he is divisive not unifying. I don't trust him. I'm sure many on this site would probably say much the same about Obama or Clinton.

[kooshy]

Yes Nancy, I agree, thanks to the US constitution, without that document, this Greedy Bunch would have walked all over us.

[Dr.Puck]

My own opinion is that President Trump, having had his legislative agenda devoured whole by the clash between the Tea Party (defund-the-nanny-state) and the small rump of moderate Republicans plus the Democratic Party, projects himself into the historic person of President Jackson, and, through this projective identification, imagines that a person who understands everything and wins all the time, would simply end slavery without a shot being fired and then unify the country.

It seems to me wishful thinking, even as an imaginative response to Trump's self-generated thought problem. It is, again as I view it, indicative of Trump's feeling powerless to--100 days out--simply order the government and nation around, bend it to his will, and make America great again.

As Josh Marshall describes our leader, Trump is "militantly ignorant."

During the campaign he told the nation he would drain the swamp of special interests, Wall Street self-dealers, and, the corrupt media. Instead President Trump and his administration has doubled down on Goldman Sachs and other plutocrats, and, he set up an opaque WH, understaffed the cabinet bureaucracies, and, created conditions for his own family's coming to financially benefit immensely from his Presidency.

His 36 year old son-in-law has been charged with: ending the opioid crisis, resolving the crisis in the ME, reorganizing the Federal Government based in principles of cost/benefit/efficiency/accountability.

Has he become almost totally assimilated by the Borg? Is a severe round of reaganomics in our hyper rent-seeking era going to bring back coal, steel, manufacturing?

Irony helps. President has killed his own agenda. Still, he has severed "better coverage" from his pre-election promise to provide healthcare that lowers premiums and deductibles, covers everybody including those with pre-existing conditions, and is "beautiful and much much better than Obamacare."

Who knew?!

[Babak Makkinejad]

There were days of celebrations in UAE cities - "with coeds coming to class giggling..."; if you do not believe me search the public Internet.

And the United States, Canada, UK, France, Australia are committed, absolutely committed, to the preservation of the security and prosperity of UAE against Any and All.

"Any", I imagine, stands for "Iran" and "All", I suppose, stands for "the Party of Ali".