Month: June 2017

Ryan Shrugged

by digby

Via Daily Kos, this is downright surprising:

Tucker Carlson sounded like a Progressive Democrat in the manner that he grilled Paul Ryan on Trumpcare. The Speaker made a facial expression at the end that should concern every Trump voter.

Paul Ryan likely did not expect the reception he got from Fox News host Tucker Carlson. He seemed a bit taken aback with the grilling in this excerpted video.

“Let’s get the tax policy so as I understand it,” said Tucker Carlson. “And I’m just reading this. So I may have it wrong. But there’s an investment tax in here, the net investment income tax. And as far as I know, it only kicks in on couples making over a quarter million dollars a year. So it’s a tax on wealthy investors, and you’re eliminating it.”

“Yes,” Paul Ryan responded. “A 3.8 percent tax. yes.”

“So I guess my question is looking at the last election was the message of that election really we need to help investors?” Carlson asked. “I mean the Dow is over 20,000. Are they really the group that needs the help?”

“This was a tax on capital income which is bad for economic growth,” Paul Ryan said. “It’s basically a capital gains tax increase effectively to finance Obamacare. We’re undoing Obamacare. So we’re not going to keep Obamacare taxes in place. So all of these taxes, the trillion dollar tax cut that this bill represents, that is part of that trillion dollar tax increase that was in Obamacare, to finance Obamacare. We’re repealing, we promised we would repeal the Obamacare taxes. This is one of the Obamacare taxes. So we’re keeping our promise. And, by the way, it’s bad tax policy because it’s bad for economic growth. And we’re also repealing the Obamacare spending. So we’re getting rid of its taxing, and we’re getting rid of spending. And this is us keeping our word. You may want to keep that 3.8 percent tax. We’re not going to keep it because it was part of Obamacare.”

Paul Ryan shrugs with disregard when challenged about rich getting all the spoils

“Well but lots of things are part of Obamacare,” Carlson said. “You just said a minute ago you’re not doing anything about because you can’t under reconciliation. But you just said they look to meet every promise in this first round. I guess it’s a macro question. … But also I mean you have the overview here is that the all the wealth basically in the last years is stuck to the top end. That’s one of the reasons we’ve had all this political turmoil as you know. And so kind of a hard sell to say yeah we’re going to repeal Obamacare, but we’re going to send more money to people who’ve already gotten the richest over the last ten years I mean that’s what this does no? I’m not leftist. It’s just that’s true.”

And Ryan just shrugged.

The master negotiator myth

by digby

I wrote about Donald Trump’s allegedly legendary salesmanship for Salon this morning:

Last year on the campaign trail, Donald Trump made a lot of promises, almost always adding that he planned to fulfill them “quickly.” He would say, “We will defeat ISIS and we will do it very, very quickly,” or “We’re disrespected right now all over the world. But that will change very, very quickly.” (He was right about that one. It changed very quickly, but not for the better.)

Just before the election in November he said this:

I will ask Congress to convene a special session so we can repeal and replace and it will be such an honor for me, for you and for everybody in this country, because Obamacare has to be replaced. And we will do it and we will do it very, very quickly.

No one understood why Trump would need to convene a special session of Congress but it sounded very forceful and “strong” (another word he uses constantly). He got so grandiose in his promises to act quickly that at one point he pledged to get nearly his entire agenda done on the very first day.

What his followers truly loved about him, of course, was that he was saying out loud all the politically incorrect things they felt inhibited from saying in polite company, for fear of someone thinking they aren’t nice people. His candidacy, especially the rallies, provided one gigantic safe space for people to cheer for things that liberals hate. But when you asked people why they thought he would make a good president, it was always because he was a successful businessman who knew how to get things done.

Trump’s entire pitch was based on his supposedly legendary ability to negotiate. He flogged “The Art of the Deal” like it was the Bible, signing it on rope lines for his adoring fans and constantly calling it the bestselling business book of all time. This was the myth underlying his reality TV “Apprentice” persona, which was inspired by the book.

Trump was supposed to be a master negotiator who would singlehandedly cut new global trade deals to favor U.S. businesses and leave the rest of the world happily promising to pay more and get less. He would stare down world leaders and they would respect him for his manly strength and determination. He would bring Democrats and Republicans together in a room and bang their heads together until they came to an agreement. He was that good.

Do I even need to say it? None of that has worked out. The Republicans can’t seem to get any legislation to Trump’s desk, and he has proven to be counterproductive whenever he gets involved. Not only hasn’t he lived up to the hype, he’s actually much worse at negotiating than any president in modern memory.

Glenn Thrush and Jonathan Martin, reporting for the New York Times, examined why Trump can’t seem to make any deals as president, and found that much of it is because of his terrible relationships with many Republican officials. Issuing crude threats against Republican senators who come out against him, as a Trump-allied Super PAC did this week when Sen. Dean Heller announced he wouldn’t vote for the Senate health care bill, has been called “beyond stupid” by none other than Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell himself.

But the larger problem for Trump is that he simply lacks the knowledge one needs to be able to negotiate successfully. Thrush and Martin note:

A senator who supports the bill left the meeting at the White House with a sense that the president did not have a grasp of some basic elements of the Senate plan — and seemed especially confused when a moderate Republican complained that opponents of the bill would cast it as a massive tax break for the wealthy, according to an aide who received a detailed readout of the exchange.

Mr. Trump said he planned to tackle tax reform later, ignoring the repeal’s tax implications, the staff member added.

It is widely understood, including by its Republican authors, that the bill was a massive tax cut disguised as health care legislation. That the president didn’t know that means he clearly hadn’t read the bill in any depth nor had he read the news media reports about it.

Washington isn’t the real estate and brand licensing world that Trump is used to. It’s clear that he’s in way over his head. But it’s worth remembering that there’s a lot of evidence that he was never very good at making deals.

Tony Schwartz, Trump’s ghostwriter on “The Art of the Deal,” came forward during the campaign to confess that most of what he’d written in that book, which is the basis for the Trump myth, is just that — a myth. Trump inherited a lot of money from his father, who had political juice in New York and co-signed Trump’s deals for years. He struggled for years, through bankruptcy and failed entrepreneurial ventures, managing to survive by finding new and novel ways to fund his lifestyle (some of which are being investigated by the FBI and the special prosecutor right now). The “Trump brand” was slapped on any cheap consumer product he could persuade to take it.

Trump’s particular problem in politics is that he has an extremely short attention span, which means that the learning curve for the presidency, which is steep for anyone, may just be too much for him to master. Schwartz told the New Yorker’s Jane Mayer that this problem has left Trump with “a stunning level of superficial knowledge and plain ignorance,” explaining, “that’s why he so prefers TV as his first news source — information comes in easily digestible sound bites.”

It’s impossible, Schwartz said, “to keep [Trump] focussed on any topic, other than his own self-aggrandizement, for more than a few minutes, and even then … if he had to be briefed on a crisis in the Situation Room, it’s impossible to imagine him paying attention over a long period of time.” Schwartz described Trump as not a dealmaker at all but merely a self-promoter who craves “money, praise, and celebrity” and never gets enough of it. These are not unusual traits among leaders, but they are not sufficient or even necessary for the job he has now.

Trump seems to have thought being president was a performance, like the fantasy role he played on “The Apprentice.” There’s a lot more to it than just holding photo-ops sitting behind a desk announcing something that you haven’t read and don’t really understand. So far he hasn’t shown any evidence whatever that he’s up to the task.
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QOTD: A Republican

by digby

… one who hasn’t completely drunk the Trumpade:

Reacting to this:

I’m watching Trump defenders on TV saying that the president is a “fighter” and it’s what everyone voted for.

They are right. This is what his people voted for. At some point we have to accept that this juvenile misogyny is part of the reason they voted for him. They like it.

Update: Not all Republicans

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Bad faith is policy
by Tom Sullivan

From health care to voting rights to economics, the narrative coming from conservatism’s thought leaders as well as its political ones is professionally disingenuous. But in the faux politeness of the Beltway, rarely does the press call it out as such.

Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo this week observes how Republican goals rarely conform to their stated ones. Regarding health care, Marshall notes, the press fundamentally (or perhaps deliberately) misreads the intent of the Republican legislation. An exchange between CNN’s Wolf Blitzer and Dana Bash illustrates his point. Why can’t the parties get together on this? Bash asks. Marshall responds:

When you try three times to ‘repeal and replace’ and each time you come up with something that takes away coverage from almost everyone who got it under Obamacare, that’s not an accident or a goof. That is what you’re trying to do. ‘Repeal and replace’ was a slogan that made up for simple ‘repeal’ not being acceptable to a lot of people. But in reality, it’s still repeal. Claw back the taxes, claw back the coverage.

Pretending that both parties just have very different approaches to solving a commonly agreed upon problem is really just a lie. It’s not true. One side is looking for ways to increase the number of people who have real health insurance and thus reasonable access to health care and the other is trying to get the government out of the health care provision business with the inevitable result that the opposite will be the case.

Insisting that the split between the parties on health care policy demonstrates a lack of bipartisanship misses the point.

If you had an old building and one group wanted to refurbish and preserve it and the other wanted to tear it down, it wouldn’t surprise you that the two groups couldn’t work together on a solution. It’s an either/or. You’re trying to do two fundamentally opposite things, diametrically opposed. There’s no basis for cooperation or compromise because the fundamental goal is different. This entire health care debate has essentially been the same. Only the coverage has rarely captured that. That’s a big failure. It also explains why people get confused and even fed up.

Or as Paul Waldman writes of the Republican effort, “[T]his is the party that wants to dismantle government, not figure out how to make it work better.”

The sham politics of bad faith is now policy. Arguments from Republican leaders for any number of policies follow the same pattern. What I wrote here two years ago bears repeating:

My wife calls this having “a Republican argument.” That is to say, a disingenuous one. It’s where your opponent abandons rules of evidence and logic and instead argues by assertion or by exaggerated fear of what “might be” happening undetected.

It is to argue, for example, that eliminating public assistance to the rich through tax cuts, credits, and direct incentives (that fund their fifth home, new yacht, or airplane upgrade) will kill their incentive to work hard and “create jobs.” But public assistance to the poor — you know, for food — eliminates their incentive to work.

It is to argue after every mass shooting that we need no new gun laws criminals will simply ignore; we just need to enforce laws already on the books. Except when it comes to voting restrictions, we need new laws on top of those they complain the state is already not enforcing.

It is people arguing that we need to restore public confidence in the election system after they’ve spent decades trying to undermine it to build public support for restoring Jim Crow.

Lacking evidence of widespread fraud in elections, conservative groups have begun assembling databases of election irregularities to support their case for photo ID laws. The Heritage Foundation has one. But a review reveals that of the 500 cases collected dating back over two decades, only seven involve voter impersonation that might be caught by requiring photo IDs. One of those seven was a voter impersonating another registrant to prove it could be done. Another of the seven involved election judges falsifying the ledger. IDs would not have stopped crooked election judges.

The point of assembling such databases is always the same: to promote the idea the problem is widespread and to build public support for a solution to a virtually nonexistent problem. In the name of “election integrity,” Republican legislatures have erected barriers to voting that “with surgical precision” fall hardest on groups least likely to vote for Republicans. As Marshall says, “that’s not an accident or a goof. That is what you’re trying to do.”

Tort reform is another Republican enthusiasm that pops up from time to time. Like now. Invariably, the sales pitch is that capping medical malpractice awards will “discourage frivolous lawsuits and reduce the cost of health care.” Currently, research shows medical liability makes up 2 to 2.5 percent of health costs. It was under 2 percent in 2005 when President Bush floated the idea of getting hospitals to switch to all-electronic records in a speech at the Cleveland Clinic. It might reduce health care costs by as much as 20 percent as well as save lives. But the effort to save lives and taxpayers money might cost millions. Bush’s colleagues preferred then, as they do now, to focus on the 2 percent solution.

Privatization transfers publicly owned assets to private investors. We the People incur the capital costs; investors reap the profits only available by taking ownership from us. Public-private partnerships promise to save the public tax money up front for new capital projects, but only by charging people in near perpetuity for using the roads/bridges/etc. The promise is always that these schemes will reduce taxpayers’ costs (lower taxes are always implied) but forever seem to cost us more out of pocket.

It is almost as if saving us money, strengthening our democracy, and making us healthier are not the real goals.

The health care bill now on hold in the Senate looks to turn Medicaid into block grants and capping its growth. Speaker Paul Ryan, as we know, has been dreaming about “sending it back to the states, capping its growth rate” since he was in college and “drinking out of a keg.” Making Americans healthier doesn’t really seem to be the driver here any more than saving taxpayers money or boosting election integrity.

If block grants and privatization are such terrific, fiscally conservative ideas, why not auction off a few of our nearly 900 overseas military bases, convert the Pentagon into time shares and condos, and send the defense budget back to the states while capping its growth?

Headline o’ the Day

by digby

Apparently their lies weren’t quite effective enough:

That makes it political suicide to vote for that monstrosity. And there are other polls that are almost as bad. None show more than 35 percent support. And they’re all heading downward:

There’s little public confidence in Trump or congressional Republicans on the issue, however, which threatens any effort to build support among the undecided. Forty-three percent of Americans, the poll shows, trust congressional Democrats most to protect them and their families’ interest in the health care debate. Only 19 percent trust Trump most, and 10 percent trust congressional Republicans. 

It’s not just the public, media polls that could push Republicans away from uniting around a bill. The American Medical Association, which opposes the measure, this week released surveys conducted in a number of states that are home to fence-sitting senators — Alaska, Colorado, Nevada, Ohio and West Virginia — that showed little support for the bill and its provisions. 

To hammer home the point, the AMA hired two separate polling firms to conduct the surveys, Public Opinion Strategies and Voter/Consumer Research, that work for Republican campaigns. (Public Opinion Strategies conducted four of the five surveys — excepting West Virginia, where it lists Sen. Shelley Moore Capito as a client.)

If they could give up their permanent tax cut white whale, they could simply leave Medicaid alone, shore up the exchanges and say “we repealed it and we replaced it and now it’s called Trumpcare!” Hooray!

But they can’t. Their donors demand the tax cuts and the wingnuts will never go for anything that doesn’t stick it hard to the poor. That’s where we are. They’ll all go down with the ship if that’swhat it takes.

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The new villain

by digby

Don’t try this at home. They’ll get very mad:

It was a strange sight, even for the “sport” of professional wrestling.

A wrestler holding a microphone faced an Appalachian crowd before a match and began unleashing a torrent of insults, the nature of which seemed out of place at a pro wrestling tournament.

“I understand now why you all identify with country music. It’s slow and it’s simple and it’s boring, just like each and every one of you.”

As the crowd grew increasing hostile, the wrestler’s remarks became more politically tinged.

“You know what, I think Bernie Sanders would make a great secretary of state.”

“I want to exchange your bullets for bullet points. Bullet points of knowledge.”

He even called Donald Trump a “con man.” The crowd exploded in jeers. “Shut up,” someone yelled.

Strange, indeed. But then, the muscular man’s shirt read, “Not My President.”

Meet the wrestler who goes by the name “Progressive Liberal” Dan Richards, the most hated character in Kentucky’s Appalachian Mountain Wrestling (AMW) program, a small professional wrestling circuit.

Hey Alexa, yo’ mama

by digby

He really is obsessed:

The president also references The Washington Post, which is owned by Amazon’s CEO, Jeff Bezos, in his tweet.

On Tuesday, the publication put out a story saying a fake issue of Time magazine with Trump on the cover was hanging in some of the president’s golf clubs.

“[T]he cover on display at Trump’s clubs, observed recently by a reporter visiting one of the properties, contains several small but telling mistakes,” the Post wrote.

A spokeswoman for Time later confirmed with the Post that the cover wasn’t real.

 President Donald Trump delivers remarks in the Diplomatic Room following a shooting that injured a member of Congress and law enforcement officers at the White House June 14, 2017 in Washington, DC. President Trump targets Amazon over tax claims
1 Hour Ago | 01:59
Aside from attacking the Washington-based publication directly, Trump harshly criticized Amazon during his campaign, saying the e-commerce giant operated a monopoly with an unfair tax shelter that’s somehow propped up by Bezos’ ownership of the Post.

During one campaign rally in February 2016, Trump told the crowd: “If I become president, oh [does Amazon] have problems. They’re going to have such problems.” He added that Bezos only bought the Post to have “political influence.”

Trump is now calling out Amazon for avoiding so-called internet taxes, what was once a much larger and controversial issue for the e-retailer.

A representative from Amazon did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

However, as pressure built in individual state houses, Congress and courts to allow states to require retailers to collect the tax on out-of-state sales and pass it on to state governments, Amazon has accelerated changes in its tax policy.

Starting April 1 this year, Amazon began collecting sales tax nationwide, calming much of the prior controversy. So it remains unclear what Trump was referencing when he accused Amazon on Wednesday morning of not paying “internet taxes.”

In general, online retailers fall under two different tax systems today — retailers located out of state pay no sales tax, while those with some type of link to the state must pay it. Amazon having distribution centers in certain states, but not others, had put the company in a tricky spot.

“This is a personal thing. … He’s going after Jeff,” Gene Munster, co-founder and managing partner of Loup Ventures, told CNBC’s “Squawk on the Street.” “It’s all about personal vendetta against The Washington Post.”

He really is a whiny little boy isn’t he? Any mature adult would ignore this story and just let it die. Instead, he’s drawn attention to it simply because he’s so petulant and vindictive that it’s impossible for him to control himself.

I think at this point we may be looking at one of those regimes in which the King is simply a figurehead playing games of his own while other people run the government. And the problem is that this Mad King has chosen a group of misfits almost as nuts as he is to do it.

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A thousand Pinocchios

by digby

28.2M Americans are still waiting under #Obamacare and remain uninsured. They need relief now. #RepealAndReplace pic.twitter.com/guEEOiaXDy

— Sean Spicer (@PressSec) June 28, 2017

This is obviously an official talking point. Cornyn did it yesterday:

28 million uninsured under Obamacare

— JohnCornyn (@JohnCornyn) June 26, 2017

This is, of course, ignoring the fact that the CBO estimates that if Trumpcare goes through it will be closer to 50 million uninsured.

This is the fatuous nonsense they’re peddling:

The bill recently introduced in the Senate would get rid of the individual mandate, which in 2015 alone caused 6.5 million Americans to pay $3 billion in penalties to the IRS because they did not want or could not afford a government-dictated health plan. It would directly repeal some of ObamaCare’s most costly regulations while giving states flexibility to waive others if they develop innovative ways to provide coverage and bring down costs.

The Senate’s plan also would repeal hundreds of billions of dollars in onerous taxes. It would put Medicaid on a sustainable spending path and give states a real chance to reform the program to make it work for the people who rely on it.

The Trump administration, recognizing the need for urgent action, began offering Americans relief from ObamaCare starting in February. The Department of Health and Human Services has reviewed thousands of pages of ObamaCare rules and taken more than a dozen distinct actions, with additional positive steps in the works.

But administrative action is constrained by the failed law Americans all live under. If Congress acts this summer, the Trump administration will have significantly expanded ability to offer relief, and the country will have taken a huge step toward truly patient-centered health care.

Again, neglecting to mention that under their plan people like me are going to get hammered financially (The Kaiser calculator says my premiums will rise over 100% if this takes effect)and Medicaid patients are going to be dying or costing the emergency rooms billions in uncompensated care.

But they are all despicable monstrous liars. And that’s all they’ve got to keep their mystifyingly loyal cultists on board.

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Ratfucking for dummies


by digby

Regarding Trump’s obsessive CNN horseshit I can’t help but be reminded of this scene from All The President’s Men, from Goldman’s first draft of the screenplay:

WOODWARD and BERNSTEIN walking in the rain. It’s pouring as they leave FBI Headquarters and they are in anguish.

BERNSTEIN
(after a while)
Woodward?

WOODWARD
Hmm?

BERNSTEIN
What was the mistake? Do you think
it’s been rigged, all along the way,
leading us on so they could slip it
to us when it mattered? They couldn’t
have set us up better; after all
these months our credibility’s gone,
you know what that means?

WOODWARD
(nods)
Only everything…

They are soaked, Nearby is a garbage can, they grab papers, hold them over their heads, start to walk. Now–

CAMERA MOVES UP HIGHER TO REVEAL

The papers they grabbed were the Post front page. (This
happened.) And as they walked, the Haldeman story was on their heads. HOLD on the reporters walking miserably through the rain. Now–

CUT TO:

THE POST.

A tremendous pall has settled on the city room. People walk by, glancing at WOODWARD and BERNSTEIN, who sit almost immobilized at their desks, wet, whipped; no energy left.

CUT TO:

BRADLEE’S OFFICE. SIMONS sits across from BRADLEE as ROSENFELD
enters quietly with a bundle of teletype paper.

SIMONS
(indicating the papers)
More denunciations?

ROSENFELD
(nods)
One Senator just gave a speech
slurring us 57 times in 20 minutes.

BRADLEE has started typing something brief. When ROSENFELD’s done, so is he. He hands it to SIMONS.

SIMONS
What’s this?

BRADLEE
My non-denial denial.

ROSENFELD
We’re not printing a retraction?

CUT TO:

CLOSE UP–BRADLEE. He is thoughtful for a while. Then, spinning around, staring out towards the newsroom:

BRADLEE
Fuck it, let’s stand by the boys.

And he stands, spins out of the room as we

CUT TO:

THE FLOWER POT ON WOODWARD’S TERRACE.

The rain has stopped. The apartment is dark. It’s late at
night. Inside, the phone RINGS and

CUT TO:

WOODWARD’S APARTMENT in the dark as he manages to knock the phone off its cradle.

WOODWARD
Hello?

BERNSTEIN’S VOICE (O.S.)
What’d you find?

WOODWARD
Jesus Christ, what time is it?

BERNSTEIN
You overslept?

WOODWARD
Goddamnit!–

He fumbles for the lamp, as it falls with a CRASH–

CUT TO:

WOODWARD–MOVING. Hair wild, clothes half-buttoned, he runs through the dark Washington streets as we

CUT TO:

TWO WELL-DRESSED MEN in the shadows across the street, going in the same direction and

CUT TO:

WOODWARD spotting them, picking up the pace and

CUT TO:

THE TWO MEN moving faster too and now

CUT TO:

A BUNCH OF CABS. WOODWARD jumps into the first and as it roars off

CUT TO:

THE TWO MEN getting into a cab also, roaring off in the same direction and

CUT TO:

WOODWARD’S CAB taking a corner fast and as it goes on, HOLD until the second cab takes the same corner, faster, and now

CUT TO:

WOODWARD jumping out of his cab, fumbling into his pockets for change as we

CUT TO:

THE TWO MEN getting out of their cab, paying, and as their cab drives off

CUT TO:

WOODWARD diving back into his cab and in a moment it is roaring again through the night and we

CUT TO:

THE TWO WELL-DRESSED MEN standing on the sidewalk, watching as WOODWARD disappears into the night and then suddenly,

ZOOM TO:

DEEP THROAT IN CLOSE UP AND MAD.

DEEP THROAT
–you were doing so well and then
you got stupid, you went too fast–
Christ, what a royal screw up–

PULL BACK TO REVEAL

DEEP THROAT and WOODWARD in the underground garage.

WOODWARD
–I know, I know, the pressure’s off
the White House and it’s all back on
the Post–

DEEP THROAT
–you’ve done worse than let Haldeman
slip away, you’ve got people feeling
sorry for him–I didn’t think that
was possible. A conspiracy like this–
the rope has to tighten slowly around
everyone’s neck. You build from the
outer edges and you go step by step.
If you shoot too high and miss, then
everybody feels more secure. You’ve
put the investigation back months.

WOODWARD
We know that–and if we were wrong,
we’re resigning–were we wrong?

DEEP THROAT
You’ll have to find that out, won’t
you?–

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Trump tweets while the world burns

by digby

I wrote about our president’s obsession for Salon this morning:

There hasn’t been much going on this week. Well, other than the fate of more than 20 million people and one-sixth of the United States economy. And there are a few bothersome little events possibly happening over in the Middle East. But other than that this week has been dull, dull, dull. At least our fearless leader, Donald Trump, must think so since he’s been working night and day to fix the major global crisis of a story that briefly appeared on CNN’s website and was then retracted. Thank God the president of the United States is on it. If we all stick together through this challenging and critical time, we may just get through it.

OK, I’m being sarcastic. This has been a tumultuous and busy week in Washington, but it wasn’t fake news that had the majority of the country on pins and needles. It was the prospect of millions of people losing health care and services, with many individuals desperately in need of and possibly unable to survive without them. As it turns out, they were given a brief reprieve when Majority Leader Mitch McConnell was unable to muster 50 votes to ram the bill through the Senate. Now all eyes will turn to the individual home states where freaked-out constituents will be stalking these Republican officials. There will be parades and town halls and barbecues across the nation and these GOP politicians will get an earful.

One might have thought the president would be deeply involved with the Senate vote, since he’s allegedly the greatest negotiator the world has ever known. There have been reports of some phone calls to recalcitrant senators and a few offhand comments endorsing the bill, but Trump simply has not been a factor in the debate.

After McConnell announced he was delaying the vote until after the July 4 break, Trump had all the Republican senators at the White House for a photo op and brief meeting in which he made it clear he didn’t really give a damn about the health care bill one way or the other. He said, “This will be great if we get it done. And if we don’t get it done, it’s just going to be something that we’re not going to like. And that’s OK, and I understand that very well.”

He has said from the beginning that he thought it would be better politically to just sabotage Obamacare and blame the Democrats, so this isn’t a surprise. Still, since Senate leadership continues to work to get the thing passed, it’s not exactly confidence building. Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, summed up the situation as a problem related to Trump’s lack of political experience and the fact that he has yet to learn how to work with Congress. Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., put things a little bit more bluntly on MSNBC on Tuesday, saying, “If you count on the president to have your back, you need to watch it.” The Washington Post reported that most senators consider the White House operation to be a paper tiger and simply don’t take the president seriously.

Trump wasn’t just uninterested or too busy with important matters to offer the negotiation his full attention. On Monday night the White House put out a statement saying that it had intelligence that the Syrian government was preparing to launch another gas attack. Journalists following this up with the State Department, the Pentagon and U.S. Central Command found that no officials at any of those agencies knew anything about this. That suggests either that the White House was making things up or there was a total lack of communication among the various responsible parties. According to The Daily Beast, the president himself was completely out of the loop:

According to a knowledgeable senior administration official, [Secretary of State] Tillerson warned his counterpart, Sergei Lavrov: the U.S. sees that Russia and Syria may be prepping for another chemical weapons attack; and that there will be consequences if Assad follows through with it. All this occurred this week as President Donald Trump displayed what two White House officials characterized as relative indifference and passivity towards the subject, instead opting to focus his public and private energies towards fuming at his domestic enemies in the Democratic Party and the “fake news.”

“The president cares more about CNN and the Russia story than [Syria] at the moment,” one official observed. . . .

White House officials speaking to The Daily Beast painted a picture of a president who, for the time being, is far more obsessed by negative press attention and media feuds at home than any coming atrocities abroad.

The official was in The Daily Beast account was referring to the story about three journalists who resigned from CNN after the network retracted a story about Trump crony Anthony Scaramucci’s being under investigation for his ties to Russia. Judging by Trump’s hysterical tweeting on the subject, he can think of nothing else. He evidently believes this somehow proves the Russia story is fake news.

According to The Daily Beast, presidential advisers Steve Bannon and Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner were consulted before the White House made the Syria announcement, which means they are acting in a presidential capacity on a major foreign policy issue while Trump tracks his bad press. Considering what other countries think about our president that might almost seem reassuring.

A Pew Research Center survey released this week shows that President Trump and his policies are overwhelmingly unpopular around the world. Pew polled people in 37 different countries on six continents, and on average only 22 percent of those surveyed said theyhave confidence that he will do the right thing in international affairs. (Trump got higher marks than former President Barack Obama in just two countries, Russia and Israel.)

America’s allies in Europe and North America are particularly repelled by him, which is deeply disturbing. And they don’t just disapprove of his policies, such as the supposed border wall or his travel ban or his withdrawal from the Paris accords. They disapprove of his personal character even more stridently. Most people around the world describe him as arrogant, intolerant and dangerous. Many do see him as “strong,” but they are probably assuming that his arrogant, intolerant, dangerous rhetoric signifies strength and confidence, when it is actually just the bleating of a deeply insecure and shallow man.

It appears the planet is about to find out whether the world’s only superpower can continue to function with a president who can do nothing but watch TV and battle with the news media over his coverage. Considering Donald Trump’s monumental limitations, of course, that might turn out to be a blessing.