A curious factoid
by Tom Sullivan
Wonder Lake and Denali. Photo by Denali National Park and Preserve via Creative Commons.
“Elegant” and “depressing” is how the Washington Post describes Republican Senator Jeff Flake’s speech yesterday. After castigating the sitting president’s behavior as “reckless, outrageous, and undignified,” and saying he would “not be complicit” in supporting conduct within the executive branch that is “not normal,” the Arizona Republican announced he would not run for reelection. Flake said:
It is clear at this moment that a traditional conservative who believes in limited government and free markets, who is devoted to free trade, and who is pro-immigration, has a narrower and narrower path to nomination in the Republican Party — the party that for so long has defined itself by belief in those things. It is also clear to me for the moment we have given in or given up on those core principles in favor of the more viscerally satisfying anger and resentment. To be clear, the anger and resentment that the people feel at the royal mess we have created are justified. But anger and resentment are not a governing philosophy.
From the Post’s lead editorial:
“None of this is normal,” Mr. Flake said. “And what do we as United States senators have to say about it?”
The answer: not much. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) has been speaking up — after he, too, decided not to stand for reelection. A few others have shown some courage at times: Mr. Flake’s fellow Arizonan, the indomitable John McCain; the independent-minded Susan Collins of Maine; Alaska’s Lisa Murkowski. But given that Mr. Flake’s fellow Republicans privately agree with much of what he had to say, the silence from his leaders and most of his colleagues is overpowering.
Others joined in, including Stephen Colbert, noting that Flake would be “complicit and absent.” Colbert continued:
“First McCain, then Corker, now Flake,” Colbert said. “Why is it that Republicans only speak up against Donald Trump when they know they’re not running for re-election? They finally grow a set, and then they say, ‘I’m taking my balls and going home!’”
Several data points in the citations above — “governing philosophy,” Alaska’s Lisa Murkowski, and “not normal” — come together in something Political Animal’s Nancy LeTourneau picked up yesterday from a report in Alaska Dispatch News.
Murkowski’s fellow Republican and fellow Alaskan, Sen. Dan Sullivan, told a story to the recent convention of the Alaska Federation of Natives. He described a meting he and Murkowski had had in the Oval Office with the president and Interior Sec. Ryan Zinke:
“We had maps and we were talking all about Alaska issues. So many issues. Our fisheries. Whaling, the culture of whaling in Alaska. The economy. The military,” Sullivan said.
They brought up Obama administration actions that they said hurt Alaska, such as a block on the King Cove-Cold Bay road through the Izembek National Wildlife Refuge, Sullivan said.
On each one, Trump asked Zinke: “Can we change that and help Alaska?”
Trump thought of one on his own. Wasn’t the name of a big mountain in Alaska changed by executive order? he asked, referring to Denali, the former Mount McKinley named for the president from Ohio.
“Lisa — Sen. Murkowski — and I jumped over the desk. We said no, no!” said Sullivan, who is originally from Ohio.
Why? Trump asked.
“The Alaska Native people named that mountain over 10,000 years ago,” Sullivan said he told him. “Denali, that was the name.”
What jumped out at LeTourneau is, here is a man with no discernible knowledge about the job to which he was elected. She had a short list of what he’s proven he doesn’t know, to which I’d add no discernible of knowledge of domestic or foreign policy. In the Republican debates, the would-be commander-in-chief didn’t know what the nuclear triad was. He has no knowledge of or interest in legislative procedure.
The CEO president issues memos of what he wants done to the co-equal legislative branch and just expects them to take care of it, as he would his underlings in the private sector. He probably had to watch “I’m Just a Bill” on YouTube for the basics on how a bill becomes law.
LeTourneau observes:
So the real estate mogul from New York who didn’t know things like what happened with immigration reform in 2013 did know that President Obama officially returned Mount McKinley to its original name, Mount Denali. Trump wanted to reverse that action, but had no clue why the people of Alaska would object.
What that tells me is that Trump focused like a laser beam on what Obama accomplished—even to the point of noting that he renamed Mount Denali. But just as with things like Obamacare, the Paris Climate Accord, and the Iran nuclear agreement, he didn’t bother to learn anything about the actual policies. He simply cataloged them and became obsessed with undoing them, just as Ta-Nehisi Coates suggested.
He doesn’t know much, but somewhere in his lizard brain he’s filed away odd factoids like that. It’s “an itemized list of Obama’s accomplishments” and he’s “made the negation of Obama’s legacy the foundation of his presidency,” LeTourneau writes.
He has no governing philosophy other than getting even. I re-read Obama’s 2011 White House Correspondents’ Dinner speech and remember the reality star’s stone-faced scowl all the way through it. Sadly, it’s actually plausible that our sitting president ran for office to get revenge on Obama — both for winning the presidency in spite of his opposition and then for poking fun at him afterwards.
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