This week’s White House Report Card finds President Trump adding to his list of achievements in winning the Supreme Court’s OK to use military funds to help build the border wall. And chances of impeachment faded further with the lack of a smoking gun in former special counsel Robert Mueller’s testimony to two House committees.
Still, our graders did not reward the president with good grades. Conservative analyst Jed Babbin finds Trump’s foreign policy simple, and Democratic pollster John Zogby blames the president for dividing the country.
John Zogby
Grade D+
The Supreme Court has ruled that President Trump can use military funds to build about one mile of his border wall. If one brick is laid, he can campaign for 2020 as achieving another one of his promises.
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 27, 2019
More significantly, he dodged another impeachment bullet with the testimony before Congress of former special counsel Robert Mueller who, as promised, stuck to his report and offered one syllable responses to the bloviations posing as questions from both sides of the partisan divide.
Today, @HouseJudiciary is filing a petition for 6e grand jury materials where we made clear to the court that we are considering impeachment, along with other options, under our Article I powers. Congress must hold this President accountable. https://t.co/GCvkGdsGD0
— (((Rep. Nadler))) (@RepJerryNadler) July 26, 2019
The president’s polling numbers stayed at 45% – 46%. But he leads an intensely divided nation, and he is the divider-in-chief. Despite his childishly taunting tweets, he is slightly better off than his awful performance of last week.
Jed Babbin
Grade C+
President Trump had a pretty good week featuring a new budget deal that passed the House and the awful (for the Democrats) congressional testimony by former special counsel Robert Mueller. Other events showed the president still has a tenuous understanding of foreign policy.
The spending bill, negotiated with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, raises federal spending $320 billion above the limits imposed by the 2011 Budget Control Act and suspends the debt limit until July 2021. It passed the House with 132 Republicans voting in opposition to it. The bad news is Trump’s habit of big spending. The good news is that the Pentagon gets relief from the 2011 BCA’s sequestration and two years of badly needed budget stability.
The president bloviated on the Afghanistan war saying that he could win it in a week but wouldn’t because it would cost about 10 million lives. Palling around the White House with Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan, Trump said that Pakistan is helping us get to a peace deal in Afghanistan (which is contrary to fact and three decades of Pakistan’s unadmitted but strong alliance with the Taliban). Trump also offered to mediate the India-Pakistan conflict over the province of Kashmir, which Trump said he’d been invited to do by Narendra Modi, India’s prime minister. Modi denied he invited Trump to mediate and rejected the idea. Trump doesn’t understand that his personal charm can’t resolve that conflict which is both religiously based and existential to both nations.
Beautiful Welcome Ceremony at the Pentagon this morning for our new Secretary of Defense, Mark @EsperDoD! https://t.co/qYDkjmqnOd
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 25, 2019
The biggest and best development for the president was the awful testimony by Mueller before the House Intelligence and Judiciary committees. Mueller was confused and obviously unfamiliar with the investigation he supposedly ran and its report. His appearances were a disaster for the “impeach Trump” gang and left their media cohort as dazed, confused, and unsure as Mueller was.
Meanwhile, both North Korea and Iran launched short-range ballistic missiles, Iran is still holding British-flagged and an India-flagged tankers and threatening to impose a “toll” on ships going through the Strait of Hormuz.
John Zogby is the founder of the Zogby Poll and senior partner at John Zogby Strategies. His latest book is We are Many, We are One: Neo-Tribes and Tribal Analytics in 21st Century America. Follow him on Twitter @TheJohnZogby
Jed Babbin is a Washington Examiner contributor and former deputy undersecretary of defense in the administration of former President George H.W. Bush. Follow him on Twitter @jedbabbin
