The “failing” New York Times continues to be President Donald Trump’s favorite newspaper, even if he would never admit it. In a pair of Sunday morning tweets, the president blasted the paper and its chief White House correspondent, Peter Baker, for failing to list in a recent article all the accomplishments of the Trump administration.
Baker, Trump said, “should have mentioned the rapid terminations by me of TPP & The Paris Accord & the fast approvals of The Keystone XL & Dakota Access pipelines. Also, look at the recent EPA cancelations & our great new Supreme Court Justice!” [sic]
The premise of Baker’s Times article is that on many of the big promises Trump made on the campaign trail—repealing Obamacare and ending the Iran nuclear deal among them—he has not followed through and put the blame or onus for the failures on Congress.
“In the case of health care, Mr. Trump is making a virtue of necessity. Having failed to push through legislation replacing the Affordable Care Act, he is taking more limited measures on his own authority aimed at chipping away at the law,” Baker writes. “On the other hand, when it comes to the Iran deal, he has the authority to walk away without anyone else’s consent but has been talked out of going that far by his national security team. Instead, by refusing to recertify the deal, he rhetorically disavows the pact without directly pulling out.”
Baker cites other issues, such as immigration, Cuban relations, and trade, on which Trump has not fully implemented his vision or reversed the actions of previous administrations. There’s a reasonable argument Team Trump might use to rebut much of Baker’s case: that sweeping campaign promises are required to declare a vision, but once in office presidents must be pragmatic to achieve that vision.
And it’s an argument some around Trump (anonymously) made to Baker: “Mr. Trump’s advisers characterize that as the more pragmatic side of a businessman who takes maximalist positions in part to set the stage for negotiations but does not necessarily intend to go as far as he might give the impression.”
That doesn’t stand up to a lot of scrutiny on failures such as Obamacare repeal and other legislative pitfalls, though it’s more effective on the president’s recently announced decision on the Iran deal. But while Trump’s advisers make the argument, Trump’s style is characteristically to fight back. Among the achievements he notes, the confirmation of Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court continues to be Trump’s most compelling follow-through on a campaign promise (to appoint conservative-approved judicial nominees in the mold of originalist Antonin Scalia). Indeed, Kim Strassel at the Wall Street Journal has an entire column praising Trump for his appointment of Junior Scalias throughout the federal bench.
Is nine months too soon to be calling in the tab for Trump’s promises? Other presidents promised big and struggled to deliver—Reagan on federal spending, Clinton on health-care reform, Obama on closing Gitmo. But there are good reasons for this kind of examination for this president. Trump looks increasingly up against a clock, set by the 2018 midterm elections. His party may hold on to one or both houses of Congress, but they very well may not. Any erosion to their already thin majority, which seems likely, will make Trump’s life more difficult.
Lose the House and Trump could very well face impeachment. Lose the Senate and kiss those confirmations for Scalia-like judicial appointments goodbye. Lose both? It would be the end of the Trump presidency. Clear-eyed Republicans would have looked out beyond the celebrations from last November and recognized the difficulties Trump would face. But the sense of urgency for getting things done in Washington, with a healthy dose of realism, hasn’t been present in the Oval Office. Trump’s agenda has suffered for it, no matter what he may say in tweets of pique.
Mark It Down—“President Trump and President Xi have probably one of the closest relationship the president has with a head of state.” —Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, October 15, 2017
Speaking of Tillerson, the former ExxonMobil CEO refused to deny to CNN’s Jake Tapper Sunday that he had called President Trump a moron. Tillerson had been accused of doing so following a meeting at the Pentagon this summer, as NBC first reported last week. The secretary of State declined in a press conference shortly after that report came out to dispute the claim, something a spokesperson finally did several hours later.
But Tapper asked Tillerson again on Sunday. “Is it true? Did you call him a moron?”
“Jake, as I indicated earlier when I was asked about that, I’m not going to deal with that kind of petty stuff,” Tillerson responded. “I mean, this is a town that seems to relish gossip, rumor, innuendo, and they feed on it. They feed on one another in a very destructive way. I don’t work that way. I don’t deal that way. And I’m just not going to dignify the question.”
Pressed several times by Tapper to clarify, Tillerson simply said he was “not playing” the Washington game.
So why not say outright what a spokesperson had already said and what anyone might say had they been falsely accused of saying something so disrespectful of his boss? It’s a mystery only if you truly believe Tillerson definitely didn’t call Trump a moron.
Scheduling Note—President Trump will deliver an address to the conservative Heritage Foundation on Tuesday, October 17, at 7:30 p.m. ET.
Baseball Playoffs—What are the Washington Nationals missing? The Washington Post’s Tom Boswell rewatched last week’s season-ending Nationals loss against the Chicago Cubs and finds a club without the extra oomph to really want to go all the way.
Song of the Day—“No Reply At All” by Genesis
