Friday, August 18, 2017

Another of Squirrel-Hair's councils goes the way of the hula-hoop and the Edsel

This time it's the infrastructure council. Infrastructure is supposed to be one of S-H's front-burner issues, something to build a legacy on, but it's sputtering.

He had tapped a couple of New-York-developer buddies, Richard LeFrak and Stephen Roth, to lead it. They're declining to comment.

Jazz Shaw at Hot Air puts this in the context of a run of bad karma the Big Guy is experiencing right now:

He did his friends LeFrak and Roth a favor by blowing up the council on the launchpad. If he hadn’t, they would have faced a hard choice about whether to turn on Trump and follow the lead of other CEOs in boycotting his business councils or to participate and weather the liberal backlash. Tough place for a New Yorker to be. Trump solved their problem for them, no doubt in the expectation that even if LeFrak and Roth were game, other would-be members would end up declining the invitations and embarrassing the White House.
What’s it going to take to get his agenda back on track? Maybe … it never gets back on track:
The president’s top advisers described themselves as stunned, despondent and numb. Several said they were unable to see how Mr. Trump’s presidency would recover, and others expressed doubts about his capacity to do the job
Many in the White House said they still held on to the hope, however slim, that the new White House chief of staff, John F. Kelly, could impose order on the disarray even as Mr. Trump hopscotches from one self-destructive episode to the next.
“The Kelly era was a bright, shining interlude between failed attempts to right the Trump presidency and it has now come to a close after a short but glorious run,” said a GOP operative to WaPo. A senior official who’s thinking of whether to resign told Reuters, “After yesterday, it’s clear that there is no way for anyone, even a Marine general, to restrain his (Trump’s) impulses or counter what he sees on TV and reads on the web.” Expectations that Kelly would impose more discipline on Trump are one major casualty of Tuesday. It’s YOLO from here on out.

Shaw goes on to talk about the widening rift between S-H and Congressional Republicans. The most noteworthy example he mentions, it seems to me is Senator Tim Scott saying that the president has lost a significant amount of moral authority.

Oh, and, of course, the comment thread below the piece is full of the usual lame attempts by the water-carriers to distort the reality of the situation.

6 comments:

  1. Is liberal backlash the same as leftist backlash? And are liberals freedom haters too, or is it just leftists? Inquiring Kennedy liberals want to know.

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  2. Are there still liberals left in post-America?

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  3. Guess you weren't tuned in to Prager yesterday. He praised the liberals who supported his concert in Orlando yesterday and said we're A-OK

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  4. Well, okay. I did know about him getting to conduct, and what he had to say about the distinction between liberals and radicals. But I'll bet if you walked up to any nice, civic-minded professional person at a Jefferson-Jackson Day dinner in any given county and asked where he or she stood on homosexual "marriage," the minimum wage, government involvement in health care, CAFE standards, subsidization of solar energy, or "diversity" offices in corporations and schools, you'd get pretty anti-freedom, anti-God answers.

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  5. I think Kelly, Tillerson, and others are quietly and politely improving this administration. I am more concerned with this and previous "presidential pens".
    Despite their well meaning, these seem shortsighted or sometimes obviously biased times. Hopefully our legislative bodies retake their authority. Even if they have to take a "quite time" with their heads on their desk. Then maybe the legislators wake up get along with the rest of the room. Get something done. Little steps are fine.

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  6. We liberals are nothing if not live and let livers. Leftists want to tyreanize us, not liberals. We just wanna have fun, taxing and spending, you know.

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