The balance sheet for DJT as of early December 2017 is not favorable

I realize that a number of people who basically see things my way are giving the first ten and a half months a pretty good grade, and they've done a commendable job of applying objectivity to arriving at their assessment. Recently, National Review editor Rich Lowry, who oversaw the dedicating of an entire issue of his magazine in the spring of 2016 to opposition to a Trump presidential candidacy, wrote a Politico piece entitled "The Trump Presidency Isn't Nearly As Bad As It Sounds,"  which starts out the way one would expect a Lowry piece on Trump to start:

The president of the United States wakes up some mornings seemingly determined to convince as many people as possible that he’s unsuited to high office.

Fortunately for him, he has a Twitter account allowing him to act on this impulse immediately and without any filter.

He then coins the phrase "presidency on a separate track from his Twitter feed" and makes a compelling case for things going in a way that ought to please any actual three-pillar conservative: judicial appointments, rollback of the Clean Power Plan, and the push for a lower corporate tax rate, to name a few. But he ends on the kind of note that all of us in his camp have to end such observations on: It's mainly by virtue of great people that Trump has surrounded himself with that some good things have been accomplished.

But that piece was published nearly a week ago. Now the line of demarcation between Trump's Twitter life and the policy-level robustness of his administration is not so clear:

A series of tweets by U.S. President Donald Trump about the investigation into contacts between his 2016 campaign and Russia prompted concerns on Sunday among both Democratic and Republican lawmakers, with Republican Senator Lindsey Graham saying Trump could be wading into “peril” by commenting on the probe.

“I would just say this with the president: There’s an ongoing criminal investigation,” Graham said on the CBS program “Face the Nation.” 

“You tweet and comment regarding ongoing criminal investigations at your own peril,” he added.

On Sunday morning, Trump wrote on Twitter that he never asked former FBI Director James Comey to stop investigating Michael Flynn, the president’s former national security adviser - a statement at odds with an account Comey himself has given. 

That tweet followed one on Saturday in which Trump said: “I had to fire General Flynn because he lied to the Vice President (Mike Pence) and the FBI.” 

Legal experts and some Democratic lawmakers said if Trump knew Flynn lied to the Federal Bureau of Investigation and then pressured Comey not to investigate him, that could bolster a charge of obstruction of justice. 

Then there is a column in today's New York Times by Billy Bush, the Access Hollywood  correspondent who conducted the notorious 2005 "grab 'em by the p----" interview with Trump. Many years later, Bush looked into some allegations that Trump was doing more than bloviating during that conversation, and found some pretty detailed substantiation:

Some of what Natasha Stoynoff, Rachel Crooks, Jessica Leeds and Jill Harth alleged involved forceful kissing. Ms. Harth said he pushed her up against a wall, with his hands all over her, trying to kiss her.

“He was relentless,” she said. “I didn’t know how to handle it.” Her story makes the whole “better use some Tic Tacs” and “just start kissing them” routine real. I believe her.

Kristin Anderson said that Mr. Trump reached under her skirt and “touched her vagina through her underwear” while they were at a New York nightclub in the 1990s. That makes the “grab ’em by the pussy” routine real. I believe her.

I suspect a significant portion of the Trump base is going to see names like Lindsey Graham and New York Times and dismiss them as, respectively, a RINO squish and an organ of fake news out of hand. Let us hope that at least some, when honest with themselves, will muster some curiosity about the veracity of all this.

No doubt radio personalities who have succumbed to the raw tribalism that characterizes our age will devote today's programs to the yet another indulgence in the long-knives-of-the-'Establishment'-are-out-for-our-hero theme that makes their output of the last two years so predictable.

Yesterday, I shared a Susan Wright piece at Red State on Facebook about Vice President Pence's lame attempts to portray Trump as a man of sincere and substantive faith during a recent interview on a Christian television network. I hesitated before hitting "post," because I was well aware I was providing fodder for leftists to paint the entire right side of the spectrum in a disparaging light, so conflated has Trumpism become with actual conservatism. Also, the piece comes down pretty hard on Pence for his the way he's compromised what he's always professed to be about as a human being, and, since Pence is an actual conservative, that provides some rich material for the enemy indeed.

I haven't been over there yet this morning to see if anything is going on in the comment thread, but I know I don't regret sharing it.

Lowry, in the course of making his point at Politico, says that the laudable accomplishments are pretty much what we would have seen with a Cruz presidency. Well, yes, which bolsters the point that we could have had a fine 2017 without the social-media baggage that may well cause real trouble for the administration, and the unanswered assertions of a number of women who claim Trump is of a piece with all the lechers whose careers have nosedived in recent weeks.

No, on balance, it doesn't add up to a positive scorecard.

We chose someone whose character is accurately described thusly:

I don’t mean somebody who stumbles. I mean somebody who has built his reputation on being hateful, adulterous, and abusive, and who routinely flaunts arrogance, attacking anyone who doesn’t cater to his whims, showing absolutely no grace or self-control.

I’m talking about someone who works in profanity and disrespect for others. This is not the fruit of a believer . . .

And it's beginning to bleed over into the realm that the water-carriers want to see as impervious to it.