Trump - Governance By (False) Proclamation

The first 100 days of the Trump presidency are liable to be the most ineffectual in modern American history. He is the only recent President who has seen his signature effort go down to defeat. For Trump, that was repealing Obamacare, and despite Republican control of the House and the Senate, the effort went down to defeat without even a vote. But I'm not sure Trump even recognizes how significant a defeat that was, because he seems to believe that if he says it, it must or will be true.

The only major accomplishments of his administration so far has been to roll back Obama era regulations and issue great-sounding but essentially ineffective executive orders. The regulations were mostly taken care of by the Senate and even some of Trump's executive orders have been failures. The Muslim ban was struck down by the courts twice and hasn't really been heard about since. And many of the other executive orders will require years of rule-making and presumably court challenges before they will go into effect.

Take, for example, yesterday's executive order on H-1B visas. While it is clear the program is being abused by the outsourcing firms that bring primarily Indian workers into the US under the guise of this program, have US workers train them, and then send those workers back to India and outsource the jobs there, Trump's executive order does nothing to really deal with the problem. It merely authorizes a study of the program and then recommendations and rule-making that will take years to complete. And by having the program focus on truly high-skilled workers, it will favor the big tech companies over their smaller competitors. In addition, Trump "Buy American/Hire American" promises were pretty much nothing more than making sure existing policies were being followed. None of this will stop the "theft of American prosperity" as Trump claimed.

What's more disturbing is the sight of the machinery of the US government being put into gear into trying to make Trump's patently false statements true. It now appears that the whole Devin Nunes fiasco and the associated false charges against Susan Rice were solely driven by a desire within the White House to provide some "evidence" for Trump's baseless claim that Obama had wiretapped him. According to Ryan Lizza at the New Yorker, "The intelligence source told me that he knows, “from talking to people in the intelligence community,” that “the White House said, ‘We are going to mobilize to find something to justify the President’s tweet that he was being surveilled.’ They put out an all-points bulletin”—a call to sift through intelligence reports—“and said, ‘We need to find something that justifies the President’s crazy tweet about surveillance at Trump Tower.’ And I’m telling you there is no way you get that from those transcripts, which are about as plain vanilla as can be."

The accusations, then, against Susan Rice for "unmasking" Trump-related individuals was a lie in order to prove Trump's original lie that Obama had wiretapped him. Even more disturbing is the fact that many White House officials knew the Susan Rice accusation was a lie but simply wanted "to put it out there" to support Trump's Obama allegation.

But this kind of covering for the President's lies comes not only from the political operatives in the White House. It is apparently now coming from the "rational" members of the administration like Defense Secretary James Mattis and NSA H.R. McMaster. It all started when it was announced that a US carrier strike force was headed to the "Western Pacific", which was interpreted as a sign that the US was escalating the tensions with North Korea. The same day, McMaster said the move of the carrier strike force was part of giving the President "a full range of options to remove" the North Korean nuclear threat.

Two days later, Trump told Fox News that "we're sending an armada" to the Sea of Japan as a show of force against the North Koreans. Further escalating tensions, Trump tweeted that same day "North Korea is looking for trouble. If China decides to help, that would be great. If not, we will solve the problem without them! U.S.A." Spicer also confirmed that the carrier group was headed toward North Korea. Also on that day, Mattis again confirmed that the carrier group was in its way to North Korea and that the reason its itinerary was being disclosed is because going to North Korea required the cancellation of joint exercises with Australia that also involved that same carrier group.

Then this past Monday, Defense News spotted a photo of the carrier group posted by the Navy as it went through the Sunda Straight in Indonesia. That seemed a little odd for a carrier group that was supposedly on its way or near North Korea over a week earlier. In fact the carrier group had spent most of the last week actually taking part in those joint exercises with Australia in the Indian Ocean, not the Western Pacific. If not for the catch by Defense News, the American public and much of the public in South Korea and Japan would have assumed that the carrier group was in a position to strike North Korea, fueling heightened tensions.

Now, the administration is trying to blame this on miscommunication between the Pacific Fleet commander and the Defense Secretary and members of the administration. That is highly unlikely but frightening on its own as it is an admission that the administration has no knowledge or control over what its fleet commanders are actually doing. And if you don't believe that story, it is clear that McMaster and Mattis knew that the "armada" was not steaming toward North Korea but did nothing to contradict that impression or, more importantly, Trump's statement. They abetted his lie.

It is bad enough that Trump is a congenital liar. What's worse is the lengths this administration will go to in order to provide cover for those lies. For Trump's supporters, the executive orders sound like they are fulfilling his campaign promises, but they are not. For his supporters in Congress, they must now realize that he will create even more lies to cover for his original lies. That should not give them a warm and cozy feeling when they are negotiating with him. And for our allies and enemies, they now know that even McMaster and Mattis will cover for Trump's lies. The Russians and the Chinese certainly knew where that carrier group was and, if they knew, then North Korea surely knew as well. The real question is whether the South Koreans and the Japanese were also informed. Imagine the lack of confidence it would create if they were not.

Trump will live in his fantasy world of what he says automatically happens. But the machinery of the US government should not be forced to "prove" his lies. If it continues, it's a very dangerous road ahead.