Trump Tries Everything To Deflect From The Failure Of His First 100 Days

It is pretty clear that all of Trump's actions this week are entirely focused on distracting us all from the complete and utter failure of his first 100 days. Trump is obviously obsessed with his failures and is going to great lengths to obscure it.

It started out with the demand to fund the border wall. Of course, everyone in Congress knew Trump was bluffing and, as has become his habit, he completely folded on the issue in just a couple of days.

The tax "plan" that was released yesterday was a joke, nothing more than a one page campaign document that, for a variety of reasons I have already documented, will never see the light of day in Congress.

The revised health care plan may have pleased Mark Meadows and the House Freedom Caucus but it is still doubtful it will get past the House and, even if it does, it will almost certainly not pass muster in the Senate. The plan essentially entails the same drastic Medicaid cuts as before and eliminates the requirement to cover pre-existing conditions and provide a minimum level of coverage. But rather than mandating the elimination of these requirements, it leaves that "option" up to the individual states. In addition, the proposed bill exempts Congress from those changes. Considering the level of opposition to the prior bill, it seems hard to believe that the GOP House members are going to actually vote for rolling back the requirement to cover pre-existing conditions, even if it is "optional".

Similarly, Trump's threatened executive order to pull out of NAFTA was yet another huge bluff meant to deflect attention from his failures. Trump caved on that bluff in just a couple of days as well and now he will try to get Mexico and Canada to move "swiftly" on renegotiation.

The new trade war with Canada is, like the border war, just another deflection to convince his supporters he really is doing something on trade . Similarly, the intelligence briefing on North Korea at the White House today apparently provided very little new information but made for a nice spectacle.

Even the Executive Order on allowing states to open national monuments to mineral exploration, as bad as it is, will take years to complete the review and make its way through the guaranteed court challenges to come. His ridiculous idea to break up the Ninth Circuit is something that he has no control over and would take an act of Congress, with Democratic support, to actually accomplish.

All these actions are either doomed to failure or, at best, will take years to actually become a reality. They are solely designed to deflect from the total failure of his agenda in the first 100 days. They are the desperate flails of a failing President whose massive ego cannot accept criticism or defeat.