When I became an executive recruiter, part of my training that was pounded into my head was that you never want to put someone into a role for which they weren’t fully qualified, because they would flounder and fall back on whatever the one thing they did know how to do — to the exclusion of everything else. So it strikes me as inevitable that Trump would go back to his roots and concentrate on being a contractor again, because he’s not good at any other part of his job. Via Talking Points Memo:
The real story here is that Trump has been operating as king or dictator for going on a year. There’s no accountability for anything. No limits, no penalties. So the demands keep spiraling. It’s one thing to say that Trump now has deputies that are 100% MAGA and offer none of the pushback or foot-dragging of his first-term team.
But this is a next step in the process. When you’ve been living the impunity lifestyle for 10 months, it grows on you. Things occur to you that wouldn’t have occurred to you before, even to a predatory malefactor overflowing with insatiable appetites. He’s shifted into new territory, like Anthony in that classic Twilight Zone episode “It’s a Good Life” who can make things and people disappear with his mind and holds a whole town in his juvenile thrall, sending anyone who hurts his feelings or make him feel bad to the cornfield.
This is, needless to say, not a good development. But it is still one that opens up opportunities the political opposition can and must exploit. He’s increasingly reckless, acting like someone who is free from any consequences or the need for support from anyone beyond his admirers.
The reality is that Trump is deeply unpopular. There have been efforts to rebrand his approval numbers as “low but stable.” And that’s true to a degree. But they’re really low, at unprecedented levels of unpopularity for anyone at this point in their presidency with the exception of his own first term. As the country dips into ever deeper levels of corruption and impulse control despotism, the opposition has to mine it for everything it’s worth.
