Carl Sagan more than once quipped that they all laughed at Christopher Columbus, and they all laughed at Einstein, and they all laughed at Thomas Edison… but they also all laughed at Bozo the Clown. Then he’d pause and let that sink in. He who breaks all the rules and introduces something entirely new is not necessarily a genius. He may be a fool. Don’t be fooled by the chatter and hype. Don’t make snap judgments. Wait. These things will sort themselves out. Wait for the genius. Or wait for the fool. Be patient.
The wait is over. Republicans waited for Donald Trump’s genius to emerge. They wanted Donald Trump’s genius to emerge, and told the nation that Donald Trump’s genius would be obvious soon, or pretty soon, or soon enough. Now they know they didn’t get Einstein. They got Bozo the Clown:
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) told President Trump in a conversation Monday that the Senate will not be moving comprehensive health care legislation before the 2020 election, despite the president asking Senate Republicans to do that in a meeting last week.
McConnell said he made clear to the president that Senate Republicans will work on bills to keep down the cost of health care, but that they will not work on a comprehensive package to replace the Affordable Care Act, which the Trump administration is trying to strike down in court.
McConnell told him that joining the court fight to immediately eliminate all of the Affordable Care Act without a plan for what comes next was not a stroke of genius. That was political suicide, and he and the rest of the Republican senators were not feeling particularly suicidal. Democrats control the House. The math is all wrong now. And Trump finally got that last part:
After getting the message from McConnell, Trump tweeted Monday night that he no longer expected Congress to pass legislation to replace ObamaCare and still protect people with pre-existing medical conditions, the herculean task he laid before Senate Republicans at a lunch meeting last week.
“The Republicans are developing a really great HealthCare Plan with far lower premiums (cost) & deductibles than ObamaCare,” Trump wrote Monday night in a series of tweets after speaking to McConnell. “In other words it will be far less expensive & much more usable than ObamaCare. Vote will be taken right after the Election when Republicans hold the Senate & win back the House.”
The Republicans will not win back the House. He’s off the hook. Even if the courts strike down the Affordable Care Act in its entirety, not likely but quite possible, he can say it’s not his fault the Republicans have no plan for what comes next. Why would they even bother? Those damned Democrats would shoot it down anyway. But of course all of this makes Trump and the Republicans look like jerks. Republicans are now hoping the court challenge fails. Trump may hope it fails too. They have no replacement plan now and won’t have one for almost two years from now, if they come up with one of them at all. At the moment they plan to have a plan.
That’s Bozo the Clown territory, and it all started with this stroke of genius:
Trump blindsided GOP senators when he told them at last week’s lunch meeting that he wanted Republicans to craft legislation to replace the 2010 Affordable Care Act.
The only heads-up they got was a tweet from Trump shortly before the meeting, saying, “The Republican Party will become ‘The Party of Healthcare!'”
What? They panicked, but now they’ve fixed that problem. But they do have a clown on their hands:
President Donald Trump said Tuesday that he is “100 percent” prepared to shut down the U.S. border with Mexico to block an influx of migrants.
“If we don’t make a deal with Congress, the border’s going to be closed,” he told reporters in the Oval Office. “100 percent.”
At almost the same time, less than two miles down Pennsylvania Avenue, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., said that might be a financial disaster for Americans.
“Closing down the border would have potentially catastrophic economic impact on our country, and I would hope we would not be doing that sort of thing,” McConnell said, noting that he agrees with the president that there is “a border crisis.”
But still, Trump will see reason here, as he does now and then:
McConnell also said Tuesday that he and Trump now see eye to eye on waiting until after the 2020 election to work on health care legislation following Trump’s promise to move earlier. McConnell had balked at that idea. And last week, Trump quickly retreated on two of his own budget proposals – cuts for the Special Olympics and Great Lakes restoration – after hearing criticism from GOP members of Congress.
Don’t worry. The many good and sensible Republicans will keep Trump from doing anything too stupid. But that was hard work:
President Donald Trump’s senior economic aides are scrambling to impress upon him the potentially dire economic costs of his threat to shut down the U.S.-Mexico border, according to two people familiar with the matter.
Both Kevin Hassett and Larry Kudlow, the president’s top economic advisers, have shared papers and data with Trump over the last 36 hours, illustrating the way economic growth could slow even if the president shut down the border for just one day – not to mention the effect on the flow of goods, raw materials and the U.S. supply chain.
Inside the White House, officials frantically spent the day searching for ways to limit the economic impact of shuttering the border, according to two senior administration officials and one Republican close to the White House. One possibility involved closing the border to cars but allowing commercial trucks to continue to pass through. Officials stressed, however, that no final decisions have been made.
The White House resident genius is still working on all of this, with friendly reminders:
The U.S. auto industry is particularly concerned, facing not only the prospect of a border closure, which would limit the import of essential automobile parts, but also potential tariffs on foreign car imports.
“Within a week, we’d have most of the U.S. auto industry shut down,” said Kristin Dziczek, an expert on the economics of the auto industry at the Center for Automotive Research, a nonprofit think tank based in Michigan.
Everyone wants to say something about this:
Senior officials at Trump-aligned outside industry groups have also privately reached out directly to the White House to stress their concerns, according to a person familiar with the matter. They’ve encouraged White House officials to make the case directly to the president that a border closure could undermine the positive economic headwinds that are so central to Trump’s reelection message.
Neil Bradley, chief policy officer at the Chamber, told reporters Tuesday afternoon that the business group was among those who had expressed concern directly to the White House about Trump’s threat to close the border.
Trump hears it all, but he’s found a way to ignore it all:
The president put the onus on Congress to reach an immigration deal. “If we don’t make a deal with Congress, the border’s going to be closed, 100 percent,” he said on Tuesday afternoon.
And that will be their fault and not his fault at all. Everyone knows this.
No one knows this. He does keep being a Bozo:
More than 18 months after a devastating hurricane slammed into Puerto Rico, President Trump continues to publicly attack the island’s leaders and oppose federal aid efforts, a fixation that could hurt his reelection chances in Florida.
On Tuesday, Trump accused Puerto Rican politicians of gross incompetence and corruption, saying on Twitter that they “only take from the USA.” White House spokesman Hogan Gidley echoed those comments during an interview with MSNBC, referring to Puerto Rico, a U.S. territory, as “that country.”
Trump’s attacks are likely to get the attention of thousands of Puerto Rican voters whose growing numbers in Florida could be pivotal in 2020, said Susan MacManus, a University of South Florida political scientist.
“This is a state where elections turn on less than one-half of 1 percent,” she said. “And the largest cache of new voters is in that community. Why is he picking this fight now?”
This is not genius:
Trump’s path to reelection would narrow significantly if he does not win Florida, home to more than 1 million U.S. citizens from Puerto Rico. The Puerto Rican population, which is heavily concentrated in Central Florida, has grown significantly in recent years, as the island has been hit with a one-two punch of economic turmoil and debilitating hurricanes.
What was he thinking? That question comes up more and more often now. Aaron Rupar reported this:
During an Oval Office event with NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg on Tuesday afternoon, President Donald Trump either lied or got confused about where his father was born, admitted that closing the border with Mexico will be economically harmful to the US (but threatened to do it anyway), pushed a baseless conspiracy theory, and repeatedly struggled to say the word “origins.”
Oh, and he urged Congress to “get rid of judges” who are making it harder for his administration to summarily deport migrants – a position in tension with the idea that the United States is a nation of checks and balances that respects the rule of law.
Even by Trump’s standards, it was a troubling performance.
A lot of it was nonsense too:
Trump began by threatening to close the border with Mexico as soon as this weekend, but urged Congress to “meet quickly and make a deal” before he has to do it.
“What we have to do is Congress has to meet quickly and make a deal. I could do it in 45 minutes,” he said. “We need to get rid of chain migration, we need to get rid of catch and release, and visa lottery, and we have to do something about asylum, and, to be honest with you, we have to get rid of judges.”
No one knew what he was talking about. He was just talking. And there was this:
When a reporter got around to asking Trump about NATO, the president launched into his usual talking points about how Germany doesn’t spend enough on defense. But in a ridiculous twist, Trump suggested he has warm feelings for the country because his father, Fred Trump, was born there.
“My father is German, was German,” Trump said. “Born in a very wonderful place in Germany.”
Fred Trump was born in New York City in 1905 and pretended he was Swedish. That’s all on record. That was odd, and there was the conspiracy. Trump rambled on and on about the Mueller investigation. He’d been set up. He’d been set up from the beginning and Mueller should have looked into that. Someone should look into that now. This had been a plot to bring him down, so look at the “oranges” of the investigation. He meant “origins” not “oranges” and used the one word for the other again and again.
Kevin Drum saw this:
Today President Trump tried three times to say the word “origins” but instead said “oranges” and said that his father was born in Germany, not New York City, and complained, in a speech being televised on CSPAN, that he had to be careful because someone was probably going to leak what he said to the media. In the same speech, he warned Republicans to be “more paranoid” because he “doesn’t like the way the votes are being tallied.” And he said about wind farms, “They say the noise causes cancer.”
But don’t worry. His mental state is just fine – nothing to see here.
Right! He’s a genius and all this has been carefully planned and flawlessly executed, in order to… something. Don’t ask. Whatever it is must be pure genius too. Or, alternatively, he’s now searching for words, and now he cannot remember simple facts about his own family and his own life – what he said and deeply believed a week ago, that he now says he doesn’t believe, and denies he ever said, even just a week ago, and sometimes an hour or so ago. His cognitive functions are failing – the Alzheimer’s thing of course. But there is a third possibility. They all laughed at Christopher Columbus, and they all laughed at Einstein, and they all laughed at Thomas Edison… but they all laughed at Bozo the Clown too. Which is it? We may have the clown.
Just Above Sunset 