They’re like
three fools in a tub
By:
LeRoy Goldman
Columnist
Times-News
BlueRidgeNow Online
August 20, 2017
At
34 percent, President Donald Trump’s approval rating has cratered.
After only six months in office, he has managed to turn everyone
against him except his hard-core supporters.
Similarly,
approval of the Republican-controlled Congress hovers around 10
percent. House Speaker Paul Ryan and Senate Leader Mitch McConnell
can take little solace from the fact that the public does prefer
Congress to North Korea. Trump, Ryan and McConnell’s self-inflicted
sorry state reminds me of the three fools or knaves in James
Halliwell’s 1842 nursery rhyme, “Rub-A-Dub-Dub.”
It
is now clear that the GOP has failed to govern effectively from
either end of Pennsylvania Avenue. The GOP is at war with itself and
is losing. This is what happens when you combine ignorance, arrogance
and blind partisanship.
The
three fools’ first move on the legislative chessboard was their
botched attempt to turn their oft-repeated cry to repeal and replace
Obamacare into reality. What was supposed to be a blitzkrieg
sputtered out in complete failure after months of intraparty feuding
and recrimination. The die was cast in the House when Ryan foolishly
attempted to unify his ranks behind a bill that would have denied
health care coverage to more than 20 million Americans, many of whom
were Trump supporters. It was a bill that Trump first hailed in a
White House Rose Garden ceremony and then later called “mean”
when it moved to the Senate.
Once
the ill-fated bill passed the House by the narrowest of margins, it
was up to the Senate to rewrite it. But McConnell, who wrote the
Senate bill behind closed doors with a few of his colleagues and
insurance lobbyists, doubled down on Ryan’s fatal error. He
produced a bill that would have denied coverage to millions, and one
that split his caucus between the hard-liners who would have been
satisfied with simply repealing Obamacare and the moderates who would
not countenance such a mean-spirited approach.
In
the end, McConnell faced the humiliation of being unable to muster
the 51 votes necessary to pass his bill.
Trump
then poured gasoline on the failed effort by blaming McConnell and by
threatening to let Obamacare implode.
And
that brings us to the knave-in-chief. Hardly a day has gone by since
Trump took the oath of office in which he has not been his own worst
enemy. Trump won the election because he promised America that he
would drain the swamp. But bringing the Washington leviathan to heel
is far easier said than done. No president in modern times, until
Trump, has been willing to take on what all of them believed was a
war that either should not be waged or could not be won.
Trump
should have known that the magnitude of such an endeavor would
require skills, smarts and strategy that went far beyond his lack of
understanding of what he was up against and how to vanquish it.
Instead of staffing his inner circle with savvy individuals who
understood how Washington could be brought to heel, he staffed it
with a crazy quilt collection of amateurs from whom Trump demanded
loyalty to him above all else. Instead of a staff of heavyweights all
committed to driving the diverse components of Trump’s breathtaking
agenda, he created a staff of sycophants who are now at one another’s
throats.
Even
if the Russians had never attempted to influence our election, there
is abundant evidence that the Trump administration is in state of
disintegration. But, of course, the Russians did meddle in the
election.
We
don’t yet know where independent counsel Robert Mueller’s
investigation will lead, what it will conclude, and who, if anyone,
will pay the legal or political price for wrongdoing. In the fullness
of time, we will. But we know Mueller is no fool or knave, and we can
connect the dots that are starkly clear.
We
know Trump has gone easy on Russia. We know he has refused to support
the unanimous findings of this nation’s intelligence agencies that
Russia attempted to undermine our election. We know he’s called the
investigation a “total fabrication.”
We
know he fired FBI Director James Comey because of the Russia
investigation. We know he attempted to force the resignation of
Attorney General Jeff Sessions because he recused himself from the
Russia investigation. And we know that the investigation is looking
deeply into the activities of Trump and his confidants, including
Paul Manafort, Michael Flynn and Donald Trump Jr.
Perhaps
there is no fire, but the smoke is suffocatingly thick.
In
their own unique ways, Trump, Ryan and McConnell have given a
disturbingly new meaning to Halliwell’s nursery rhyme about fools
and knaves. Rub-a-dub-dub.
Times-News
columnist LeRoy Goldman is a Flat Rock resident. Reach him at:
