They’re like three fools in a tub

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:

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