After two years of investigation, Mueller’s findings about Team Trump can be roughly summarized as follows: Too stupid to conspire. Too incompetent to obstruct.
These findings are entirely consistent with what I’ve found covering the Trump campaign and administration. I’d submit only one addendum:
Too dumb to govern.
Many Democrats are disappointed Mueller opted against charging Trump and top aides. But Mueller captured the essence of Trump. Some of Trump’s actions are hateful, some are ideological and some stretch the bounds of constitutionality. But above all, Trump is bumbling.
Federal judges have ruled against the Trump administration at least
63 times so far, an “extraordinary record of legal defeat,” The Post reported last month.
Trump routinely proposes illegal actions to top aides — the
secretary of state, the
secretary of homeland security, the White House
counsel, Pentagon officials — and they ignore him. Though Trump claimed Monday that “nobody disobeys my orders,” The Post’s Aaron Blake assembled a list of
15 instances of aides doing just that.
His advisers quit and are fired
at a record pace, leaving vacancies, placeholders and semi-functioning agencies.
He flopped in repealing Obamacare and botched implementation of his travel ban and his family-separation policies.
He shut the government down in fruitless pursuit of a border wall and managed to help
create a crisis on the border where none had existed before.
He
spews falsehoods by the thousand and
announces policies that don’t exist.
He floats wacky nominees — on Monday, Herman Cain
existing appointees.
He eschews briefing books and devises policy with a toddler’s attention span; in one emblematic episode, economic adviser Gary Cohn
reportedly swiped a letter from Trump’s desk so that he would forget about killing a trade pact.
Now Mueller has documented more of the same. Trump’s campaign was happy to accept help in the election from Russia but didn’t pull it off. Trump wanted to obstruct the investigation but was thwarted by aides. And the man who
claimed he had “one of the best memories in the world” said more than three dozen times in response to Mueller’s questions that he
couldn’t recall the answer.
The president, perhaps sensing that “too dumb to fail” isn’t a good reelection slogan, went from claiming “total EXONERATION” before the report came out to “total bull$#@!” after.
And Trump’s error-prone lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani
proclaimed on Sunday that “there’s nothing wrong with taking information from Russians” — exactly the wrong lesson of the past two years.
Does incompetence fit the definition of high crimes and misdemeanors? That’s up to the House.
I, for one, celebrate Trump’s clumsiness. His fondness for authoritarianism and his disdain for the free press and the rule of law would be much more worrisome if he were effective.
Trump, with his “enemy of the people” shtick, might talk like Joseph Stalin, but — fortunately — he governs more like Homer Simpson.
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Originally Posted by alexa
