Member-only story
A Progress Report on Draining the Swamp
Readers Should Decide for Themselves How Swampy the Trump Cabinet Is
When an anti-Trump protestor held up a sign proclaiming, “Ikea Makes Smarter Cabinets,” it occurred to me that the White House obsession with “winning” every news cycle in a time of 24/7 news cycles means the factual basis for that sign is very much a moving target.
We have entered the third year of a presidency that continues the destruction of political norms begun in Mr. Trump’s campaign. Courtesy and compromise have been bad words for so long that government in the hurly-burly give and take of a healthy democracy has become an alien concept. A difference of opinion brings out the razors and brass knuckles.
Donald John Trump had never held an office in government and he set out to begin at the top. He became the latest demonstration of the fallacy that government should run like a business.
Trump reached a theoretical level of absurdity when he thought out loud of applying his business model to the national debt. He proposed that the United States of America should default on its debt for the purpose of negotiating lower interest rates. He was silent about how the U.S. dollar would remain the world’s reserve currency after that ploy.
His normal business practice as a real estate developer in New York and New Jersey was to hire…
