If You Think Trump’s Summer Was a Bummer, Wait ’Til Fall Starts

"The five factors that are going to combine this fall to create a perfect storm that will drive Trump crazy and bring our nation to the brink of peril.

RICK WILSON 08.31.17 1:00 AM ET Disasters happen. Nature refuses to cooperate with the best-laid plans of kings and lesser men alike. The 3 a.m. phone call, whether it’s a foreign policy crisis, a natural disaster, or an economic challenge, always, inevitably and inexorably comes. For this president, a man with a notoriously short attention span and a singular focus on his own internal ego monster, the destruction and damage from Harvey is just one part of a perfect political storm approaching Donald Trump and his administration. There are five political elements in the fall forecast that will combine to make Trump’s first autumn in office rough going. First, the basic, fundamental problem is President Short Attention Span himself. Trump’s inability to focus for longer than the duration of a tweet will make his troubles in the coming months much, much worse. Consider last Sunday as an example. At first, he greeted the day with a few on-point messages of support for the people hit hard by Harvey. Then things went off the rails, with a logrolling promotion of Sheriff David Clarke’s book, some bleating about Mexico paying for the imaginary Wall, and a swipe at Senator Claire McCaskill of Missouri. While FEMA, the State of Texas, and tens of thousands of volunteers buckled down for recovery operations, Donald Trump was engaged in his usual Twitter logorrhea. If you thought that Trump would improve once Steve Bannon, Seb Gorka and a few of the other hangers-on were fired, think again. Trump is always Trump, and never, ever improves. Even the scripted statements and speeches where he reads from the teleprompter are done through gritted teeth, and you can practically see the mania building as he plots his next attention-whoring outrage. John Kelly’s thankless task won’t get easier. The prisoner never loves his warden, even if he obeys the rules from time to time. The White House staff will need to keep the shock collar charged in the next 10 days, as the scope of the deaths and destruction becomes clear. Second, Donald Trump’s disaster on race isn’t over, no matter how many variations of the staff-driven cleanup speeches and remarks he reads. The cat was out of the bag the moment the ‘both sides’ speech lowered the bar on presidential moral character, and it’s cracked the loyalty of his Cabinet and deeply embarrassed an already shamed and disgusted Republican Congress. As much as the Russian propaganda machine and its American fellow travelers on the clickservative right play moral equivalency games where the Old Navy anarchists of Antifa are equal to neo-Nazis, Klansmen, alt-reichers, and the rest of their white-supremacist flotsam, the damage Trump took on this is real and lasting."

(Via.).  If You Think Trump’s Summer Was a Bummer, Wait ’Til Fall Starts