The normal rule is that newly elected leaders enjoy a honeymoon period in which they are sized up by media pundits and voters. There was never a honeymoon for Donald Trump. He began his presidency on day one with a divorce which has become ever more acrimonious.
Trump spilt America because he threw away the establishment playbook. He won the White House with the sort of invective and insult no modern politician had ever dared voice. The rule has always been to cover your real feelings and say whatever is needed to win voter support. The defeated Hillary Clinton was a master at being all things to all men. And ordinary Americans had had enough of the mealy-mouthed politics she epitomized.
They gave the Oval Office to the candidate who promised to break the paralyzed and failing bipartisan political system. But from the get-go, the defeated establishment howled in anger. Never can a new incumbent have taken office with so many attack dogs already howling at his heels. The Washington media, so used to being coddled and sweet-talked by successive administrations, was outraged. This turned to fury when Trump and his people made it clear that they were going to cut out the White House press pack and send out their message via Twitter.
Trump put Mike Pence on the ticket with him because he clearly believed the Indiana governor would help him mend fences with the Republican establishment which he had so insulted and humiliated as he knocked down one favored Republican son after another in the primaries. Yet the Pence ploy has not worked. The Republicans now control both congressional chambers. They had long opposed Obamacare. Trump had campaigned on a promise to scrap it. Yet when his American Health Care Act was presented to the House of Representatives, it failed. The defeat of Trump’s first piece of legislation was a humiliation not least because the president had boasted of his deal-making talents and expressed his unwavering certainty that the bill would be passed.
Only two months into his term, Trump is wounded. It is hard not to think that for the establishment, including the Republicans on Capitol Hill, this is in fact payback time. Just for good measure there are investigations into links between Trump and many in his administration with Russia. He lost his first National Security adviser Mike Flynn after Flynn accepted that he had omitted details of his contacts with Russia’s US ambassador. Now the Senate Intelligence committee is to quiz Trump’s son-in-law and close aide Jared Kushner over his Russian links. Other allegations are surfacing, such as the vice-president’s apparent use of a private email server, something for which the FBI investigated Hillary Clinton.
It is beginning to look as if the establishment really is setting out to destroy the Trump presidency in any way that it can. Trump is an alien in the body politic and that body wishes to expel him. The squabbling politicians from both sides are uniting to do the deed. But there is surely a danger that in demolishing the Trump White House, they are also going to cause further damage to their already tarnished reputation and no less crucially, dishonor the office of president. Most tellingly, on Capitol Hill it seems that the democratic presidential choice made by American voters is not considered important.
