* It’s obvious to all but hard-core, Trump deplorables that the first 100 days of the Trump Administration have been awful by any unspun, meaningful criterion. We won’t count the ways–from legislative false starts to foreign policy faux pas, but a recent comment by syndicated columnist Nicholas Kristof really dug deep. He said that Trump has had the worst beginning of any president since William Henry Harrison. For the record, Harrison died a month after his inauguration.
* The bad–but hardly surprising–news is that President Donald Trump has endorsed an off-shore, oil-drilling strategy. It’s called, unsurprisingly, the America First Offshore Energy Strategy. It’s an executive order that would, among other things, reverse bans in the Gulf of Mexico, site of the disastrous BP oil spill of 2010.
The good news is that it could take years to implement, maybe more years than the Trump Administration has in office–four or less. The Interior Department will have to conduct a review. And industry demand for more oil leases is obviously low these days.
* Troubling that Trump would have invited Philippine thug-President Rodrigo Duterte for a White House visit. No less concerning is that he was winging it. Both the State Department and the National Security Council were caught off guard by Trump’s invite. But maybe he ran it by Jared and Ivanka–close enough.
* Speaking of winging, hardly reassuring to hear that Nikki Haley, the outspoken U.S. ambassador to the U.N., has largely been going it alone when commenting on foreign policy issues. From military strikes on Syria to sanctions against Russia.
Now we learn that the State Department officially frowns on the practice and has finally told Halley’s aides to make sure to clear her public remarks with Washington first. It’s beyond disturbing that this wasn’t hashed out during the transition period, a likely reflection of the foreign-policy and federal-government inexperience of both Halley and the man who has been ceding her the spotlight, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson.
* The president recently referred to North Korean leader Kim Jong Un as a “smart cookie” and “under the right circumstances” would be “honored” to meet with him. Maybe Trump likes the prospective juxtaposition. Next to the fat kid with a bad haircut, he looks nearly normal.
* We know political partisanship is beyond rancor right now, and some partisans and media sources are admonishing us for not being more open minded. Cable news and online forums are, as we know, often off the charts. It’s what they do. Divide and go bonkers. But, for the fun of it, I compared the takes on the Trump tax plan by the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, two establishment pillars, albeit ideologically different. But not exactly BuzzFeed and Breitbart.
“The skimpy, one-page tax proposal his administration released Wednesday is, by any historical standard, a laughable stunt by a gang of plutocrats looking to enrich themselves at the expense of the country’s future.”–NYT.
“The White House rolled out its tax principles, investing new energy in the first serious reform debate in 30 years.”–WSJ.
* Like most prognosticators, statistician/odds-maker Nate Silver, of the well-regarded FiveThirtyEight.com, didn’t pick the winner last November. And as with many pundits, he hasn’t gotten over it. He’s still tweeting that FBI Director James Comey cost Hillary Clinton the presidency. “It’s a fairly open-and-shut case,” he says.
There’s a really good chance he’s 100 percent correct.