Trump Already Getting Bunker Mentality As It Is Preceived His Presidency Is Screwed Up

Trump was apparently furious that Jeff Sessions ended up recusing himself and with his team for letting him to so. In his own petulant manner, he booted Priebus and Bannon from Air Force One for the flight down to Mar-a-Lago.  And he created even more problems when he got down there with his tweetstorm accusing Obama of interfering in the election by wiretapping his campaign. As usual, he offered no evidence for this outrageous claim and it looks like it was based on an inaccurate (surprise!) article in Breitbart that appeared late last week.

With an administration that is beset by leaks from inside and outside the White House that it is unable to control, you can sense the beginning of a bunker mentality beginning to set in. There is already a belief by some in the White House, probably including Trump himself, that any of the holdover Obama appointees as well as the majority of career bureaucrats are enemies. That view of the world will create even greater pressure to try to run everything out of the White House. That was probably already the preference of Bannon. Trump probably just expected the bureaucracy would implement his vague orders and since that hasn’t happened they all must be against him.

The self-inflicted wounds of the first month and a half of the Trump presidency has already made Trump “tired of everyone thinking his presidency is screwed up”, which likely he means he will try to exert even more control which will result in even more self-inflicted errors. And he has more than self-inflicted wounds to worry about. The Russian scandal will be surrounding the administration for the next few months at a minimum. The internal divisions within the GOP are making repealing Obamacare difficult, if not impossible, although that my be a blessing because a GOP plan that does pass will probably create an even greater backlash than failing on that promise. But not being able to push through an Obamacare repeal imperils the GOP plans for tax reform because that relies on repealing the Obamacare tax increases. Another internal republican battle over the debt ceiling looms in the early fall. And the GOP in Congress are getting frustrated that Trump is really providing no leadership, leaving all the heavy lifting to them.

As his campaign promises continue to go largely unfulfilled and the internal divisions within the GOP create its own version of gridlock, Trump will get even more angry and apt to lash out. And it will probably lead him to rely more and more on his executive powers, creating even more self-inflicted wounds. And the cycle will just spiral inward, getting tighter and tighter as Trump feels more and more like his presidency is failing. It is hard to imagine that we are at this point only six weeks into his term.