The following article by Susan Milligan was posted on the US News and World Report website May 12, 2017:
If it was the setting for a reality TV show instead of the center of government of the world’s leading democracy, the White House might be criticized for displaying too much drama. But even by the high-bar standards of an administration that has had a very difficult start, President Donald Trump and his administration have had an unusually bad week.
On Monday, fired acting Attorney General Sally Yates delivered devastating public testimony to a Senate committee, telling lawmakers she had warned the White House that then-national security adviser Michael Flynn was vulnerable to blackmail by the Russians because of lies he had told about his connections to the foreign nation. As she spoke, skeptical federal judges peppered Trump administration lawyers with questions about the president’s imperiled travel ban on entrants from majority-Muslim nations.
On Tuesday, the head of the U.S. Census bureau resigned, leaving the agency leaderless as it faces a turmoil over funding of the 2020 census. Late that afternoon, the White House announced that Trump had fired FBI Director James Comey, setting in motion a flurry of calls for a special prosecutor and bipartisan questions about what Trump’s true motivations were. An apparently unprepared White House struggled to control the message, with the bizarre spectacle of White House press secretary Sean Spicer fielding reporters’ questions in the dark as he stood among the bushes outside the West Wing.
On Wednesday, embattled Education Secretary Betsy DeVos was booed by students as she spoke at the historically-black Bethune-Cookman University in Daytona Beach. Meanwhile, on Capitol Hill, Senate Democrats slowed down committee work to nudge their Republican colleagues to move aggressively on getting to the bottom of Comey’s firing and on making sure the investigation of alleged collusion between the Trump team and the Kremlin continue. The news nearly drowned out other troubling news for the president and his party, a Quinnipiac University poll showing very low approval ratings for both Trump and congressional Republicans. And by Thursday, members of the Senate Intelligence Committee were hearing from the acting FBI director, Andrew McCabe, who pledged to let Congress know if the White House attempted to interfere with the Russia inquiry. That would be the same Senate panel that had earlier in the week subpoenaed documents from Flynn and invited Comey to appear before the committee the following week.
True, it was not the first set of challenges for the White House, which has seen its major campaign promises stymied by Congress or the courts. But the whiplash-inducing series of events has lawmakers and observers wondering: is this the week that things are actually starting to melt down for team Trump?
“This has been a very bad week for President Trump and his administration, in no small part because he took dramatic and questionable action in firing the FBI director,” says Sen. Chris Coons, D-Conn. what made it worse, Coons and others say, is that Trump handled the firing in a disrespectful manner – alienating career FBI staff – and then made the in-your-face move of meeting in the Oval Office with the Russian ambassador and the Russian foreign minister.
“I think a lot of folks in Trump’s base think pretty highly of the FBI, and the way this guy was summarily fired and mistreated doesn’t look good with his own people,” says Senate Judiciary Committee member Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I. and a former prosecutor and state attorney general.
“This was a guy who, when he was a reality TV star, showed he was willing to fire people in person, to their faces, in a way that showed his determination and strength. And this is a moment when he fired one of America’s most senior law enforcement officials by TV. And by having his private security guy walk over, in a manila envelope, a very self-justifying letter. So it was not a good week for President Trump,” Coons adds.
The Quinnipiac poll had Trump’s approval rating at a near-record low of 36 percent, with an erosion of support among his base – white men and white voters with no college degree. Nearly three out of five voters said Trump’s first 100 days were “mainly a failure” – and the poll was taken before the firestorm of Comey’s dismissal. “There is no way to spin or sugarcoat these sagging numbers,” Tim Malloy, assistant director of the poll, said in a statement.
While Trump’s earlier behavior had been met with eye rolls and outrage by Democrats and muted defenses by Republicans, the Comey firing had lawmakers and other officials and analysts referencing Watergate. The Comey dismissal was compared to the 1973 Saturday Night Massacre, when two senior Justice Department officials resigned in succession rather than follow through on President Richard Nixon’s demands that they fire Archibald Cox, the special prosecutor assigned to look into Watergate. (Cox was gone after Solicitor General Robert Bork, the acting head of the Justice Department, filled Nixon’s wishes.)
Congressional Republicans, too, are starting to feel some collateral damage. The Quinnipiac poll showed that Americans, by a 54-38 percent margin, would prefer that Democrats run Congress instead of Republicans. The gap was the widest ever measured by Quinnipiac, the poll’s authors said.
Despite having control of both chambers of Congress and a fellow Republican in the White House, GOPers in Congress have not been able to get what they want. The recent appropriations bill was a big victory for Democrats, who kept funding for favorite programs. The Senate failed this week to undo an Obama-era rule regulating methane waste, an enormous win for environmentalists facing an anti-regulatory Congress and White House. Proposals to cut taxes for corporations and the wealthy, as well as to undo Obamacare, are sputtering. And the furor over Comey won’t make it easier, lawmakers say.
Meanwhile, Republican incumbents were being heckled and badgered at town hall meetings by constituents unhappy with the GOP-run, House-approved plan to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act. The measure is not expected to pass as written by the Senate, but House members who voted for it are getting criticized for it anyway. The nonpartisan Cook Political Report last week moved its predictions for 20 seats in favor of the Democrats. Kyle Kondik, managing editor of the University of Virginia-based Sabato’s Crystal Ball, says 18 GOP-held seats are now more competitive because of the health care vote.
“I think there comes a point where, particularly on the House side, the president begins to look like a liability to members of Congress holding their seats, and at that point, a vibrant sense of self-preservation will overwhelm either party loyalty or personal loyalty to the president. And I think at this point, that is foreseeable,” Whitehouse says.
View the post here.