Time for #Amendment25: Steve Mnuchin Is Not Doing His Proper Job
Must-Read: Steve Mnuchin is not doing his proper job:
Matthew Yglesias: The latest Trump interview once again reveals appalling ignorance and dishonesty https://www.vox.com/2017/5/11/15622900/trump-economist-interview: "It seems overwhelmingly likely [Trump] is speaking nonsense out of ignorance...
...[but] the performance of Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin as his squire in the interview is disturbing on an entirely different level... an enabler rather than a provider of adult supervision. Trump, ignorant, will say something stupid. Then Mnuchin, better-informed, will back him up by saying something blatantly false. The good news, such as it is, is that in Trump’s own telling, the president can be easily manipulated by foreign governments who dupe him into avoiding rash actions....
At times [Trump] appears to be willfully lying in pursuit of some political agenda, or at least repeating a half-remembered partisan talking point.... He... asserts that nobody had heard of Mike Pence before he was chosen to be Trump’s running mate... that Ireland “never raised their taxes” during the Great Recession... [that] we “always lose” in NAFTA arbitration cases... run a $15 billion trade deficit with Canada... Reagan’s 1986 tax reform proposal increased the deficit... we’re “the highest taxed nation in the world”.... It’s difficult to know where exactly misstatements end and free-associating nonsense begins....
Rather than bring Trump back down to earth, his aides stand by to enable his nonsense.... A signature moment in the interview comes after Trump gives a long, rambling answer on China in which he appears to say that he dropped his campaign pledge to designate China as a currency manipulator as part of a deal on North Korea.... Mnuchin chimes in to try to clarify the president’s rambling with an answer that’s crisp, precise, reflects well on the president, and is totally false: “Right, as soon as the president got elected they went the other way.” In reality, Chinese undervaluation of its currency came to an end way back in 2014....
At another point, Trump is giving a rambling answer about his tax returns and musing. Hope Hicks needs to cut in to remind Trump that he’s supposed to be pretending there’s an audit issue....
Perhaps the most bizarre exchange in the interview... [is] Trump['s] explain[ing] that he is an advocate of priming the pump through fiscal stimulus, and also suggest that he invented this term a few days ago and is surprised his interlocutors are familiar with it.... Trump himself has been using the phrase for longer than Trump seems to remember....
Last but by no means least, in Trump’s own narrative of his own presidency he’s kind of a sucker who keeps being manipulated by foreign leaders.... Trump, somehow, does not see that the upshot of this story is that he has been manipulated. Indeed, according to reports in the Canadian press, the reason the manipulation was so effective was that members of the White House staff reached out to Trudeau to tell his team how to talk Trump out of withdrawing from NAFTA.
It’s hard to know what to say about this beyond the obvious: Regardless of the topic, the president has basically no idea what’s going on. And his staff has given up on trying to bring him up to speed. Instead, they take advantage of his ignorance to try to sell him on selective misinformation—or flattery from foreign leaders—to park policy outcomes where they would like to see them...
Time for #Amendment25. Now.
