(CNN) — Just one of the wild actions and comments on Donald Trump’s manic Monday would rank among the most notorious things another president ever did.
By close of business, Trump had taken strides toward the presidency he’s always wanted: one of unfiltered authority flowing from the presidential Sharpie, shredding traditional institutions and providing a platform for demagoguery.
Often, the round-the-clock cacophony from the White House seems expressly designed to stifle public comprehension of each individual act planned to irrevocably change the country and the world.
This was certainly the case on a day that fulfilled some core goals of the Trump base but also helped to explain the plunging presidential approval ratings that have Republicans looking with dread toward the midterm elections.
It all started when one of the president’s former personal lawyers, now Appeals Court Judge Emil Bove, swore in another of the president’s former personal lawyers, Todd Blanche, as attorney general.
This was peak Trump. Nine years after the president asked James Comey for loyalty — as the fired former FBI chief told it — one of his ultimate loyalists was on Monday installed in a Senate-confirmed position at the pinnacle of US justice.
Blanche was with Trump in some of his darkest moments as he faced multiple criminal and civil charges before winning back the White House. Some Trump subordinates, like former Attorney General Pam Bondi, stumbled when striving to prove their loyalty. But Blanche has already demonstrated fealty — one reason his critics fear him and wonder whether he’ll act a spiritual successor to Trump’s McCarthyite lawyer Roy Cohn.
As Blanche was clapped by staff back into his agency, more of the president’s men gathered by the Resolute Desk. He was about to act on a feeling he’s harbored even longer than his quest to make the DOJ his boutique law firm.
Trump then signed an executive order aimed at reducing the number of childhood vaccines. And he administered a fresh dose of unscientific falsehoods, baselessly claiming vaccines cause autism and that little children had had inoculations the size of soda bottles poured into their bodies. At one point, he suggested that the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine could be “quite lethal” — amid a year when the US has recorded the most measles cases in more than a quarter-century. It was hard not to get flashbacks to his erratic Covid-19 pandemic news conferences.
But America’s most powerful public health official and vaccine skeptic, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., insisted: “This is what gold-standard science means.”
Moments later, another longtime norm fractured
Trump confirmed he’d recently spoken to new Federal Reserve Chair Kevin Warsh, but denied a Wall Street Journal report they’d had multiple conversations. The president has left no doubt he wants Warsh to lower interest rates. “If it was up to him, it would be different, but he has a board,” Trump said, raising doubts about the central bank’s independence.
The president also weighed in on the triumph of progressive and democratic socialist candidates in Democratic primaries ahead of the midterm elections: “We have jihadists being elected all over the place.”
The president’s latest inflammatory comment about Muslim candidates appears to herald a viciously negative fall campaign. He didn’t specify who he was talking about, but his remark came a week after Abdul El-Sayed won the Michigan Democratic Senate primary.
When he turned to Iran, the president showed how the once-intricate US foreign policy process has ceded to the wish-casting of the commander in chief who declared a war won after a few days that is now in its sixth month. And he claimed the Strait of Hormuz, an oil exporting choke point effectively controlled by Iran, is “opened now.” The Windward Maritime Intelligence Operations Center said Monday that only seven vessels had crossed the strait in the previous 24 hours. Before the war, the waterway often saw more than 100 ships a day.
Each of these examples show how Trump has degraded the institutions of US government and purged them of experts, bureaucrats and officials who don’t share his idiosyncratic worldview.
Many Trump supporters argue that he’s making good on his vow to dismantle a corrupt administrative state that has long thwarted conservative presidents. Others promote the idea of an all-powerful presidency and subscribe to legal theories that every government agency must bow to the chief executive’s vision.
Trump runs everything
In some ways, the maelstrom of business across the Oval Office desk Monday mirrors the deeply centralized decision-making process developed for years by the future president at the Trump Organization, where he was the sole source of authority. But Trump’s critics see his hands-on style as the behavior of a wannabe authoritarian and argue his hunch-driven style of leadership is a recipe for disaster.
It’s hard to make a case that Trump’s approach is working for anyone outside his most loyal support base, despite his claim in an interview with Punchbowl News last week that “a lot of people are saying I’m one of the greatest presidents ever.”
In a recent CNN/SSRS poll, only 21% of Americans said Trump’s military action in Iran had helped the US. Many analysts believe he’s led the US into a stalemate against a much weaker nation.
His crusade to dominate the Justice Department is one of the personal fixations — along with his monument-building program — that help explain why a record-high 73% of US adults said in that same CNN survey that he hasn’t paid enough attention to the country’s most important problems.
And according to polling from the health policy nonprofit KFF, an 81% majority of US adults say they are confident that MMR vaccines are safe for children. A small sector of Trump’s base, however, has long bought into the anti-vaccine movement.
Some of the institutionalists who Trump disdains warned on Monday evening that his increasingly unchecked presidency is dangerous.
“It is simply astonishing that this administration would continue to respond to ongoing measles outbreaks and the return of other vaccine-preventable diseases by playing politics with children’s lives,” said Dr. Richard Besser, president and CEO of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and former acting director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
David Axelrod, who served as a counselor to Barack Obama, told CNN’s Erin Burnett that a president’s words “can send armies marching and markets tumbling.” But they can “also jeopardize people’s health because the president has enormous sway. … It’s really, really dangerous.”
But Trump is beyond listening. Explaining his vaccine policy, he seemed both to encapsulate his attitude to unchecked power and to tempt fate.
“Nothing bad can happen from what we’re doing,” he said. “Nothing bad can happen.”
The-CNN-Wire
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