It is not unusual for a president-elect to go through a “honeymoon phase” in the wake of successful national elections. It’s a time when an incoming American leader can bask in his or her victory, welcome congratulations and imagine a world of exciting possibilities before the real work begins on Inauguration Day.
In theory, Donald Trump could be enjoying his “honeymoon phase.” In practice, the Republican continues to take the bait.
Take last week for example. My MSNBC colleague Hayes Brown summarized:
Leave it to President-elect Donald Trump to take one crisis in Washington and add another crisis. As a plan to preserve the federal government through the holidays began to falter this week, Trump injected a new demand: ending — or abolishing altogether — the debt ceiling before he takes office in January.
During his first term, Trump had a habit of botching policy deals with eleventh-hour demands that made little sense, and last week’s developments suggested the president-elect had learned very little from those experiences.
A stopgap spending bill worked its way through the legislative process on Capitol Hill, generating very little interest from Mar-a-Lago — that is, until late Wednesday afternoon, when Trump published an item on his social media platform demanding that the Republicans in Congress Add a Debt Ceiling Increase to the Bill. Failure to do so, Trump added, would be “a betrayal of our country.”
About an hour and a half later, he published a follow-up piece, adding that any Republican who would be “stupid enough” to pass a spending bill without raising the debt limit “should and will be given priority.”
On Thursday, Trump repeated his demand. A day later he did it again.
Republican lawmakers on Capitol Hill initially expressed confusion — a debt ceiling increase is still months away, and the issue played literally no role whatsoever in the negotiations surrounding the continuing resolution — before ultimately expressing indifference. On Friday evening, the House and Senate passed a spending package that prevented a shutdown, with no mention of the nation’s borrowing limit.
The one thing Trump wanted was the one thing he didn’t get.
He didn’t have to suffer this shame. Actually, he didn’t have to do anything. He chose to intervene at the eleventh hour with a strange and unnecessary demand, which Republicans rejected and left Democrats wondering aloud about his mental health.
If this were a rare setback in an otherwise flawless transition, it would be easier to overlook. But the opposite is true: In the seven weeks since Election Day, Trump and his team have gone from one failure to another, part of a pre-inaugural process that can only be described as shoddy. Moreover, by some measures things are only getting worse, not better.
The obvious point of the president-elect’s fixation on his illusory “mandate” is to present himself as a mighty political titan, ready to rush to the White House without steam and the support of the electorate. But as MSNBC’s Chris Hayes summarized on Friday evening: “This doesn’t seem like an unbeatable monster at all. This seems like a pretty weak leader who is hemorrhaging political capital.”
This article was originally published on MSNBC.com
