One of the oddities of the last week-plus is that it has created what seems like a crisis for the White House which is new and perhaps a turning point. Yet the most daunting challenge facing the White House – or the two most daunting challenges – aren’t on people’s radar at all. Or, rather they are entirely unconnected to the chain of events stemming from the incidents last weekend in Charlottesville. And the events in Charlottesville have largely pushed them off the front pages.
To start, I don’t want to diminish the important of what we’ve seen over the past week. Finding out that the President is Nazi-curious is a pretty big deal. There’s a good argument it’s the most important thing happening right now. My point is that these other messes have political and legal implications which may do more damage.
The lesser of these two, at least the less dramatic, is what remains to date Trump’s complete failure to move any substantive legislation as President. The failure on gutting Obamacare now seems to be permanent or at least as permanent as these things ever can be. I don’t trust it won’t come up again. Moreover, the failure of legislation doesn’t effect administration efforts to sabotage the operation of the law, which are on-going. But it now seems increasingly questionable whether Republicans can pass tax reform legislation either.
They don’t have a big chunk of money they were expecting to get from Obamacare repeal. Trump is rapidly souring his relationships with congressional leaders whose help he needs to pass anything. And the calendar is now working against them. Straight cuts to marginal rates might be simple enough, if what counts as ‘reform’ is dispensed with and no one cares about blowing a hole in the deficit. But even that may prove more challenging than it seems. What it all comes down to is that it is now at least possible that Republicans could end the year with no legislative accomplishments whatsoever.
That of course doesn’t even get to the big, slow-motion crisis. The White House remains bogged down in what appears to be a rapidly-moving and serious probe into whether the President and his associates conspired with the government of Russia to throw the election in his favor. That is needless to say the biggest deal imaginable. And even if that didn’t happen, there’s a more concrete obstruction probe in which the facts are much more clearly known and seemingly quite damning. Then there’s the distinct possibility that Robert Mueller will find criminal wrongdoing in the numerous cut-rate, mafia-backed and money-laundering funded projects that Trump has managed in recent years. (Statutes of limitations could end up being a real coup for Trump on that front.)
What it all comes down to is that we are now in this unprecedented situation in which corporate America appears unwilling to associate with the sitting President, even a Republican sitting President, because he’s simply too toxic to touch. Things look like they’re falling apart at the White House. And all of this, as bad as it likely is, pales in comparison to the legal and political jeopardy he faces on these other two fronts. Presidents always want to ‘change the subject’ from bad news cycles, hoping new news pushes the current unfortunateness out of the headlines. But the news likely to displace Charlottesville is in many ways worse. Continual floundering on Charlottesville might be his best political option.
