Tag Archives: White House

national news

Serenity belies tempest in this building

Take a look at this picture. You know what it is. It’s one of the seats of power in our nation’s government.

I snapped this picture of the U.S. Capitol Building in mid-June on our final full day in Washington, D.C., where my wife and I visited our niece and her husband. The sun was setting and the building looked so very serene. The four of us had enjoyed a final dinner together and we were enjoying a quiet evening in one of the nation’s most thrilling cities.

The picture belies a fascinating truth about the place. It is full of tumult, chaos, tempestuousness, anger (that borders on hatred) and contentiousness.

It was hard for me in the moment to think that the atmosphere under that magnificent dome could get any angrier. Silly me. It has. It’s burning white-hot, even as members of Congress have vacated Washington for their lengthy end-of-summer recess.

Members of the Senate and the House have fanned out across the land and around the world. Some of them have come back to their House districts and their states to, oh, do some “constituent service work.” Others have jetted off on those “fact-finding junkets” to ostensible worldwide trouble spots in, let’s say, Fiji, Monaco or the Mexican Riviera.

The president of the United States is quite possibly finding himself in some serious trouble. A special counsel reportedly has impaneled a grand jury to collect evidence related to that “Russia thing” that caused the president to fire an FBI director.

Members of Congress are being whipsawed by the political forces that are pulling them apart. The debate that goes on in this building is going to reach a crescendo — eventually. How it concludes remains anyone’s guess.

I felt like sharing this picture with you today as we all ponder the proverbial gale-force winds that are going to rock the Capitol Building in the weeks, months — maybe years — to come. They also are going to pound that building at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue.

It’s where the president and his family currently reside. It’s the place the president supposedly referred to as a “real dump.” It’s no such thing. However, the White House — as well as the Capitol Building — will have to withstand some mighty ferocious forces.

Thus, the serenity you see in the picture here is a disguise.

national news

If only Trump weren’t so critical of others

I am a bit reluctant to say anything critical about Donald J. Trump taking a vacation.

He’s the president of the United States. He’s never “off the clock.” He travels with a personal aide who carries the nuclear launch codes. His family is protected 24/7 by Secret Service agents. The president is merely a phone call away from being briefed on any crisis that erupts without warning. He’s got stay on his toes at all times. Be nimble. Be ready to react and respond.

The president is never not the president, even when he is relaxing with his family and friends.

I’ve defended presidents of both parties for as long as I can remember over criticism of their vacations.

Then again …

This president has popped off incessantly about vacations. He tweeted something critical in 2011 about President Barack Obama taking time off from the rigors of his office. Trump stated via Twitter: “@BarackObama played golf yesterday. Now he heads to a 10 day vacation in Martha’s Vineyard. Nice work ethic.”

Sheesh, man!

He has said publicly that successful businessmen and women don’t need vacations. Their work should be their relaxation, he has said.

However, he’s taken plenty of time away from the office during his still-brief time as president. Much of that time has been spent at his Florida resort and at his club in New Jersey.

As The Associated Press reported: “Don’t take vacations. What’s the point? If you’re not enjoying your work, you’re in the wrong job,” Trump wrote in his 2004 book, “Trump: Think Like a Billionaire.”

Read the AP story here.

So he’s going to flout his own advice. He’s going to fly to his private golf club in New Jersey for 17 days. It’s a good thing, too.

Repair crews are going to fix the heating and air conditioning system at “the dump” where he lives during the week, meaning the White House.

national news

Compare two presidents’ view of White House

Oh, for a momentary flashback to a time when the president of the United States would express reverence for the People’s House.

I came across an essay that President Barack Obama wrote about the White House. He penned it in 2013, less than a year after his re-election. It’s worth looking at today in light of a remark that his successor, Donald J. Trump, reportedly made to some golfing buddies at a club the president owns in New Jersey.

Trump called the White House a “real dump,” explaining to his pals that’s the reason he spends so much time away from there on the weekends.

I prefer to reflect on Obama’s essay, which you’ll find here.

The former president wrote this essay to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the Gettysburg Address, which President Lincoln delivered in 1863 at the site of the horrific Civil War battle. Obama wrote, in part: “I linger on these few words that have helped define our American experiment: ‘A new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.’”

That is what living in the White House is all about. The structure pays tribute to the struggles that have built our great nation. Barack Obama clearly understood its meaning. Donald Trump does not.

national news

White House ‘A real dump’? Why, I never …

This story might not amount to much over the long haul, but for the moment it has legs and it is beginning to scamper onto TV news reports.

Donald John Trump reportedly told members of his posh New Jersey golf club that one reason he spends so much time away from his Washington, D.C., residence is because the White House is “a real dump.”

By the way, the picture attached to this post is of my wife and yours truly this past June standing in front of the “dump” that reportedly drew the president’s derision. Honestly, it looked quite lovely to us.

The president has spent a lot of time while in office at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida. I’ve never seen it, but I hear it’s quite posh. It’s full of glitz and glam. It’s got lots of fancy chandeliers and solid-gold fixtures. It’s quite decadent, or so I’m led to believe.

Same for the president’s Trump Tower apartment in Manhattan and for his New Jersey golf club, where he told club members about his digs at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.

The White House doesn’t measure up to Trump’s standards — allegedly!

I guess perhaps the president doesn’t grasp that it’s not his house. It’s our house. Yours and mine, dear reader. Yeah, the president is an American citizens, so he has a bit of buy-in, too. He doesn’t grasp the history associated with this structure or the fact that it stands as the symbol of the exalted office that Trump now occupies.

The president is merely a tenant there, along with first lady Melania Trump and their son, Barron.

The Trumpkins across the land will ignore this impertinent utterance. Imagine, though, for just a moment this hypothetical scenario: What might the reaction be if, say, Barack H. Obama had said such a thing about the People’s House?

Well, the current president gets a pass because he “tells it like it is.”

Actually, he has just offended millions of “homeowners” who take pride in the White House and who appreciate and understand what it means to citizens of the greatest nation on Earth.

national news

Trump channeling Nixon?

The Washington media chatterers keep making comparisons between Donald John Trump and Richard Milhous Nixon.

They note certain symmetry between the two presidents of the United States. President Nixon became involved in covering up the Watergate break-in just days after it occurred. How do we know that? It was all tape-recorded. Trump, meanwhile, is now being accused of covering up his own involvement with Russians who reportedly meddled in our 2016 presidential election.

The difference between the men’s conduct, though, is stark in one important aspect. Nixon got into trouble near the end of his first term; he would be re-elected in a landslide in 1972, and then the crap really hit the fan. Trump has been president only for a few months; he still has years to go before the end of his current term — and the crap is beginning to hit the fan already.

I am not going to predict that Trump’s presidency will end the way Nixon’s did. The lies, dissembling, the switching of stories, the dramatic and drastic personnel changes at the highest levels of executive governance all are beginning to alarm many of us.

John Kelly stepped with both feet into this maelstrom when he became the new White House chief of staff this week. He scored a big victory in his first hours on the job by getting communications director Anthony “Mooch” Scaramucci booted out of the White House. Whether that initial move portends better days, weeks and months ahead at the White House remains a gaping, open question.

The Nixon comparisons only are going to mount with every revelation that is revealed. As Ruth Marcus notes in her Washington Post column, the White House is imploding.

It’s almost impossible for me to grasp the notion that all of this is happening at the very beginning of Donald Trump’s term as president. What in the world lies ahead?

national news

‘Like any father … ‘

Sarah Huckabee Sanders needs to get a grip on this indisputable fact: The man she serves as White House press secretary is not your ordinary, run-of-the-mill parent who loves his children.

Donald John Trump is the president of the United States. So, when the press aide says the president was helping his son with public remarks to the public about a controversial meeting “like any father would,” she sets aside the fact that Trump is not like “any father.”

Sure, the president is still a father and a grandfather.

Sanders’s comment deals with questions into whether the president helped his son, Donald Trump Jr., craft a misleading statement about the nature of his meeting with a Russian lawyer who invited Don Jr. to meet with her because — allegedly — she had some dirt on Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Trump’s role as a parent in this context has been eclipsed — for better and/or worse — by his role as president of the United States, the head of state of the greatest nation on Earth.

He ain’t just “any father.”

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What? It’s only been 193 days?

One hundred ninety-three days ago, Donald John Trump Sr. placed his hand on a Bible and took an oath as president of the United States.

Is it me or does it seem like an eternity? Why does it seem as though we’ve endured this man’s fumbles and foibles for an interminable length of time?

I’m wondering how the nation will be able to suck it up for the next nearly four years.

The White House chaos is exhausting even for those of us out here, hundreds of miles away. How does the president of the United States manage to keep his head in the game? How in the world does his staff cope with the utter pandemonium that pervades virtually every action within the White House?

It has only been 193 days? I’m worn out already. I need to catch my breath, get my second and third winds, and trudge on watching this drama continue to play out.

business news, national news

‘Economy is doing so well’

Donald John Trump is rightfully happy with the state of the national economy.

The stock market is setting records. Joblessness is low. More jobs are being added to non-farm payrolls. Consumer and business confidence is high.

That’s all great, Mr. President.

The president talked about all of that today as White House chief of staff John Kelly reported for work on his first day in the West Wing.

Here’s the deal, though. The trend the president cited is a continuation of the “mess” he supposedly inherited when he took over this past January from Barack H. Obama.

Didn’t the one-time Republican candidate for president trash the daylights out of President Obama’s stewardship of the nation’s economy? Didn’t he cite sluggish GDP growth as part of that so-called “mess”?

I’ll give the president credit, though, for a recent Commerce Department report that ticked up GDP growth a bit past its original estimate. For that, the president can take some measure of credit.

I just find it curiously ironic that one president’s economic “mess” becomes another president’s economic “miracle.”

national news, political news

Great start, Gen. Kelly!

Donald John Trump Sr. welcomed new White House chief of staff John Kelly to his post this morning.

The president predicted that Kelly would do a “spectacular job” in the West Wing. I’m going to presume a bit here, but it looks as though the new chief of staff is off to a rip-roarin’ start.

Within hours of being sworn in, Kelly got the president to give White House communications director Anthony “Mooch” Scaramucci the heave-ho — 10 days after Trump hired him!

There’s no nice way to say this, but Mooch conducted himself like a maniac in his White House job. He has no comparable experience that would have commended him for the job and, oh brother, it showed.

Kelly brings an entirely different skill set to his chief of staff job, which he assumed after Reince Priebus got the axe this past week. Kelly is a retired Marine Corps general; he has 45 years of service in the military; he is a combat veteran — and a Gold Star father, having suffered the terrible tragedy of losing a son in combat in Afghanistan.

The president’s prediction of a “spectacular” performance by his new chief of staff was delivered quickly by the new guy.

Gen. Kelly has a long, steep mountain to climb before completing the task of converting the White House from an Animal House into a “fine-tuned” center of government operations.

His first full day at his new post suggests he is up to the task.

Then again, it’s only been a day. Gen. Kelly still has yet another wildfire to control. That would be the president of the United States.

national news

What about the ‘idiot in chief,’ Gen. Kelly?

The new White House chief of staff is being described as someone who won’t “suffer idiots.”

No surprise there. John Kelly is a retired Marine Corps general. He’s been tested in combat during his 45 years in uniform. He has suffered grievous tragedy with the loss of his son who was killed in action in Afghanistan. Until this week, he led the Department of Homeland Security. Then the president of the United States asked him to take over as White House chief of staff.

Those who know Gen. Kelly say he brooks no foolishness.

That brings us to the fundamental point. The most successful White House chiefs of staff control virtually every word that flows from 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. In this age of social media, that should include the Twitter network operated by Donald John Trump.

Is the new chief of staff going to demand from the president that he — as in Kelly — has complete control? Will the chief be able to screen the tweets the president decides to fire off? Will he have veto power over the idiocy that occasionally flies into cyber space?

According to The Washington Post: “He knows how to do this: with common sense and good leadership,” said Kelly’s longtime friend, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to offer frank opinions. “He won’t suffer idiots and fools.”

Idiots and fools, eh?

The idiot in chief also is the fool in chief. They are the same man, who was elected president of the United States in a campaign that defied virtually every single bit of conventional wisdom known to politics.

He vowed to become “more presidential” once he took office. Trump has veered precisely into the opposite direction, as he has become less presidential.

It now falls on the new White House chief of staff to rein in The Boss. I’m unsure how Gen. Kelly is going to harness the most ignorant man ever to hold the highest office in the land.

It’s been said that former chief of staff Reince Priebus’s tenure is the shortest in U.S. history. If the new guy doesn’t get some guarantees from the president that he’ll actually get to take charge of the staff, Priebus’s record may be smashed in a matter of days.