Simon's Blog

As the sunrises over England is the sun setting over Donald J. Trump?   Well you would suspect that is the case if you read some of the coverage that he has been getting over the health care fiasco yesterday.   I am pretty sure that much of this is overblown as there are very few times in politics where things are so cut and dried.  Instead I suspect that this will feed the drip drip story about Donald Trump:  Talks the talk but can’t walk the walk.   He was after all the great deal maker and the first real deal he had to make he couldn’t.   Again, I am not sure how this will play with his electoral base  as I suspect few have lost faith and they could rightly point out this Presidency has only just begun – he does have nearly four years left and he has the chance to turn things around and many things can and will change.  This is true but at the moment his base doesn’t count for anything – instead he has a much smaller group of voters to worry about 435 in the House of Representatives and 100 in the Senate.  If he can’t convince half of each of these voters then he is politically dead – at the moment things aren’t looking promising.

At least he has foreign affairs where, as President, Donald Trump has a lot more power and leeway to act.  However here he still has to work with other countries to achieve what he wants to and so far this has not been very promising either.   Perhaps the lowest of a very low point was his totally disrespectful meeting with the German chancellor Angela Merkel.   Of course in private the meeting may well have been very   cordial and productive but the public image is the one that the world saw and that wasn’t good.   Perhaps it would be too critical to suggest that Donald Trump doesn’t know how to deal with a woman who doesn’t fit his idea of how a woman should look and dress.  Perhaps.

Donald Trump has not been really tested yet as the President of the United States in the way that many of his predecessors have so it would be wrong to judge him on such a small sample.  Yet it is clear that he hasn’t done anything to suggest that he is anything other than an empty vessel:  He can’t get his business through congress; his executive orders are overturned by the courts; he upsets his country’s allies on a regular basis and doesn’t seem to care about this;  his  election is tainted by the stench of Russian dirty tricks; his relationship with the media is at best patchy and has the worst approval ratings of any new President of the United States.   All in all perhaps the most remarkable start to any Presidency in the modern era.

Still what do I really know about anything?   If I was a Trump supporter today I would be hoping that D:ream were right…Things can only get better.   It is very very important to us in the rest of the world that they do.