Day 649: Trump gaslights nation about every immigration issue imaginable while only working a few hours per day and ignoring his unpopular policies
With just a week out from the 2018 midterm elections, Donald Trump is determined to shift the narrative of dysfunction and horrible policymaking by any means possible, all while working less in a day than the average American does in a morning.
President Donald Trump had about three times as much free time planned for last Tuesday as work time, according to his private schedule. The president was slated for more than nine hours of “Executive Time,” a euphemism for the unstructured time Trump spends tweeting, phoning friends and watching television. Official meetings, policy briefings and public appearances — typically the daily work of being president — consumed barely more than three hours of his day.
Trump’s work activity also reflects much more time spent on the performative aspects of the job, like signing ceremonies and media interviews, than on the actual work of policymaking.
A bulk of the president’s time last week was spent traveling to and from political rallies and campaigning on behalf of Republican candidates ahead of next Tuesday’s midterm elections. On Wednesday, which began with an 11:30 a.m. meeting with John Kelly, Trump delivered brief remarks on the opioid crisis and sat for a media interview before departing for an evening rally in Wisconsin. The rest of his day, according to his schedule, was open.
Compared to his predecessors, it’s even more clear just how little work Trump actually does.
Last week’s schedules are remarkably light on policy discussions. The president spent a little more than two hours of his week in policy briefings, according to the schedules, and he was scheduled to receive the President’s Daily Brief on just two of the five days reviewed.
Obama, by contrast, was generally booked throughout the day, according to Mona Sutphen, who served as his deputy chief of staff for policy from 2009 to 2011. “I’d say it was significantly, fundamentally a different pace of intensity of workload,” Sutphen said. Her successor, Nancy-Ann DeParle, recalled schedules packed with policy meetings — on average, six to seven hours a day, she said.
During all his downtime, Trump is trying to literally scare Republican voters to the polls. He has lied that a migrant caravan — that is still 1,000 miles from the U.S. border and may not even reach the U.S. — is carrying possible terrorists and is full of criminals. His echo chamber has claimed that the asylum-seekers are claiming diseases like smallpox, which was eradicated nearly 40 years ago. All of this has led to thousands of military troops being sent to the border — at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars — for a political stunt.
Trying to further stir the pot Tuesday, Trump claimed that he was going to end the right of citizenship for babies born in the U.S. to non-citizens. Unfortunately for Trump, the pertinent text within the 14th Amendment is unambiguous in its writing:
“All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.”
Trump can’t undo any constitutional protections via executive order or even legislation. It would likely take a separate constitutional amendment — or a new interpretation from the Supreme Court — if Trump wants the law changed.
In reality, he doesn’t care about anything other than throwing red meat to team red in an effort to drive them to vote.
These are desperate acts borne out of burying wildly unpopular GOP policy positions just a week before the midterms. .Some of these obfuscated policies include the tax cut to benefit corporations and the wealthy, a plan to gut Social Security and Medicare to pay for that tax cut as the federal deficit balloons, and the attempted stripping of healthcare from people with pre-existing conditions.
649 days in, 813 to go
Follow us on Twitter at @TrumpTimer
