A guest on Fox and Friends said that President Trump has spent 2017 learning the ropes, and that knowledge, coupled with his business expertise, will produce a totally different president in 2018. A minister appearing on the same program said that with the guidance of God, Trump will learn how to properly run the government. We have had plenty of knowledge of Donald Trump's prior life, how he performed in the presidential campaign, and his performance in office to learn that Trump has many traits that are detrimental to being the president of the United States. Moreover, being a business person is not necessarily conducive to being a good governmental leader, since business persons are primarily focused on making a profit. Many government programs are not expected to pay for themselves. Do we expect the Pentagon to pay for its keep?
We are just three days into a new year and already we have had evidence of how the Trump of 2017 will be no better, and maybe even worse, in 2018. His tweets on Pakistan, the Justice Department, the nuclear buttons in North Korea and the U.S., and on Huma Abedin, Hillary Clinton's most trusted staffer, have already submerged Trump in controversy. Trump slammed prior administrations for spending billions of dollars to Pakistan and getting no return on the dollar. He has claimed that Pakistan has not helped the U.S. with conducting the war on error, especially not eliminating the terrorist camps near the Afghan border. The Pakistan defense minister has fired back that Pakistan has shared information on terrorism with the U.S. and has allowed the use of Pakistani military bases for U.S. warplanes.
When North Korea's leader, Kim Jung-un, made a statement that he had a nuclear weapons button on his desk, Trump tweeted back that he had a bigger button on his desk, and it was more powerful. So when Kim Jung-un said North Korea might send athletes to the Olympics being held in South Korea and may even make use of a hot line to South Korea, Trump took no advantage of the opening. Instead, Trump re-ignited the fear that he might launch a nuclear weapons attack on North Korea without a direct attack on the United States.
President Trump's statement that there is a "Deep State" element in the Justice Department that is committed to his destruction, drew a pair of questions to Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders about how extensive was this element -- did it, for instance, involve all the employees. Sanders answered that the Deep State existed, it didn't involve all of the employees, and beyond that she couldn't define the element. Given the seriousness of the claim, the Trump administration should be duty-bound to describe the Deep State it claims exists.
It doesn't take much gray matter to understand that Trump is denigrating the FBI and the Justice Department to discredit them in the event that the Mueller investigation results in criminal charges against him. The more people Trump can convince that the investigation is a "witch hunt," the better chance he has to reduce the adverse consequences to himself.
When Trump claims the Justice Department is "his," he overturns the long historical precedent that of all governmental departments, the Justice Department must be the one that is most independent of the presidential office, as the president, including other employees in the executive branch, may become subject to criminal investigations.
President Trump has tweeted that the Justice Department open an investigation of Huma Abedin for the use of classified information in her emails. There is no evidence that Abedin's emails provided classified classified information to foreign adversaries, none the less, it is unseemly for a president to be advocating criminal investigations of those in the opposing political camp. If he can't "lock up" Hillary Clinton, he will try to do the same to Hillary's most trusted adviser.
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