Old habits die hard

As an emboldened Trump reaches for historic triumphs in hopes of bolstering his party’s prospects in November’s midterm elections, he finds himself repeatedly stymied by his old patterns of chaos and contradiction.

  

Correction: he's reaching for historic triumphs in hopes of garnering more attention, praise and awards. He doesn't give a shit about his party aside from the fact that if they lose the House in November, he knows he's going to be impeached. He's stupid in many ways, but he's smart enough to know that.

Trump’s agenda has been undermined by mixed messages and internal squabbles from within his administration — all compounded by the president’s own lack of discipline and his inconsistent ideology.

“It’s very, very volatile,” said Thomas Wright, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. “Normally, there are different factions, and they both fight within the bureaucratic process for their viewpoints . . . but this is much more freewheeling, and the most volatile person is the president.”

[...]

Amy Zegart, co-director of the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University, said “the one consistent policy that Trump seems to have is that America is getting a raw deal in the world, but how to address that raw deal varies day to day and hour to hour. It is enormously important to have message discipline, and this administration is fundamentally unable to have it.”

Let me make a stand right here. Trump also doesn't give a shit about America getting a raw deal. It turns out that he was in the sights of the Russians back in the late 80s as a rube who could possibly be played and put into the White House, and for his part of the bargain, he was going to get valuable property in Moscow where he could create the tallest building in Europe and stick his name on it. When will reporters figure out that this man cares for nothing but his own aggrandizement?

 ...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.