Too little, too late, GOP Congress

One by one, the seasoned advisers seen as bulwarks against Trump’s most reckless impulses have been cast aside or, as Defense Secretary Jim Mattis did Thursday, resigned in an extraordinary act of protest. What Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) once dubbed an “adult day care center” has gone out of business.

Trump will enter his third year as president unbound — at war with his perceived enemies, determined to follow through on the hard-line promises of his insurgent campaign and fearful of any cleavage in his political coalition.

So far, the result has been disarray. The federal government is shut down. Stock markets are in free fall. Foreign allies are voicing alarm. Hostile powers such as Russia are cheering. And Republican lawmakers once afraid of crossing this president are now openly critical.

[...]

Meanwhile, Trump’s family members are ascendant. Son-in-law Jared Kushner is an increasingly influential interlocutor with foreign governments, such as Saudi Arabia, and was dispatched, along with Vice President Pence and Mulvaney, to the Capitol on the eve of the government shutdown to try to negotiate a spending deal with congressional leaders.

  WaPo

The autocracy is unfurling its wings.

“This is a rogue presidency,” said Barry McCaffrey, a retired four-star Army general.

“We’ve got Mr. Trump who looks, in the eyes of our allies and of the professionals in the key elements of our national security power, to be incompetent and impulsive and to be making bad decisions and to be excoriating America’s historic allies and then embracing people who are threats to U.S. national security,” he said.

He doesn't look that way. He IS that way.

The GOP owns this disaster.

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