One Year Donald Trump Grade = "D" from Pittsburgh Post Gazetter

Donald Trump has made a mess of just about everything!

Dan Simpson in the Pittsburgh Post Gazette

I planned to forgo a one-year-anniversary performance-rating column about Donald Trump’s presidency, but the poetic fillip of a shutdown of the federal government on the occasion gave me no choice.
The failure of our elected officials to pass and sign into law in a timely fashion the legislation necessary to keep the government running is simply appalling. I will not attempt to allocate blame, although an absence of capable leadership certainly is one element.

What enrages me most is that the shutdown took place on the taxpayer’s dime. We employ all these people, picking up their salaries, their health insurance, their pensions, all their lifetime benefits, and they just flat don’t do their jobs. Just about the only way to get back at them is to vote against them, but they have constructed such barriers between us and them that turning them out of office at the polls or by recall or impeachment is so hard as to be almost impossible.

So, we pay, they don’t do their jobs, and they close down the government that is supposed to serve us. It is in some ways a perfect end to the first year of Mr. Trump’s term in office.

I don’t buy the argument that it is entirely the Republicans’ fault, controlling as they do the White House and both houses of Congress. We are told, for example, that scores of Democrats are already running for president in 2020, which does not incline them to peacemaking, otherwise known as problem-solving.

Mr. Trump at this point has to be rated a total, still-building disaster, at home, abroad and in terms of ethics.

He seems to top each of his daily indignities worked upon us with something new the next day. The only way to explain what he does in quasi-logical terms is to assume that he wants to dominate the public’s attention with repeated outrages. We can be either serious, or absurd.

On the serious side, Mick Mulvaney, acting director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and therefore responsible for protecting American consumers from being cheated, has, consistent with the Trump administration’s approach to regulation, asked for $0 — ZERO — for the bureau’s budget for the quarter. The bureau also asked the federal court in Kansas to dismiss a payday-loan suit it had filed last year against four companies accused of cheating borrowers by charging illegally high rates.

As far as Mr. Trump personally is concerned, one of his most outrageous acts continues to be his refusal to let the American people see his tax returns. This is partly brazen blockage to protect himself from the investigation into Russian intervention in the 2016 election being conducted by special counsel Robert Mueller.

By the way, it’s about time that the American public saw the fruits of the Mueller inquiry. Otherwise, there will be a growing suspicion on the part of us humble peasants that this investigation has become yet another part of the Washington slow-roll game of self-protection on the part of our ruling lords and masters. I smelled a rat when former presidential counselor Steve Bannon was spared a grand jury appearance last week.

On the more amusing side, there is the $130,000 pre-election payment to porn queen “Stormy Daniels” allegedly to keep her quiet about a fling she had with Mr. Trump. If President Bill Clinton had been tangled up in such a matter, the press would have gone crazy and it might have been the end of Mr. Clinton’s presidency. But in Mr. Trump’s case, his recorded comments about grabbing women by the private parts and his reputation for boorish behavior, Americans do not appear to be much shocked by the new tale. I would still like to know where the $130,000, not chump change, came from. Was it Mr. Trump’s money or the Republican National Committee’s or someone else’s? Maybe the coal miners took up a collection.

As for the Trump-Republican “tax reform” bill, it was certainly due and must be put on his first-year report card as a plus. I favored reducing the corporate income tax to give our companies a chance in competition with European and Asian concerns. Which Americans got helped and which got hosed by the bill’s provisions may become clearer after this year’s tax returns are filed and assessed. I am suspicious, but no one really knows yet.

The confirmation to the Supreme Court of Justice Neil Gorsuch was a “wash” as far as I am concerned in terms of Mr.Trump’s performance. It was predictable that the Republicans would seat a determined conservative. What was scummy on their part was not even considering President Barack Obama’s nominee, leaving a long vacancy on the court so they could make the choice.

The Republicans’ flailing, more or less unsuccessful bid to get rid of Obamacare, which would strip health insurance from many Americans, particularly poor Americans, was petty and just plain wrong. Who could possibly want to take health care away from children and poor, disabled and old Americans?

I have written before about Mr. Trump’s pathetic, damaging record in foreign relations. He has destroyed deals and made no new ones that are any good. America’s partners in the world are either appalled or frightened by his erratic, highly personal approach to foreign affairs. The rest of us are reduced to just hoping he won’t start another war in hopes of either saving his presidency or winning a second term.

His grade for the year: D. But we will survive. We still have the states, the cities, the courts, some members of Congress and we, the pathetic media, to help put things right.

Dan Simpson, a former U.S. ambassador, is a Post-Gazette associate editor (dsimpson@post-gazette.com, 412-263-1976).