Donald Trump blows it

| 2:30 am EST February 9, 2018
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For all his uniquely evil scandals, for all his treasonous secrets, for all the investigations into his lifetime of crime, could it be possible that Donald Trump will be taken down by good old fashioned ineptitude? Even as Trump tries to fend off the kinds of scandals that sound like they’re from a third world dictatorship, he’s being rapidly picked apart by his simple inability to do the job well. This week has brought that into startling focus.

As of last night, the federal government has once again been shut down. Last time it was because Trump kept agreeing to different deals with different members of Congress, preventing any of them from being able to pass anything by the deadline. This time it’s because, after Trump meekly caved to a deal that the opposition party loved, a member of his own party threw a tantrum and brought the whole thing crashing down. Not only did the government break this week, the economy broke as well.

Okay, so there are wide variety of complex and sometimes contradictory indicators when it comes to the health over the economy. But most Americans equate the economy with the stock market, regardless of how tenuous that correlation may be in reality. Over the past week the stock market has suffered two different drops of more than a thousand points each, losing roughly ten percent of its value in the process. There are a number of reasons why the stock market goes down. But one of the biggest is that investors hate instability – and Trump’s flat out incompetence appears to have finally spooked them into concluding that Trump is ruining the roaring Obama economy.

So in a span of one month, Donald Trump has blown it to the point that the federal government has been shut down twice. In a span of one week, Wall Street has concluded that Trump has blown it so badly overall, it’s pulling its money out of the market. Trump’s approval rating was historically low when the stock market was booming and the government was open for business. What’s going to happen now that even those Americans who pay not attention to politics can see in concrete terms that he’s simply inept?