Catherine Rampell: When The Arsonist Demands Praise For His Firefighting Skills

"Donald Trump is great at creating problems — and then pretending to fix them.

Donald Trump has made a habit of ginning up crises and then declaring victory when he “solves” them. We in the media must stop giving this arsonist credit for his firefighting skills.

The past two weeks have been fraught with international emergencies of the president’s own making — either problems that he pretends already plague us, or those he manifests into existence. This is the best way to understand his trade-war brinkmanship with Canada and Mexico...

Source:The Washington Post with a good look at Donald J. Trump (MAGA, Florida) 47th President of the United States & 1st wannabe dictator.

If you have a paid subscription to The Washington Post, you can see the rest of Catherine Rampell's article over there. 

As my colleague Kire Schneider wrote about this last last Monday:

"As Ederik mentioned yesterday and what Jesse Dollemore talked about today, is that Donald Trump creates all these man-made disasters (generally unintentionally, I believe, because he doesn't know what he's doing) and gets leaders of other countries to make some announcement announcing that they're doing what they already agreed to do years ago, or at least weeks ago... 

My point here is President Trump when he announced his tariffs on Canada and Mexico over the weekend, got burned by that. The Stock Market took a tumble and what mostly likely happened is that his oligarch backers got on him about that and told him that he needs to retreat (or something to that affect) and end, or at least pause these tariffs. 

So what the President did on Monday was try to save his face by announcing that he he reached new border agreements with Mexico and Canada, that were already in place. And tried to take a victory lap on that. But as much as President Trump might hate this, we still have free speech and a free press in America. And Catherine Rampell and a lot of others, including The New Democrat, called him out on that." 

From The New Democrat

As my colleague Fred Schneider mentioned last Tuesday: 

"I give Catherine Rampell credit for willing to be on the same CNN panel with Scott Jennings to discuss anything with him and not just being able to beautifully (in more ways than 1) deliver her key points about an issue, but then just sit there and be able to take his garbage (to put it mildly) and just laugh it off as if she's thinking: "He can't be serious". Which is how Scott Jennings has really sounded for about a year now every time he's on CNN talking about anything related to Donald Trump... 

Donald Trump as President of the United States, (which is a big enough American nightmare right there) is like a stocker at a grocery store, who is a bit of a klutz, who just made another mess, cleans up all the apple sauce, or tomato sauce, the milk, that he just knocked over on the floor, who then cleans up that mess and expects extra credit for cleaning up his own mess, that he should've never created in the first place... 

From The New Democrat

As my colleague Ederik Schneider wrote about this last Monday: 

"Sorry, but I don't give credit to people for: 

Not jumping off the bridge. 

Not breaking into my house. 

Not hitting my car when they're parking. 

I don't give cabbies a bigger tip from dropping me off at the right location. 

When you almost create a trade war and you are just pausing that trade war, you don't deserve credit for almost blowing up your house, but putting pause on that. Perhaps you really want to look at the consequences of that. Will the insurance company be fooled. That sort of thing.

The CTV News piece is correct:America gets  0.2% of its fentanyl from Canada. So where is the victory here? How is Canada putting more of their own troops on their border with us, a victory for America? If anything, Canada with its unpopular and outgoing Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, caved. And Donald Trump takes a victory lap for not blowing up his own house." 

From The New Democrat

No offense to Catherine Rampell and The Washington Post: The New Democrat was on this line of thinking about how Donald Trump handles his own problems that he creates for himself last week. How he politically shoots himself in the foot and sees a doctor about that and acts like he repaired the damage to his own foot himself and claims to be a world class surgeon, or something. But we're glad that Catherine Rampell picked up about this as well. Her CNN appearance last week when they were talking about the President's tariffs, suggests that she was already thinking about this for her column as well. 

I don't have much to add to what Ederik, Kire, and Fred have already said about this. 

The only thing that I would add is that Donald Trump is both an incompetent, as well as a narcissist when it comes to governing. He's simply not qualified to be President of the United States as far as actually doing the job. And you combine with the fact that he has way too much overconfidence and probably doesn't trust the people around him that he should actually listen to. So as a result, he simply ends up making a lot of bad decisions. 

The North American tariffs from last week are a perfect example of what I'm talking about. But then if that's too much for you, being the narcissist that he is, he can't mentally handle ever admitting that he's ever made a mistake about anything. So after he does the political version of spilling the milk that he dropped, or the tomato sauce that he bumped into and knocked over to the floor, and unintentionally creates a political cleanup in isle 9 fiasco for himself, he looks for someone else to blame for it, (generally someone or something that had nothing to do with his own crisis) or acts like he's a some political superhero, who comes in and saves day. 

Blaming DEI for the plane colliding with the helicopter from 11 days ago, when he was already cutting staff at the Federal Aviation Administration the week before the collision, is a perfect example of looking for someone else to blame for his own faults. 

And acting like Canada and Mexico agreed to do something new, when he postponed his tariffs last week, when the fact is that both country's had already agreed to do what they announced last week... 3 years before the Mexican tariffs and weeks before Donald Trump became President again, are the perfect examples of the President simply trying to dishonestly save political face from a political crisis that he created all by himself. 

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