Sohn: Taking a President's Day measure of 'chaos Trump'

President Donald Trump finally spoke on Wednesday to condemn domestic violence during a working session regarding the opportunity zones provided by tax reform in the Oval Office of the White House in the aftermath of his aide Rob Porter resigning because his spouse abuse kept him from getting a security clearance. Trump responded to a question and said, "I am totally opposed to domestic violence of any kind. Everyone knows that, and it almost wouldn't even have to be said." (AP Photo/Manuel Balce Ceneta)
President Donald Trump finally spoke on Wednesday to condemn domestic violence during a working session regarding the opportunity zones provided by tax reform in the Oval Office of the White House in the aftermath of his aide Rob Porter resigning because his spouse abuse kept him from getting a security clearance. Trump responded to a question and said, "I am totally opposed to domestic violence of any kind. Everyone knows that, and it almost wouldn't even have to be said." (AP Photo/Manuel Balce Ceneta)

So much for anyone thinking that President Donald Trump would eventually find his footing and turn on the "presidential" switch.

Here on the eve of Presidents Day, it's fitting to take the measure, to date, of our 45th president.

Don't bother with a ruler. Chaos is hard to quantify.

Yet scattershot and chaos are Trump's measure, and if he serves a full four years - please not two terms - it could well become America's measure as well.

Absorbing the news of Trump and his White House on most days can best be compared to drinking from a fire hose.

A wise newspaper editor once remarked that reading newspapers for history was like telling time with the second hand of your watch. If you want to understand the big picture trends of our time, read magazines. But for history, you'll need to read books.

Trump, tutored on reality TV, has added a completely new "in-the-moment" distraction by making his "official" policy statements on Twitter. So for purposes of compressing a year into just a few days - second hands on the clock - consider only the news of Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday:

» The Trump and the porn star story (nice title for a country song, huh?) took a new twist when the president's personal lawyer said he paid Stormy Daniels six figures in hush money out of his own pocket not to talk about her tryst with then-candidate Trump just before the election. Monica Lewinsky just went second fiddle.

» Trump ties Congress into pretzels again over an immigration deal. Last month he said he would sign any immigration bill lawmakers sent him. Wednesday he threatened to veto bills that don't reflect his priorities, including the construction of a border wall.

» Trump's $4.4 trillion budget would add $7 trillion to the deficit over the next 10 years, and his $2 billion infrastructure plan would be financed mostly by selling some of that infrastructure (think TVA transmission lines) and from the coffers of states and cities.

» Trump's budget plan includes a proposal to reinvent the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, once called food stamps). Food stamps have given way to a credit card-like voucher that people making almost no money can use to buy fruit, meat, fresh vegetables, soda, ice cream and any kind of bread they want to eat. You may be surprised to know that in Hamilton County, only 25,852 households (49,687 people) received $6.3 million in SNAP assistance in January 2018 - about $128 per person for a month, on average. Trump wants to replace half of those benefits with a "Harvest Box" full of food preselected for nutritional value and economic benefit to American farmers. Here's the catch, that won't include fresh meat and vegetables, but rather a cache of cheaper peanut butter, canned goods, pasta, cereal, "shelf stable" milk and other products that would be "selected" by the federal government, not by the people actually eating it. What could possibly go wrong?

» Trump's pledge to get only "the best people" in his White House became a laughing stock yet again (no, Rob Porter's plural spousal assaults didn't make him the last). Another of Trump's Cabinet members was caught traveling and vacationing with his wife on the public dime but his staff altered documents and made false statements to create a pretext for taxpayers to cover her expenses on a 10-day trip to Europe last summer. Veteran Affairs Secretary David J. Shulkin traveled to Denmark and London for meetings about health care for veterans, accompanied by his wife, a small staff and a six-person security detail. Nearly half of his time away, however, was spent visiting castles and other tourist sites.

» The Trump administration's excuses about Rob Porter's unending interim security clearance are still falling apart. We seriously, seriously cannot keep up with those headlines.

Think about it: We haven't even touched on Trump's Russia chaos. These other headlines pushed Russia and Special Counsel Robert Mueller's probe way, way, way down the list.

In fact, these other fire-hose scandals almost pushed out the most stunning news of all - the testimony Tuesday of the nation's top intelligence chiefs before the Senate Intelligence Committee. But this you had watch to get the full scare treatment.

The spy chiefs - Director of National Intelligence Daniel Coats, CIA Director Mike Pompeo, FBI Director Christopher A. Wray, Defense Intelligence Agency Director Lt. Gen. Robert Ashley, National Security Agency Director Adm. Mike Rogers, and National Geospatial Intelligence Agency Director Robert Cardillo - were united in declaring that Russia is continuing efforts to disrupt the U.S. political system and is targeting the 2018 midterm elections. Why not? It worked well to sow discord in the most recent presidential campaign.

But then those prestigious men also said - sometimes with painful silence - that they had no direction from the president about the matter, and therefore not one of their six agencies was in charge of making a plan to block future Russian meddling - either at our voting polls or on social media.

That's Chaos Trump at work. Meanwhile, he still dithers on with Twitter, starlets (even of porn) and his national irritant - immigration.

Oh, and we almost forgot another Monday headline shocker: "Putin meets Palestinian leader, conveys greetings from Trump."

Raw Story reports "Russian President Vladimir Putin on Monday told Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas that American President Donald Trump had authorized the Russian leader to speak on his behalf."

Nature abhors a vacuum - especially one of leadership.

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