- Março 26º, 2017
Dear Donald,
We’ve known each other a long time, so I think I can be blunt.
You know how you said at campaign rallies that you did not like being identified as a politician?
Don’t worry. No one will ever mistake you for a politician.
After this past week, they won’t even mistake you for a top-notch negotiator.
I
was born here. The first image in my memory bank is the Capitol, all
lit up at night. And my primary observation about Washington is this:
Unless you’re careful, you end up turning into what you started out
scorning.
And you, Donald, are getting a reputation as a sucker. And worse, a sucker who is a tool of the D.C. establishment.
Your
whole campaign was mocking your rivals and the D.C. elite, jawing about
how Americans had turned into losers, with our bad deals and open
borders and the Obamacare “disaster.”
And you were going to fly in on your gilded plane and fix all that in a snap.
You
mused that a good role model would be Ronald Reagan. As you saw it,
Reagan was a big, good-looking guy with a famous pompadour; he had also
been a Democrat and an entertainer. But Reagan had one key quality that
you don’t have: He knew what he didn’t know.
You
both resembled Macy’s Thanksgiving Day balloons, floating above the
nitty-gritty and focusing on a few big thoughts. But President Reagan
was confident enough to accept that he needed experts below, deftly
maneuvering the strings.
You’re
just careering around on your own, crashing into buildings and losing
altitude, growling at the cameras and spewing nasty conspiracy theories,
instead of offering a sunny smile, bipartisanship, optimism and
professionalism.
You
promised to get the best people around you in the White House, the best
of the best. In fact, “best” is one of your favorite words.
Instead,
you dragged that motley skeleton crew into the White House and let them
create a feuding, leaking, belligerent, conspiratorial, sycophantic
atmosphere. Instead of a smooth, classy operator like James Baker, you
have a Manichaean anarchist in Steve Bannon.
You
knew the Republicans were full of hot air. They haven’t had to pass
anything in a long time, and they have no aptitude for governing. To
paraphrase an old Barney Frank line, asking the Republicans to govern is
like asking Frank to judge the Miss America contest — “If your heart’s
not in it, you don’t do a very good job.”
You
knew that Paul Ryan’s vaunted reputation as a policy wonk was fake
news. Republicans have been running on repealing and replacing Obamacare
for years and they never even bothered to come up with a valid
alternative.
And
neither did you, despite all your promises to replace Obamacare with
“something terrific” because you wanted everyone to be covered.
Instead,
you sold the D.O.A. bill the Irish undertaker gave you as though it
were a luxury condo, ignoring the fact that it was a cruel flimflam, a
huge tax cut for the rich disguised as a health care bill. You were so
concerned with the “win” that you forgot your “forgotten” Americans, the
older, poorer people in rural areas who would be hurt by the bill.
As
The Times’s chief Washington correspondent Carl Hulse put it, the
G.O.P. falls into clover with a lock on the White House and both houses
of Congress, and what’s the first thing it does? Slip on a banana peel.
Incompetence Inc.
“They
tried to sweeten the deal at the end by offering a more expensive bill
with fewer health benefits, but alas, it wasn’t enough!” former Obama
speechwriter Jon Favreau slyly tweeted.
Despite
the best efforts of Bannon to act as though the whole fiasco was a
clever way to bury Ryan — a man he disdains as “the embodiment of the
‘globalist-corporatist’ Republican elite,” as Gabriel Sherman put it in New York magazine — it won’t work.
And
you can jump on the phone with The Times’s Maggie Haberman and The
Washington Post’s Robert Costa — ignoring that you’ve labeled them the
“fake media” — and act like you’re in control. You can say that people
should have waited for “Phase 2” and “Phase 3” — whatever they would
have been — and that Obamacare is going to explode and that the
Democrats are going to get the blame. But it doesn’t work that way. You
own it now
.
You’re all about flashy marketing so you didn’t notice that the bill was junk, so lame that even Republicans skittered away.
You
were humiliated right out of the chute by the establishment guys who
hooked you into their agenda — a massive transfer of wealth to rich
people — and drew you away from your own.
You
sold yourself as the businessman who could shake things up and make
Washington work again. Instead, you got worked over by the Republican
leadership and the business community, who set you up to do their
bidding.
That’s why they’re putting up with all your craziness about Russia and wiretapping and unending lies and rattling our allies.
They’re
counting on you being a delusional dupe who didn’t even know what was
in the bill because you’re sitting around in a bathrobe getting your
information from wackadoodles on Fox News and then, as The Post
reported, peppering aides with the query, “Is this really a good bill?”
You got played.
It took W. years to smash everything. You’re way ahead of schedule.
And I can say you’re doing badly, because I’m a columnist, and you’re not. Say hello to everybody, O.K.?
Sincerely, Maureen
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