How Trump is already failing

The economy is crumbling. Prices keep climbing. Attacking Ukraine is uniting Europe. And Trump seems to chase a new shiny object every several days - but fails to execute on any of them.

Here’s one of the main things about Donald Trump. He is diabolically effective at promising the moon and at publicity and optics, so he does well at political campaigning. But he is absolutely wretched at execution and delivering on anything he has promised, and so he is laughably horrendous at governing, which requires actual results, no matter how many lies he tells.

He also has virtually no attention span and no sense of tenacity, of persisting through adversity and finishing what he starts.

He is a spoiled rich kid in a candy store, buying one of everything, trying all of them, failing to finish anything, and leaving a mess for someone else to clean up behind him.

Look past the bluster and the boasting. Trump blurts things out and then becomes totally lost when it comes time to execute anything — or he changes his mind when things prove to be unpopular.

As a president, this means a new big frothy announcement every day or every few days or — once he gets more tired — every week or two. But none of them actually ever result in anything, even when he had four full years during his first term to deliver the goods:

• The wall never did get built: only 52 miles of Mexican border wall were constructed. The US-Mexico border is 1,954 miles long.

• “Infrastructure Week” was infamously postponed multiple times but never resulted in any major infrastructure package being proposed, let alone passed, let alone resulting in actual construction of anything.

• Coming up on a decade into Trump’s real political career, and we still have never seen his long-promised proposed alternative to the Affordable Care Act. His most recent words on the subject were during his debacle of a debate with Kamala Harris last year, in which he muttered that had “concepts of a plan.”

This inability to finish anything he starts is continuing if not accelerating in his second term, as he rolls out even more outlandish policy proposals more rapidly, partly through having the four years out of office for his cabal to assemble Project 2025 — though he’s already started to wander off-script:

Tariffs - He threatened tariffs with Canada and Mexico, backed off of them (when the two countries shrewdly offered up “concessions” that they had already delivered under Biden), is now pursuing them again, may back off again any moment, but then also teased a wider range of tariffs on countries like South Korea and India during his address to Congress last night — a wild amount of inconsistency and deeply irresponsible stewardship of the American economy. He’s a vacillating sea captain who jerks the wheel of the ship in drastic changes of course based on passing whims.

Predictably, the ship is now flailing. The Federal Reserve now predicts GDP is headed for a 2.8% annualized decrease this quarter, whereas in late January they were predicting a growth rate of 2.3%. Why the sudden change? Because consumer confidence has dropped precipitously — as have exports. It turns out that messing with people’s expectations regarding tax increases of 10-25% or more on virtually everything will in fact lead to (a) shaky feelings among consumers, who will clamp down on purchases and brace for the worst, (b) bad feelings among companies and consumers overseas, who are now actively rejecting American goods, which hurts the American companies who make those goods for export markets. And now the stock market is drooping, a real-time vote of no confidence in Trump.

Ukraine - His premeditated ambush on Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is continuing to backfire badly — with Europe now already pledging an additional $154 billion in new aid to Ukraine as part of an $840 billion package of defense spending announced by the European Union. The UK is doing its own support package, and other countries like Germany appear likely to engage in additional measures as well.

If the $154 billion figure does not seem like breaking news — that’s because of all of the conflicting numbers that have been thrown around regarding actual aid delivered to Ukraine.

The real numbers: Europe has delivered $132 billion up to now, compared with $114 billion from the US.

So here is the takeaway — Europe is more than doubling its support to Ukraine. And Zelenskyy left Washington to go to a hero’s welcome in London followed by an emergency meeting of NATO leaders, but without Trump. America is being shut out of a club we ourselves created and led for 75 years.

And before anyone says that Trump is achieving some goal of getting Europe to pay more: first, see the above numbers, showing Europe was already paying more than the US, and second, the “Europe needs to pay more” line was always and very purposefully a canard, a distraction, a diversion.

The real goal of Trump’s Ukraine policy, such as it is, is to bully and manipulate Ukraine into a bad deal with Russia that allows Vladimir Putin to declare victory and end what has turned into his Vietnam+Afghanistan+Iraq, a bloody quagmire that started by aiming for regime change in Kyiv but is on track to result in regime change in Moscow if Putin does not change course.

Make no mistake about it: Zelenskyy’s tweet yesterday indicating a desire to come back to the negotiating table, referring to Trump’s “strong leadership” and providing yet another thank you to America (his 95th in the last 3 years, by one count, and no, that’s not hyperbole), was merely a bit of diplomatic flattery, rather than showing some 180-degree turn by Ukraine. European leaders have been counseling Zelenskyy to smooth things over with Trump, at least on the surface — but the proof is in the funding. They want to calm the waters with Trump just long enough to assemble the larger war machine that will allow Ukraine to defend itself without further American help for the time being.

Trump has achieved none of his goals with Ukraine — and instead he actually provoked stronger European unity and revived support for Ukraine, which had declined in enthusiasm over the last two years and is now back to 2022 levels.

Gaza — After all his weird, creepy, boastful boosterism about engaging in a gigantic ethnic cleansing project to turn Gaza into a Trump Gaza real estate development to which actual Palestinians would not be allowed to return, Trump was completely silent on the subject during his address last night.

But tellingly, earlier in the day, he issued a post on Truth Social announcing that universities will be cut off from federal funding if they allow student protests, and the students would be expelled or prosecuted.

Spring is coming. Is Trump perhaps anticipating a rising tide of protests over his Gaza plan? Is he already backing away from it? Or is he already being told that it would be impossible to implement without the use of extreme military force — because it’s not like residents would willingly leave their homes, and it’s not like Hamas will simply surrender and depart if Trump shows up with a hard hat and blueprints for some propaganda photo op.

Everything else - And this is to say nothing about egg prices (which keep climbing), bird flu (where they fired the scientists tasked with fighting it, then had to scurry to rehire them), Medicaid and other government assistance programs (which they froze and then unfroze after a furious outcry), taxes (where the tiny House Republican majority could not muster the votes to put up their actual plan but only could pass a watered-down resolution with no details and no teeth), or court challenges (which Trump keeps losing).

The net result? Trump is already underwater on his approval ratings, a record of dysfunction that is only rivaled by — you guessed it — Trump himself, during his first term.

Trump’s presidency is currently meeting approval with only 37% of independents — and town halls are going so badly for Republican members of Congress that the House Republicans’ campaign committee has now banned members from doing any more of them.

He is failing. He is losing. Amplify the truth. Keep up the pressure. And use his own failures and weaknesses to our advantage.