Over 70% of the candidates Donald Trump supported lost their election bids. But that was just the start of a very bad week for Donald Trump and his administration. He made himself look even worse by his glum attitude in Paris at the memorial of the 100th year since the end of World War One, making himself even more isolated from other world leaders (except for Putin who got Trump's only smile). Then he caused a furor by refusing to go to the French cemetery where thousands of American soldiers were buried. He skipped the Peace meeting attended by other world leaders, and once back in Washington, refused to go to Arlington Cemetery on Veterans Day to lay a wreath on the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. He is the only president in over five decades to fail doing that.
And who was responsible for his very bad week? It was Trump himself. Once again, he has displayed his total incompetence.
Here's how Paul Waldman describes Trump's self-imposed meltdown in The Washington Post:
New reporting paints a picture of the administration descending into a thunderdome of backstabbing and resentment as staffers jockey for position or wonder whether they should get the heck out, all presided over by an erratic, unhappy president. This might sound like a familiar story, but if it isn’t already worse than it has been before, it soon will be, especially now that the midterm elections have cast a cloud over the remaining two years of President Trump’s term. Let’s run down a few of the highlights:
- Trump’s trip to France to mark the 100th anniversary of the end of World War I was a disaster, marked by a brooding and petulant president mocked and condemned wherever he went. Angry about his party’s midterm losses, Trump has spent his time in the past week insulting reporters in terms that are unusually personal even for him, spinning out desperate conspiracy theories about stolen elections on Twitter and lashing out at Theresa May and Emmanuel Macron.
- After deciding not to attend a ceremony honoring those killed in the war because rain apparently made it inconvenient to get there, Trump grew enraged at his staff “for not counseling him that skipping the cemetery visit would be a public-relations nightmare.” Somehow he was not able to figure out for himself that doing so might not go over well.
- Trump “told advisers over the weekend that he had decided to remove Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen and that he also was seriously considering replacing White House chief of staff John F. Kelly.”
- While Trump is considering replacing Kelly with Nick Ayers, Vice President Pence’s chief of staff, “aides told Trump that appointing Ayers would lower staff morale and perhaps trigger an exodus.”
- First lady Melania Trump’s staff issued an extraordinary statement saying a top national security aide, Mira R. Ricardel, “no longer deserves the honor of serving in this White House,” making public a bureaucratic feud that stretches between the White House and the Pentagon.
- According to the Los Angeles Times, “With the certainty that the incoming Democratic House majority will go after his tax returns and investigate his actions, and the likelihood of additional indictments by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III, Trump has retreated into a cocoon of bitterness and resentment.”
- Trump’s firing of Jeff Sessions and appointment of Matthew Whitaker as acting attorney general, a move meant to protect him from the Mueller investigation, is turning out to be a mini-scandal in its own right, to the point where the president vacillates between singing Whitaker’s praises and claiming he doesn’t know him.