The challenges for President Trump have arrived and his tumultuous month of August lingering into these beginning days of September with the aftermath of the tragic Hurricane Harvey and as reported this morning a new nuclear test in North Korea, one that registered a 6.3 on the Richter Scale.
As the Sylvester Turner, Mayor of Houston, stated it's all about housing in terms of the relief and aid for the communities. Secondarily, he said that the removal of debris was essential to prevent any public health crisis. So far, the president has responded well to the disaster and has signaled an immediate injection of $7.8 billion for hurricane relief. It's a start but realistically, that amount is only half of the tip of the iceberg of monetary resources that it's going to take to rebuild southeast Texas.
With the limited amount of congressional working days in September and funding for hurricane relief the first order of business on the domestic front and the North Korean threats on the foreign policy end, the administration's legislative agenda is all but dead. With the suggestion that Hurricane Harvey relief funds be tied to the raising of the debt ceiling will length the debate and simply create more uncertainty with the best to hope for is a continuing resolution to fund the government. Not to mention that Mr. Trump called out and picked fights with a number of Republican legislators this past month, number one on that list being the Senate Majority leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY). This comes after the president isolating himself with an abhorrent press conference in the wake of Charlotttesville, an alternative-universe like rally in Phoenix where he dissed both of the state's Republican senators, and then a pardon for an unrepentant bigoted sheriff who defied the rule of law. Now, senators like John McCain (R-AZ) want to stick it in the president's eye, so to speak.
The president is still talking about health care, which will not be taken up again by Congress and there just isn't the legislative time to get tax reform done, with everything else on the table. Nothing legislatively is going to get done in this next session. Further complicating the domestic agenda is the president's coming Tuesday decision on what to do about DACA - the deferred action on childhood arrivals.
Many conservative members of Congress has urged the president not to rescind the executive order (DACA), but as today's panel discussed, doing away with DACA doesn't play well with Mr. Trump's base. The hard line attorney general Jeff Sessions is advocating for the order's cancellation. There was also conjecture from the panel that the president would kick it to Congress to decide what to do, which would be the politically logical thing to do, as Princeton professor Eddie Glaude pointed out, but he seemed to think that because it's Mr. Trump, conventional political logic doesn't apply. One can only speculate, but rescinding DACA would also implement harsh deportation policy on places particularly like southeast Texas, which would be a slap in the face by the president to that community if he rescinded the order now. Bottom line is: These 800,000 'Dreamer' kids are Americans and should be made so.
And while Mr. Trump was throwing cold water on Congressional relations in August, it was fire and fury everywhere else. In addition to inflaming racial divisions with irresponsible comments, "fire and fury" was the phrase that the president used as a response to missile tests by North Korea. It's worth noting a statistic that Chuck Todd outlined: Kim Jung Il conducted 16 missile tests in his entire time in power, and his son Kim Jung Un has had 18 since Mr. Trump became president. It's quite obvious that the young dictator is testing the ill-tempered president.
Mr. Trump's terrible August, frankly, has set him up well for a productive September and despite outside mitigating issues such as the Russian investigation, can the president overcome all of these challenges to simply show that he can be competent in the job?
September is going to be the most significant month of his presidency so far.
Panel: Kristen Welker, NBC News; Susan Page, USA Today; Eddie Glaude, Princeton University; Matthew Continetti, Washington Free Beacon
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