Stepping On It

Aaron Blake at The Washington Post wrote an excellent piece yesterday (link here) about how Donald Trump's administration actually has some genuine good news, but the President himself is so inept that he buried that with yet another childish Twitter-storm, this time about a US Senator.

In locker room parlance, that's called "stepping on your own dick."

This suggests two things:

1) Once again, Trump is his own worst enemy. Rather than allowing communications professionals on his staff to shape the message, he thinks he's "smarter" (his own term) and knows all about shaping a message. Arrogance and narcissism are the reasons for this, two character flaws that are fatal to executive officer success.

2) He actually doesn't know very much about what is happening in his own administration. United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley seems to be the one running the policy show on this front. She may have been a less than mediocre governor, but she's actually doing a decent job in her current position. She deserves the credit for this, and not Trump. It's also worth nothing that she was a Never-Trump Republican until after the election.

Trump's Twitter use is a big net-negative for him. He seems to be the only one who believes he's using it to communicate effectively. Republican National Committee surveys have shown that even his own supporters overwhelmingly feel he needs to stop tweeting. Of course, he ignores any advice he doesn't want to hear and keeps self-destructing on Twitter.