Who’s ‘in Charge’ of running the Government of the United States of America?
The Big seems to be ducking when things go sideways?
And ….
Reports are that Stephen Miller and Pete Hegseth HAVE make moves in their bosses name that the President says he didn’t know about?
Recent questions on the Garcia detention case have been dropped in Trump’s Attorney General desk…
Health policy questions referred to RFK Jr.?
Who picked the Trump Surgeon General?
And people complained about Joe Biden?
Hmmmm?
But less than four months after taking over from Biden, it’s Trump who, in his own telling, is often unaware of major events surrounding him and directly involving his administration.
At other times, Trump has distanced himself or appeared distant from his administration’s major and consequential decisions, as if he had little or nothing to do with them.
On Wednesday, Trump said he “didn’t know that” when asked about a key Republican senator coming out against his controversial nominee to be U.S. attorney for D.C., Ed Martin. The comments by Sen. Thom Tillis (North Carolina) had come a full day prior and appeared to end Martin’s confirmation hopes. In the days before, Trump had promoted Martin’s candidacy and reportedly made calls to key senators.
On Sunday, Trump was asked about more than a dozen layoffs the previous Friday in a program that provides health care for 9/11 first responders and survivors. “I’m not aware of anything that may have been brought up recently,” Trump said. By Tuesday, Fox News reported, nearly all the staff had been reinstated….
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Trump has also often expressed a lack of familiarity with or connection to his own administration’s immigration crackdown and major pieces of its deportation efforts.
On Wednesday, Trump was asked to address his administration’s reported plans to deport migrants to Libya, and said, “I don’t know; you’ll have to ask Homeland Security.” The story was first reported a day prior.
In an April 22 interview with Time magazine, Trump said of the arrest and detention of Tufts University student Rumeysa Ozturk: “I’m not aware of the particular event.” Ozturk had been apprehended by masked agents nearly a month earlier, and her case has been one of the most controversial given the video of the arrest and the lack of evidencefor the administration’s claims linking her to Hamas. (A federal judge on Friday ordered her release.)
Trump has also distanced himself from other major deportation actions in some striking ways….
One two occasions in recent weeks, he indicated that it was his lawyers who were blocking efforts to seek the return of Kilmar Abrego García from El Salvador, to which he had been wrongly deported. (The courts had ordered the administration to facilitate Abrego García’s return.) He even said he could get Abrego García back if he wanted to. “I’m not the one making this decision,” Trump told ABC News. “We have lawyers that don’t want to do this.”
And in one of the most puzzling instances, Trump in March claimed that he hadn’t actually signed the controversial proclamation — which has since been struck down by the courts — that the administration used to deport migrants under the Alien Enemies Act without due process. This despite his signature being on it. “I don’t know when it was signed, because I didn’t sign it,” Trump said. “Other people handled it.” (A spokesman later said Trump did, in fact, sign it.)
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To be clear, this and several other matters mentioned above have been some of the most significant of Trump’s second term. And he has suggested he wasn’t really involved in or across the situations.
There’s certainly a question about how much Trump actually is out of the loop and how much he’s just saying that. Trump’s record for dishonesty is nearly without compare. When it comes to some of the more sensitive issues, he could benefit from distance from these decisions. But this seemingly hands-off approach also reared its head in his first term, particularly when it came to the administration’s covid response. The New York Times ran an article early in the pandemic headlined “The President as Bystander.”….
image…Politico
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