{"id":76786,"date":"2018-02-12T17:33:48","date_gmt":"2018-02-13T00:33:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/thiessentrump-throws-away-his-momentum-for-peanuts\/"},"modified":"2018-02-13T00:33:48","modified_gmt":"2018-02-13T00:33:48","slug":"thiessentrump-throws-away-his-momentum-for-peanuts","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/thiessentrump-throws-away-his-momentum-for-peanuts\/","title":{"rendered":"Thiessen:Trump throws away his momentum for \u2018Peanuts\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Marc
Marc Thiessen, Washington Post Writers Group<\/span>du1-i-syn<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Normally, presidents try to ride the wave from a successful State of the Union as long as they can.<\/p>\n

Not Trump. What have we been taking about for the past week? Russia.<\/p>\n

Why? Because within days, Trump changed the topic when he released a declassified memo prepared by Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee alleging abuses of the FISA process by the FBI.<\/p>\n

The media and Democrats could not believe their luck. They were more than happy to stop talking about Trump\u2019s speech and go with wall-to-wall coverage of the memo. Soon, Trump\u2019s powerful address, and the agenda he laid out, were a distant memory \u2013 supplanted by a fierce debate over the GOP\u2019s \u201cpartisan\u201d attack on the FBI and whether Trump would fire special counsel Robert S. Mueller.<\/p>\n

What was Trump thinking? He tweeted that the GOP memo \u201ctotally vindicates\u201d him. No, it doesn\u2019t. Even Republican Rep. Trey Gowdy of South Carolina, the only member of the committee to review the intelligence behind the memo, said that it had nothing to do with the Russia probe.<\/p>\n

So why would Trump release that information right after his State of the Union and thus bring the momentum he had gained to a grinding halt? He should know better. Recall that in 2017, after Trump delivered his first, also highly praised, address to Congress, the subject changed to Russia within 24 hours when The Post reported that Attorney General Jeff Sessions had not disclosed in his confirmation hearing that he met twice with Russia\u2019s ambassador to the United States. It was a well-timed leak designed to step on Trump\u2019s story.<\/p>\n

The attack on Sessions was malicious and not Trump\u2019s fault. This time, however, Trump intentionally changed the subject from his speech to Russia. This is a self-inflicted wound.<\/p>\n

Then, to add to the PR disaster, Trump declared at what was supposed to be an event highlighting his tax reform success that Democrats who refused to stand and applaud during his State of the Union were \u201cun-American\u201d and \u201ctreasonous.\u201d He was joking, of course, but it was a really bad joke \u2013 and gave the media the excuse to gin up the outrage machine over Trump\u2019s comment.<\/p>\n

Again, Democrats quietly celebrated. Until that moment, they had been widely criticized for their disrespectful performance on the House floor, which had alienated millions of Americans watching the president.<\/p>\n

Even my liberal Post colleague Dana Milbank called the Democrats\u2019 behavior \u201cembarrassing.\u201d Now, with a single misbegotten turn of phrase, Trump had turned them from petulant protesters into principled defenders of the First Amendment.<\/p>\n

These mistakes were tragic because Trump\u2019s address seemed to reach and win the approval of many Americans who like his first year\u2019s accomplishments but don\u2019t approve of him, including millions of independents and Democrats. With his speech, he got them to give him a second look. In the days that followed, he needed to stay on message and keep winning them over with smart speeches putting detail onto the policies he laid out in his State of the Union.<\/p>\n

He could have hit the hustings to talk about his very generous immigration plan to give 1.8 million \u201cdreamers\u201d a path to citizenship and challenge reluctant Democrats to come to the table. He could have given speeches about his proposals for education, tackling the opioid crisis, and \u201cright to try\u201d legislation he endorsed to give dying Americans a chance to save their lives using experimental treatments. He could have won over independents, and even some Democrats, and expanded his base of support. Instead, he changed the topic to Russia and made a cringe-inducing joke about \u201ctreason,\u201d and millions thought to themselves: There he goes again.<\/p>\n

The Trump presidency is like a \u201cPeanuts\u201d cartoon, with Trump as Lucy with the football. Every time you think this time will be different \u2013 this time he\u2019ll stay on message, this time he\u2019ll show some discipline, this time he\u2019ll realize how much more powerful it is to be presidential \u2013 he quickly pulls the football away.<\/p>\n

Marc Thiessen, a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, writes a twice-weekly online column for The Post \u00a9 2018. The Washington Post Writers Group<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Thiessen, Washington Post Writers Groupdu1-i-syn Normally, presidents try to ride the wave from a successful State of the Union as long as they can. Not Trump. What have we been taking about for the past week? Russia. Why? Because within days, Trump changed the topic when he released a declassified memo prepared by Republicans […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":76787,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[125],"naviga_topic":[],"class_list":["post-76786","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","tag-newsletter-opinion"],"acf":[],"author_name":"dh_admin","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/76786","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=76786"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/76786\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/76787"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=76786"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=76786"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=76786"},{"taxonomy":"naviga_topic","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/naviga_topic?post=76786"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}