If Trump Isn’t Listening to His Advisers, Who Is Shaping Policy?

Is this the way our government should operate?

It’s the risk the GOP took when they thwarted the efforts of those prescient delegates on the floor of the 2016 RNC convention.

I often wonder if anyone responsible for not allowing those delegates to have their say then ever look back at the results of their deeds and say to themselves, “My God, what have I done?”

What they did was put the well-being of our nation in the hands of an undisciplined, barely coherent, egotistical – and potentially compromised – con artist.

Donald Trump does not know what he’s doing.

Because he is so woefully, desperately in over his head, he’s reacting like any drowning man, flailing and grabbing on to anything (or anyone) he can.

In what was a wider piece on White House Chief of Staff John Kelly’s diminished role as gatekeeper to the Trump White House, Politico cited a former White House official who suggested that meetings in the White House were the kind of unstructured, fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants kind of affairs that make serious lawmakers and Cabinet staff pull their hair out.

It is already known that Trump requires “executive time” until 11am, each morning.

That’s his time to watch “Fox and Friends” and rage on Twitter.

Trump’s thoughts are fed to him directly from whatever is being discussed on Fox News, and according to the former official who was interviewed, meetings in the White House tend to reflect that.

“He comes down for the day, and whatever he saw on ‘Fox and Friends,’ he schedules meetings based on that,” the former official told Politico. “If it’s Iran, it’s ‘Get John Bolton down here!’ … If he’s seen something on TV or [was] talking to [Fox News host Sean] Hannity the night before, he’s got lots of flexibility to do whatever he wants to do.”

We should all hope none of the sycophants at Fox ever casually suggest nuclear war as an option to end illegal immigration.

Who believes Sean Hannity and the other loyalists with the network are unaware that they’re actually guiding policy, now?

He once praised the show for being named the “most influential” on television, a title given to the hosts by a media website because it is known that Trump watches it.

Earlier this year, he booked himself for a phone interview on the show.

It’s a sick, incestuous relationship that bears no resemblance to how the presidency was designed to work.

On Sunday, the weekend crew with “Fox and Friends” urged Republican candidates running for office to pay homage to the throne, saying they should “aggressively” show their support for Trump, if they want to win in November.

They also took aim at Congress, with host, Pete Hegseth suggesting a government shutdown, should the border wall not be built.

But Hegseth continued, and said that the president’s poll numbers being so much higher than those of Congress should impact their view on the wall. “They keep saying, ‘Nah, we just can’t really agree on this border wall, we just can’t get the funding for it, you know, it’s a couple billion bucks, we got billions of dollars for this for that for this for that Republicans didn’t vote for’. Yet we can’t fund the border wall?” said a worked-up Hegseth. “Like I don’t understand why they don’t get that.”

“And I think the President would be wise to reiterate that he would shut it down if they won’t give a border wall,” Hegseth added. A short time later, the President tweeted the very reiteration Hegseth said that he should.

So when do we get uncomfortable with this?

I would be willing to “shut down” government if the Democrats do not give us the votes for Border Security, which includes the Wall! Must get rid of Lottery, Catch & Release etc. and finally go to system of Immigration based on MERIT! We need great people coming into our Country!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 29, 2018

We have a president that bypasses Congress, and a Congress too weak or too dumb to understand that this free republic remains so because our founders had the foresight to create three co-equal branches of government.

We’re in new territory, here, and until the sitting Congress grows a backbone, I fear the republic will remain in peril.