President Donald Trump just received his latest report card, and it isn't pretty. The latest Gallup poll has him with a 38 percent job approval rating — a figure that undoubtedly represents his undying base. Here's how I've graded him:
For a man who supposedly made billions, Trump appears to have a problem with math. At this late date, he is still getting his electoral vote tally wrong. It was 304, not 306 and, no, it still wasn't more than Obama and George H.W. Bush received. And when Bill O'Reilly challenged Trump for repeatedly sharing false numbers about African-Americans and the nation's murder rate, he responded, "Am I gonna check every statistic?" Well, yes, you really need to. That's what history will grade you on, and for that I give you an "F."
The President also gets a failing grade in reading. On Feb. 27 he said, "Nobody knew health care could be so complicated." Well, yes they did, and I'll bet his dollars-to-my-doughnuts that he never read House Speaker Paul Ryan's disastrous health care bill. If he had, he would have known that it contradicted his persistent claim that after the repeal of Obamacare, he'd give us a plan that insured more people and at a cheaper cost. Ryan's plan kicked 24 million enrollees off the health care rolls and raised the Medicaid and Medicare costs for the poor and seniors. When President "Art of the Deal" tried to negotiate terms with opponents of the plan, it became obvious he lacked command of the policy details.
The core problem is that Trump doesn't like to read. We have it on good authority that he isn't reading his daily briefing papers prepared by the intelligence community that provide insights into emerging threats. He claims he has no time to read, "I never have. I'm always busy doing a lot." Trump doesn't even have a computer on his desk. He gets his understanding of current affairs by having staff cherry-pick printouts of stories from newspapers and the Internet for his daily review. To me, that's the equivalent of CliffsNotes.
So, why the president's overall poor performance? A parent of any 10-year-old could explain. Trump spends too much time with TV and his unsecured android phone. He sits in his office glued to Fox News and commentary shows for several hours a day and simultaneously tweets about them, like a kid passing notes in a classroom. He did this during FBI Director James Comey's recent testimony before Congress. It's been noted that the concurrent tweets respond precisely to what the people on the screen are saying at that very moment, proving he's not doing his assigned work.
Trump also gets an "F" for his first two big military actions. A March 17 air strike on Mosul mistakenly killed more than 150 civilians who had been told by leaflets to stay in their homes for safety. And Trump's first counter-terrorism operation — the January raid on an al-Qaida outpost in Yemen — resulted with the loss of a Navy SEAL, the wounding of six other service members, the killing of 25 civilians, the destruction of a $75 million aircraft, and the yielding of no actionable intelligence, according to Pentagon officials. Trump blamed the military for the debacle, proving that Harry Truman's famous buck doesn't stop at this president's desk. Incidentally, Trump was absent from the situation room during the raid, but there was a presidential tweet sent at the same time about his upcoming appearance on the Christian Broadcasting Network. Sad.
Don't look for a Benghazi-like congressional investigation of the Yemen raid. Republicans are too busy bungling health care reform, repealing Dodd-Frank to reward those evil people on Wall Street Trump warned us about, putting out Trump-set fires with our allies, and developing a budget that slashes funding for public broadcasting and a block grant program that supports Meals on Wheels.
If Trump was a kid, any responsible parent would curb his TV privileges and take away his phone. He's wasting too much time tweeting about the ratings of "The Celebrity Apprentice" and the disproven claim that President Obama wiretapped his phone. Tellingly, there have been no recorded tweets about the Russian missile launch in violation of our arms treaty, or the Russian fighters that buzzed an American destroyer in the Black Sea. That's interesting, given the stench of Russian entanglements wafting from the White House.
With Trump's failing grades, it is a pity that his trip to the woodshed is almost four years away.
Frank Batavick writes from Westminster. His column appears Fridays. Email him at fjbatavick@gmail.com.
