I think he doesn't want the job. More than that, I think he's surrounded himself by people who don't want the job either.

Trump is going to spend a lot of time enriching himself personally and putting himself in front of sycophants. I don't know if anyone else filled out that "first 100 days" survey of his; I did, which means I'm on his mailing list. And, I mean... I've been on presidential mailing lists. Obama, Bush. None of them tried to sell me trinkets twice a week. Trump? Beer steins, lapel pins, hats, shirts, plaques, it's been kind of amazing. Literally twice a week. The official communications arm of Donald J Trump Inc. is singularly interested in having me visit the gift shop. That's it. Despite my enrollment for policy reasons, no policy has been discussed. Not even once.

Which is not to say that bad stuff won't get done. I mean, let's build a wall to go with our fence and Mexico will pay us back. But if you look at the Wall as a microcosm of the Trump presidency, it's all there: singular focus on something we don't need, utter lack of vision as to how to accomplish it, unrealistic and nebulous view of the resources necessary. Say it in front of a rally, though, and you get the requisite cheers.

Which, historically, should allow the party in power to sweep through massive changes. But the party in power is focused on gutting the ethics office except when they get caught. Or on passing amendments that single out the salaries of individual government employees. There's a power vacuum, everybody sees it, everybody is trying to jump into it, and nobody has the intelligence/gravitas/charisma/skill to withstand the vortex.

I'm not a fan of Reagan. I think he set science back decades and brought us to the brink of nuclear war all while bankrupting our future. But he was a charismatic man who led easily and knew how to read a room. And for most of his second term, he had Alzheimer's and the country was being run by apparatchiks and petty bureaucrats with their own ideas about how to get things done and that's how you get the S&L crisis and the Iran Contra scandal and "Just Say No."

I think we're in for 2nd term Reagan, only with a bitter and vainglorious kleptocrat instead of a grandfatherly-if-forgetful former actor. It's gonna be a bunch of "oh well"s and "well, that happened"s. And I think in the end we're mostly going to be okay.

Except for Appalachia and the midwest. They're fucked.