Nobody knew healthcare could be so complicated.

Frankly? I'm surprised at how poorly it's gone. Trump isn't a great businessman but he's not an abysmal one and he's a semi-talented showman. I would have expected that a semi-talented manager, when faced with a Herculean labor like "learn to be President", would at the very least have gathered some clever people around him.

But it appears that he doesn't even have the basis of knowledge to discern who the clever people are. Sycophants are fine if all you want is adulation but if you want respect beyond the first degree, your sycophants have to be charismatic and knowledgeable, too. It's got to be driving the GOP crazy that they've got the House, the Senate and the Presidency and it's all been derailed by the 24-7 circus sideshow. Not to say that a foreign government co-opting our electoral process is merely a sideshow but you'd think they'd get a thing or two done, aside from blowing up the already-dead TPP and jump-starting the Charter-TW merger.

Read an articlet today talking about the Rachel Maddow show and how their ratings are up 200% or some shit. They credited their success with steadfastly ignoring Trump's Twitter feed. From their perspective, what the administration says is largely irrelevant because none of them have any credibility. What matters is what they do and so far, what they do is "botch things."

I'm sure that one, two or six months from now I'll look back on this and wish for those halcyon days when the Trump administration was busily shooting itself in the foot on full auto but I'm not at all sure they'll ever get competent. I now worry about what the Trump administration will accomplish despite itself, rather than what the Republicans will do with no real checks on their power.

“This is a somewhat stunning, in so far as the president of the United States doesn’t need to get his information about classified activity from Breitbart,” says Cato Institute fellow Julian Sanchez.

And that's kind of where we've ended up - of course the President is getting his information from Breitbart because we all know he's completely disinterested in the actual levers of power. John Oliver made the point that the country lost its shit when Dan Quayle misspelled "potato." Trump took three whacks at "hereby" and then managed to misspell "tap." But we were too busy speculating that he'd just inadvertently decliassified his own FISA warrant.

Take Nixon in the deepest days of his Watergate paranoia, subtract 50 IQ points, add Twitter, and you have Trump today.

- Bruce Bartlett

Terra incognita, man. I'm confident the country and the government will recover and function but I do not know how this show's gonna go.