Trump's style

Trump's style
Monday, alongside chaos brewed by the Russia scandal, has revealed a stunted presidency and a White House struggling to master the levers of power. It also leaves President Donald Trump without a significant legislative triumph to show for his first six months in office. "He was playing with a firetruck and trying on a cowboy hat as the bill was collapsing and he had no clue," a top Republican told CNN's Jeff Zeleny on Tuesday, mocking the "Made In America" week at the White House.Combined with Trump's historically low approval rating for a President at this stage of his first term, and the constant, corrosive presence of the Russia drama, it adds up to a presidency testing the limits of political viability. "When a President has the lowest approval ratings of any President after six months it's not surprising he took one of the biggest body blows in politics after six months," said David Gergen, a senior CNN political analyst. "We have never seen a President put forward a major legislative piece in his early days that was greeted with such derision and such fear," Gergen told CNN's Don Lemon on Monday night. The question now is whether the White House and Republicans in Congress can find a way to marshall the GOP monopoly on power towards another significant agenda item -- tax reform for instance.But future success may require big changes in Trump's style. Perhaps the the ultimate takeaway from this legislative disaster is that Trump's own political methodology -- that was wildly successful in getting him elected, has turned out to be an insufficient base on which to build a functioning presidency. The health care effort revealed a White House that was unskilled in dealing with Congress and in some cases unaware to the political pressures faced by Trump's GOP allies on Capitol Hill. When the bill was speeding towards extinction on Monday, Trump was apparently oblivious to the impending embarrassment. On Monday afternoon, he blithely asserted that all was well, apparently unaware that the bill was already all but doomed. "We're getting it together and it's going to happen," he said during his afternoon event on US manufacturing, where he spent time admiring products including jumping into a fire truck and donning a Stetson hat. He also spent hours this weekend -- when the bill's chances of passing were expiring -- at the US Women's Golf Open, at his Bedminister, New Jersey, course, waving to fans and watching the action. That behavior was in keeping with the hands off attitude that Trump adopted during the Senate's Obamacare repeal efforts. But it also raises questions about his political approach itself. In recent days, Trump adopted big brush themes, maintained his superficial acquaintance with policy, used of social media as a messaging tool, and refused to accept any of the conventions about how politics has been conducted for eons -- i.e. how bills have been passed. He promised vengeance if Republicans did not pass the bill -- but little incentive for doubtful senators to get behind him, perhaps not the most effective strategy for a President with low approval ratings. "I don't even want to talk about it because I think it would be very bad," Trump said in an interview last week with Christian Broadcasting Network. "I will be very angry about it and a lot of people will be very upset. And yet, a pair of conservative senators, Mike Lee of Utah and Jerry Moran of Kansas, broke the news of their opposition -- sinking the bill -- while Trump was dining with other GOP senators to discuss the legislation. "It was beyond rude," a Republican senator who asked to speak without attribution to talk candidly about the feeling inside the caucus told CNN's Dana Bash of Lee and Moran's move. Yet this senator also noted how illustrative it is about the level of respect for this President among many Republicans on the hill. "It just shows what our guys think of Trump.

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