EDITORIAL: Donald Trump’s steep learning curve

March 21--Donald Trump's gleeful disdain for governmental process and policy detail became a virtue among his supporters and was a prime reason he won the White House.

It may become just the thing to sink his presidency.

It's why his much-touted travel ban -- a twice watered-down version of the complete Muslim ban he campaigned on -- has been stalled in federal courts. It's also why the American Health Care Act is teetering on defeat, and why he's signed no major pieces of legislation in nearly two months in office. By this time in President Obama's first term, he had already signed the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, the Children's Health Insurance Program Reauthorization Act of 2009, renewed economic sanctions against Iran and made the largest stimulus program in U.S. history law.

Trump's boast that he has done more than most presidents this early into his first term is just that, a boast. Signing a series of impressive-sounding but largely symbolic Executive Orders isn't evidence of a president "getting things done," but rather one who hasn't figured out how to get much of anything accomplished. Trump is learning that a well-timed "you're fired" and a flick of his wrist and tricks from "Art of the Deal" are useless in a democracy built upon co-equal branches of government. Federal judges and political opponents don't cower when Trump demands they submit to his will as though they are his employees relying upon his approval to make ends meet. Instead, they have asserted their very real power in return and stymied him at nearly every turn.

The president promised the world on health care but has long seemed incurious about how complex America's health care system has become and the political and real-life stakes involved in reform. There's little evidence suggesting that he is any more informed about the intricacies of immigration policy, or any other policy.

What's worse is that he has surrounded himself with top advisers -- outsiders in his image -- who seem just as naïve about the inner-workings of the top levels of the U.S. government. It's why foreign policy experts were baffled this past weekend when Secretary of State Rex Tillerson began using phrases such as "mutual respect" and "win-win" to describe our relationship with China, seemingly benign words to the everyday American but ones that could unintentionally signal to China the U.S. will accept its controversial positions on Taiwan and Tibet.

There's nothing inherently wrong about electing an outsider. Breaking tradition and rewriting norms can lead to innovation and greater efficiencies. It can bring the kind of welcome, transformative change the 63 million Americans who voted for Trump were longing for. But it requires a level of expertise and seriousness Trump has never displayed, and so far seems incapable of.

That might be music to the ears of his political opponents, but it can cause real harm to a country Trump vowed to make great again.

Jessica Schorr Saxe, MD, is chair of Health Care Justice -- NC. Contact her at HCJusticeNC@gmail.com

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