By Anita Kumar
McClatchy Washington Bureau
WASHINGTON, D.C. — It turns out that Donald Trump’s greatest strength in the 2016 presidential race was not his business acumen but rather Hillary Clinton’s unpopularity.
Tens of millions of Americans were so turned off by Clinton’s representation of establishment politics that they took a chance on an unorthodox candidate with no political experience.
And by Saturday, the anniversary of his inauguration and first day of a government shutdown, it appears that Trump can’t fix Washington either.
Democrats and some Republicans quickly blamed Trump for failing to negotiate a deal with Congress to keep the government open after it ran out of money at midnight Friday.
“President Trump earned an ‘F’ for leadership,” said House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif.
Congressional Democrats and Republicans traded blame, but the finger-pointing at Trump was even more stinging because he has bragged for years that he had a natural talent to make a deal. That boast, in fact, was about as prominent a fixture in his 2016 campaign speeches as his vows to build a wall on the Mexican border.
And now the shutdown comes just months after he failed —— twice —— to help Republicans make good on his promise to repeal and replace President Barack Obama’s signature legislative victories, , the Affordable Care Act. And it robs of him of momentum after a late 2017 tax cut and continued good fortune on Wall Street.
Trump scrapped his plan to attend a high-dollar fundraiser Saturday at Mar-a-Lago, his Florida resort, to celebrate his first year in office. Instead, he stayed at the White House working to reopen the government. He spent Saturday publicly criticizing Democrats for the shutdown in a series of social media posts.
Trump, who has a vast real estate empire, has long boasted he is a consummate dealmaker, even writing a best-selling book, “The Art of the Deal.” Four years ago, he chastised Obama for not being able to cut a deal to avoid a similar shutdown.
“The problems start from the top and have to get solved from the top. The president is the leader, and he’s got to get everybody in a room and he’s got to lead,” he said in 2013 after the last government shutdown.
“Nobody knows the system better than me, which is why I alone can fix it,” he said in 2016.
In recent weeks, Trump and his top aides held multiple meetings with lawmakers on a spending deal —— including the possibility of reauthorizing the Children’s Health Insurance Program and protections for beneficiaries of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, who were brought to the nation illegally as children. He pledged to sign off on a bipartisan deal. But then, as a midnight deadline loomed, he held to a hard-line position on excluding DACA in the government spending bill.
The criticisms of Trump as a negotiator are many. Skeptics, among both Republicans and Democrats, say he doesn’t know the issues and doesn’t want to get to know them in any great detail. Others note that he changes his mind frequently, sometimes agreeing with the last person who speaks to him, other times courting Democrats only to later side with more conservative lawmakers. And some of his aides, including senior policy adviser Stephen Miller, are hurting their chances of getting anything done.
“I’m looking for something that President Trump supports,” Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., said last week. “And he’s not yet indicated what measure he’s willing to sign. As soon as we figure out what he is for, then I would be convinced that we were not just spinning our wheels going to this issue on the floor, but actually dealing with a bill that has a chance to become law and therefore solve the problem.”
Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer, D-N.Y., said Saturday that negotiating with Trump is like negotiating with “Jell-O.”
The bombastic businessman turned reality TV star won the 2016 presidential race against Clinton, who had her own long list of problems: Most Americans didn’t trust her. Many lawmakers vowed not to work with her. The FBI was investigating her use of a personal email system while at the State Department. And voters criticized her for being out-of-touch Washington insider.
“I think it was more about Hillary than anything else,” Republican strategist Doug Heye said about the election. But, Heye said, Trump’s reputation as a dealmaker was “central to his brand.”
“He campaigned on ‘I alone can fix it.’ But it’s become clear that is not the reality,” New York based Republican strategist Evan Siegfried said. “It’s very disappointing because the message of 2016 was Americas were frustrated with the way government was working or not working. If anything, Trump has injected more paralysis into the government partially because he’s not a good negotiator.”
