As Donald Trump passes the six-month mark in office, his behavior has become only more bizarre, as if driven by the centrifugal force of
The latest victims of a “hot mike,” that miraculous conduit of political candor, are Senator Susan Collins, the Republican from Maine, and her colleague Jack Reed, the Rhode Island Democrat. During a lull in an Appropriations subcommittee meeting on Tuesday, Collins and Reed kibbitzed about the President’s state of mind, including his evident confusion about basic legislative procedure.
“I think he’s crazy,” Reed said, in a low voice.
“I’m worried,” Collins replied.
“I don’t say that lightly, as kind of, you know, ‘a goofy guy,’ ” Reed went on. “The, uh, this thing, you know, if we don’t get a budget deal—”
“I know,” Collins said.
“We’re going to be paralyzed, D.O.D.”— the Department of Defense— “everything is going to be paralyzed.”
Collins ventured that the President appears unfamiliar with the spending cap, passed in 2011, called the Budget Control Act. “I don’t even think he knows that there is a B.C.A,” she said.
When the audio of this exchange emerged, Collins’s office elaborated, to the Washington Post, that she is “worried” about “the elimination of transportation and housing programs in the President’s budget request.” A spokesman for Reed offered no apology, saying, “The Trump Administration is behaving erratically and irresponsibly.”
When Donald Trump was a candidate, his admirers explained his obsessions and his aggressions—about Megyn Kelly, Rosie O’Donnell, Hillary Clinton—as the excesses of a fierce competitor. When Trump was new to the White House, his friends defended his false claims—about “illegal votes,” the size of his Inauguration crowd, and the “highest” murder rate in decades—as bruised feelings from a tough campaign and settling pains in an unfamiliar environment.
