Trump cannot rouse his own party in Congress to pass a bill replacing the Affordable Care Act or funding infrastructure projects or enacting tax reform. He does not have a close working relationship with either House Speaker Paul Ryan or Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. Members of the party’s hard right wing think he is a squish (and not just the ones whose fathers he accused of helping to assassinate JFK), while moderates like Sens. John McCain and Lindsey Graham have rarely had a kind word for him (often with good reason).
And it’s not just Congress. Trump apparently cannot get Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin to declare China a “currency manipulator,” an action that was one of the hallmarks of his campaign. He cannot even convince Jeff Sessions, his hand-picked attorney general and the first Republican in Washington to have endorsed him, to hocus-pocus away the inconvenient investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election.
