OPINION | Despite Gen. Kelly’s lifesaver, Trump keeps sinking

My last op-ed was about how god-awful Trump’s last week had been.  

It doesn’t seem to be getting any better, even with the drastic change he made by appointing Gen. John Kelly as the new chief of staff.  

Granted, it is early in Kelly’s tenure, and he has made some smart moves, like getting rid of short-lived Communications Director Anthony Scaramucci and assuring Attorney General Jeff Sessions that his job was safe. But he hasn’t yet been able to plug the leaks; he hasn’t kept Trump from tweeting against his own self-interest and he wasn’t able to keep White House advisor Stephen Miller — a hard-right, anti-immigrant nationalist — from being the face of the administration’s xenophobic, intolerant, ill-advised — and, thankfully, “dead-on-arrival” — new low-skilled immigrant ban.  

{mosads}What’s more, I suspect Gen. Kelly won’t be able to control most of these occurrences in the future, which will continue to drive down the president’s already-low approval ratings. On Wednesday, Trump hit an all-time low approval rating of 33 percent in a Quinnipiac poll.

In the latest White House leak, America found out early Thursday morning that, in fact, Trump had punked all of his supporters for the last two years as he screeched at rally after rally that he would build a wall and make Mexico pay for it.  

In an eye-opening leak of a transcript of two phone calls early in his presidency — one with Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto, the other with Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull — we see a president who is alternately aggressive, demanding, self-centered, pleading, incoherent, insulting, dismissive, disrespectful and simply all too temperamentally unfit for the office he occupies.  

Trump even insulted the United States by calling New Hampshire a “drug-infested den” because of the illicit drug trade between the U.S. and Mexico. 

But, most astounding of all, he admitted to his Mexican counterpart that he knows Mexico will not pay for the wall, yet pleaded with President Peña Nieto to stop saying it publicly because it will make Trump look bad and will hurt him politically.  

Really??!! This is how Trump does deals? This is his way of negotiating a “great deal for America?” President Peña Nieto, I am sure, hung up and had a good laugh.

But how will Trump supporters receive this news?  Will they forgive their idol for taking advantage of them, shamelessly lying to them, blatantly using them as political fodder and admitting that to a foreign leader?  Do Trump supporters have any dignity?  Or is a red line nonexistent when it comes to Trump?

The Quinnipiac poll shows the armor is starting to crack. For the first time, the poll showed Trump losing support among white Americans without a college degree, sending his approval rating among this group into negative territory, 43/50.  Maybe there is a red line after all.

Trump’s phone call with Australian Prime Minister Turnbull went even worse. Trump was furious he had to take some economic refugees from a deal President Obama had already made. These refugees were not criminals, but Trump said of they could “become the Boston bomber in five years,” before he abruptly hung up on Turnbull.

That episode came to light on Thursday. The day before, we saw another spectacle, a dumpster-fire of a performance in the White House briefing room by White House adviser Stephen Miller, the chief engineer of Trump’s “America First” agenda, as he discussed President Trump’s endorsement of a new Senate bill that would slash legal immigration, particularly among low-skilled foreigners, by 50 percent.

Miller, in his zeal to defend the administration’s ban, got into a public row with CNN’s Jim Acosta, as Acosta asked him why Trump wanted to change the nature of our immigration flows and the heart of who we are as a country. 

Instead of using real, supported data, Miller used a debunked, spurious study to make the claim that immigrants — even legal ones, if they are low-skilled — will lower American workers’ wages and take jobs from American citizens. Neither claim is true.  

In fact, most economists believe this proposal would be hurtful to the country’s economic growth and vitality, as we have millions of American Baby Boomers retiring, and we need an influx of younger workers, with skills at all levels, to replace that productivity.  

Unable to defend the proposal intellectually, Miller went off and attacked Acosta personally for having brought up the Statue of Liberty poem: “Give us your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free….”  

Acosta stood firm, asking if the administration was now going to require everybody to know English before coming here. Miller said that would-be citizens already are required to know English before they become citizens. This is not true.

The tactic of attacking and blaming the media works wonders with the base but will do nothing to convince members of Congress, or Americans in general, that it is a smart proposal that will make the country stronger.  

In fact, it is quite the opposite.

The proposal itself is a bad one, but to have made the decision to have Stephen Miller be the public face trying to sell it to America was ill-advised, and one that the White House chief of staff needs to avoid at all costs in the future.

Can Gen. Kelly do that? He couldn’t on Wednesday.    

Finally, we see that Trump is still tweeting away. His latest handywork — as of this writing: “Our relationship with Russia is at an all-time & very dangerous low. You can thank Congress, the same people that can’t even give us HCare!”

Our relationship with Russia is at an all-time & very dangerous low. You can thank Congress, the same people that can’t even give us HCare!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 3, 2017 

Hmm, attacking Congress. I don’t think Gen. Kelly would be OK with that. Understandably, even Trump’s own Republican members are seething.  

Gen. Kelly may still very well succeed in bringing some order and sanity to the White House. But as many of us have observed, that can only be the case if the person in the Oval Office wants order and is actually sane.  

Good luck with that, General.  

Maria Cardona is a principal at the Dewey Square Group, a Democratic strategist and a CNN/CNN Español political commentator. Follow her on Twitter @MariaTCardona.

The views expressed by contributors are their own and not the views of The Hill.