Columnists

For your convenience, here's a guide to the working relationships that will guide the Trump presidency:

1.Donald Trump, Supreme Leader. Although Trump gets the lion's share of press attention -- what else would you would expect from a flaming narcissist -- once he gets into office, Trump will likely retreat into the background and become a "figurehead" President following the model of Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush. He'll be active on Twitter and make appearances on Fox News and political rallies. But don't expect Trump to be accessible to the press, in general; he hates the mainstream media. He'll rely upon his subordinates, particularly Kellyanne Conway, to deal with tough questions.

Trump will be a typical Republican President who likes the idea of being bloviator-in-chief but doesn't actually want to do the day-to-day heavy lifting Americans expect of their supreme leader. Trump will delegate most of daily grunt work to his subordinates and members of his family.

To get elected, Trump made a deal with ultra-right-wing power brokers Robert and Rebekah Mercer. (The deal that brought Kellyanne Conway and Steve Bannon onto the Trump team.) The terms of the Faustian bargain were that the Mercers, and other GOP oligarchs such as Sheldon Adelson and Charles and David Koch, would use their resources to get Trump into the oval office; in return, Trump would adopt their extreme right-wing agenda. For example, on the campaign trail, Trump never advocated privatizing Social Security; that's part of the Mercer agenda currently being pushed in Congress.

Trump will glory in the day-to-day pomp and circumstance of being president while, behind the scenes, his subordinates will push extreme changes to domestic and foreign policy. -more-

Albert Einstein: “We can not solve our problems with the same level of thinking that created them.”

The above quote is transferrable to a number of situations.

Anosognosia is the term psychiatrists and others use to describe people with schizophrenia who do not have insight into their problems. However, in some instances, this very same insight is blocked by overmedicating. -more-

After the election, Kentucky, Missouri, and New Hampshire are now under unified Republican control and legislators in these states are set on passing Right-to-Work laws, which lessens union power by allowing workers in unionized workplaces to withhold union fees used to organize and advocate on their behalf. And with a Trump presidency and a Republican-controlled Congress, there is a real danger of passage of a federal right-to-work law. -more-

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