Again, I must eat my own words that Mr. Trump might be a competent commander in chief. I’ve been trying to give this man the benefit of the doubt in several things, but he continually shoots himself in the mouth. How can one lose an aircraft carrier and its entire task force?

The lost aircraft carrier was reported by the President, by National Security Advisor H.R. Master, by Press Secretary Sean Spicer, and by Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis as heading to the Korean Peninsula.

Several days later, it was revealed never to have gone that way at all. It was always cruising south with Australian forces on maneuvers in some place like the Indian Ocean.

How can anyone orchestrate such an internationally visible fiasco? I contend it is simple for a man who consistently demonstrates that he is not an organized thinker, but a spontaneous reactor to his emotional appetites, with an inexhaustible lust for publicity.

He mistakes publicity for management. He encourages subordinate chaos, as he always did in his business and on his TV show, and then pretends to create a solution to the chaos. It seems to be his genetic style. It is a game of smoke and mirrors. And although it may work in a secret privately held company, it does not work if you are attempting to manage the unwieldy affairs of a nation.

Foreign Affairs Magazine spends its entire current issue detailing many of Trump’s erratic obsessions and mal-maneuvers. Consistently, he executive-orders something that directly contradicts specific objectives he alleges to support.

From meticulous investigative reporter, analyst, and commentator Rachel Maddox to Fox ideologue commentators, the press is kept busy noting his repeated illogical gaffs. I don’t want to confuse my commentary by listing examples. The corporate-owned publishing and TV industry is full of them. They are unavoidable they are so blatant.

I believe that one must be a denier of objective fact-based reality to still admire and support this administration. One must either not have the time or the intellectual capacity to assess facts and draw rational cognitive conclusions from them to continue clinging to this erratic experiment in mushy management.

It is ehttps://howellhurst.com/hh/wordpress/wp-admin/admin.php?page=jetpack#/dashboardmbarrassing. When John Kennedy faced the Cuban Missile crisis, before making a public announcement, he as commander in chief ordered all leaders of all segments of the Federal Government to pass through him personally any public comments they wished to make on the subject.

Kennedy thereby, with one smart directive, consolidated all government voices into one voice. He invited all his advisors to advise him, but he put them on formal commander in chief notice to keep their mouths shut until he had made a decision how all members of his team were to deal with the Russian missiles in Cuba.

That required real management skill to insure simultaneously that his team and the entire world knew what he was doing. It required something else: a fine brain and a conservative, logical, reasoned approach to issues endangering the security of the United States.

We do not have such leadership in America today. I don’t think the present leadership possesses the intellectual capacity to learn how to acquire the mental discipline to navigate the country on a sound heading.

The entire Ship of State is as off course as the lost Carrier task force. And, as Foreign Affairs Magazine documents, and I as an ocean sailor agree, that is a dangerous way to sail a boat.