TRUMP | U.S. TRUMP, AMERICA'S BOY KING: GOLF AND TELEVISION WON'T MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN

President Donald Trump waits to greet Denmark's Prime Minister Lars Lokke Rasmussen outside the West Wing of the White House before a meeting on March 30 in Washington, DC.BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/AFP/GETTY

The week that began on August 8, 2011, found President Barack Obama in the midst of whatThe New York Times would call “the most dismal stretch of his presidency.” Days before, Congress had finally managed to strike a deal on raising the debt ceiling, thus averting a disastrous default on the national debt. But the process had been long and hideous, like an ugly domestic argument waged in front of the neighbors. On the 5th, a Friday, Standard & Poor’s had handed the United States its first ever credit-rating downgrade, citing a lack of “predictability of American policymaking and political institutions.”

Obama tried to calm the nation with a Monday afternoon speech in which he declared the nation’s economic woes were “eminently solvable.” The financial markets disagreed, with the Dow Jones Industrial Average taking a 635-point dive that day. There was talk of a double-dip recession. And there was anger at Obama, who saw his approval rating drop to 40 percent, the lowest yet of his presidency. Seeking a respite, Obama went golfing that Saturday, ahead of an “economic bus tour” of the Midwest.

The following Monday, the 15th, there came a tweet from Donald Trump, host of the popularApprentice franchise. He’d recently become a hero of the right for insisting Obama may have been born a Muslim and outside the United States. It was not his first tweet needling Obama, but it was the first on a subject to which Trump would return time and again: the president’s love of golf. “@BarackObama played golf yesterday,” Trump’s tweet announced. “Now he heads to a 10 day vacation in Martha's Vineyard. Nice work ethic.” (Obama had actually played golf two days before, and his vacation wasn’t until week’s end.)

Trump pounded this plaint for the next five years, even as the economy improved, the Affordable Care Act provided health care to millions and the war in Afghanistan came to an end. Every time Obama picked up a golf club, it was incontrovertible proof that he was incapable of feeling (or addressing) the pain of ordinary Americans. Obama, as Trump put it in a tweet in 2011, “plays golf to escape work while America goes down the drain.” His last tweet on the subject came in the summer of 2016, when he was already the Republican nominee for president.

Were he to reach the White House, Trump said, he wouldn’t make the same mistake for which he’d been lambasting Obama since 2011. “I'm going to be working for you,” he told supporters in August 2016. “I'm not going to have time to go play golf.”

Now that he’s president, Trump frequently departs the White House and spends the weekend golfing at either his South Florida resort, Mar-a-Lago, or his country club in the New Jersey suburb of Bedminster. The promise he’d made a year before was discarded so quickly, you have to wonder if he even remembers making it. Politico did the legwork: George W. Bush didn’t golf for the first five months of his presidency, while Obama stayed away from his beloved links for four months following his inauguration. Trump held out for all of two weeks. He has visited a golf club 40 times since taking office in January, according to the self-explanatory site Trump Golf Count, which estimates the forays have cost American taxpayers $55 million. Another Trump tracker, this one by The New York Times, finds that his visits to Trump-branded properties total 56 days, nearly a third of his time in office.

Trump’s friends say golf is important to his well-being, just as cycling and rock climbing are de rigueur for the younger titans of Silicon Valley. “He is always working,” longtime confidant Roger J. Stone Jr. tells me, “even while socializing, playing golf or traveling. He is constantly asking questions, taking notes and placing phone calls.

“A better question would be, Does he ever really relax?”

Not really, says Sam Nunberg, a former close Trump associate who was fired from his campaign in 2015. Nunberg tells me he “never had a boss who worked harder and was more 24/7 than the president. And I’ve worked for billionaires.” As for the golfing, Nunberg insists that Trump works as he plays. “He has a schedule. Remember, he went to military school,” Nunberg explains, alluding to Trump’s five years of secondary schooling at the New York Military Academy. “He knows how to keep his employees on their feet.”

His many detractors see it differently. If the golf bothers them—and, judging by the number of websites devoted to chronicling Trump’s excursions, it does—it is only because they see it as symbolic of a lackadaisical approach to the presidency. “This is the laziest, most ignorant president in history,” says MSNBC host Lawrence O’Donnell. Sure, take MSNBC with a grain of nonpartisan salt, but all those who believe, as O’Donnell does, that Trump is the most ineffectual occupant of the Oval Office in the nation’s history cite, for one, his well-reported lack of involvement in congressional legislative efforts. They point to the numbers like doctors surveying grim lab results: only one solo press conference since his inauguration (he has held joint press conferences with foreign heads of state, after which he usually entertains questions from the press), and just a single foray west of the Mississippi since taking office (and that for a campaign rally). He’s visited neither Iraq nor Afghanistan.

In the first six months of his presidency, Trump found the time to send 1,029 tweets. They include accusations of Obama “tapping” Trump Tower, juvenile taunts hurled at North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, warmed-over insinuations about the Clintons cribbed from Fox News, complaints about Attorney General Jeff Sessions, complaints about “the Republicans” and endless laments about “fake news,” many of them followed by assertions that are comically untrue.

Of course, many critics want Trump to fail. To them, reports of his ineptitude may be the only good news coming out of the White House. As the editorial writer Steve Chapman of theChicago Tribune mused in May: “The people who fear that Trump is trying to subvert democracy, persecute Muslims and dismantle the rule of law can take heart that he won't put much effort into it.”

The Resolute desk is seen in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, DC on March 31.REX/AP

It’s not just Trump. The entire White House is in disarray. White House political adviser Steve Bannon once grandly boasted that the Trump administration would undertake a “deconstruction of the administrative state,” but controlled shrinkage of the federal government would have required far more focus than the exhausting disarray now at work. The Washington Post, for example, has found that Trump has done little to fill “key positions” in his administration, with only 50 confirmed so far. Another 165 have been nominated, and while the White House will blame Democratic “obstructionism,” that hardly explains the 357 positions for which no one has been nominated.

Trump has held several campaign-style rallies since becoming president. He is good at these, and he enjoys them, as do his most ardent supporters. Even non-campaign events, like his appearance at the Boy Scouts of America National Scout Jamboree in late July, tend to remind us less of Ronald Reagan battling communism than of Donald Trump battling Hillary Clinton. That isn’t an accident. During the campaign, Trump did work hard, because it was on his own behalf, the glory of rapturous crowds redounding directly to him, not to some abstract institution of government. He branded himself as the can-do outsider who’d build that wall and lock her up. He branded his opponents as crooked, lying, low energy, emasculated, corrupt, crazy. It was a marketing campaign, and to Trump’s apparent dismay, it worked just a little too well.

Trump does have defenders more principled than Hannity and the Fox News commentariat. One of them is Greg Ip, a business-friendly economics commentator for The Wall Street Journal. In late July, Ip disputed the claim that Trump is a “do-nothing president.” Acknowledging that Trump hasn’t scored any legislative touchdowns, Ip claimed that Trump’s appointees “have begun nudging the economy and the country in a more conservative, pro-business direction.” Then again, Trump was never about incrementalism. “Make America great again” was policy shock and awe, not small-bore executive memoranda celebrated as if each were the Louisiana Purchase.

A member of the Secret Service walks by President Donald Trump's personal helicopter at Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Florida on April 9.CARLOS BARRIA/REUTERS

Unable to take credit for his own achievements, Trump has laid claim to those of his predecessor. Obama took office during the Great Recession, when the unemployment rate was 7.8 percent and rising. Eight years later, as he prepared to leave the White House, it was 4.7 percent, a nine-year low. And yet Trump cites “absolutely tremendous economic progress,” as if he were the one who pulled the nation out of the foreclosure crisis. He brags about having quelled the flow of immigrants entering the United States illegally, but it was under Obama that illegal immigration fell to a 44-year nadir. Trump has, however, managed to keep out tourists. America has become so great, international travelers aren’t coming like they used to.

If you are one of the millions of Americans counting the days until Trump is no longer president, his failures may seem like victories. Except he is your president, and nobody wants to live in a nation in decline, a superpower devolving into a laughingstock. And while several of Trump’s proposals are either unworkable, unhinged or potentially disastrous, that’s not true for all of his ideas. There is infrastructure, above all, blessed infrastructure. The firing of 59 Tomahawk missiles at the Shayrat air base in Syria was a sign that Trump knows Bashar al-Assad is a butcher of innocents who must be deposed. So why not marshal international support to remove him? And why expend so much energy keeping out the refugees who are Assad’s victims?“His work ethic is just fine,” says Joe Walsh, the former Tea Party congressman from Illinois who now hosts a radio show. “His problem is he's focusing on the wrong things.”

President Donald Trump walks back to the Oval Office after speaking in the Rose Garden during an event with the American Legion Boys Nation and the American Legion Auxiliary Girls Nation at the White House in Washington, DC on July 26.JABIN BOTSFORD/THE WASHINGTON POST/GETTY

Some have likened Trump’s governing style to Reagan’s. Lou Cannon, who covered Reagan’s presidency for The Washington Post and later authored five books on his two terms in office, disagrees with any attempt to burnish Trump’s reputation by comparisons to the hero of modern American conservatism. “I can’t think of a single characteristic they share,” Cannon says.

Reagan was “much more diligent than President Trump is, in every respect,” Cannon tells me confidently. That diligence extended to the way he treated others, including White House staffers and political opponents. “He might not have known the details of the missile thing,” Cannon concedes in reference to 1983’s Strategic Defense Initiative, often derided in the press as “Star Wars” for its futuristic vision of national security. “But he’d know if an aide had a sick mother.” For example, after his mother died, Cannon got a call of heartfelt consolation from the president.

“Reagan had a conscious management style,” the historian reminds. “He wasn’t lazy.”

A Modern Harding

“Chicago Wine Party” was the seventh episode of the seventh season of Married...With Children. It premiered on November 1, 1992, a Sunday. The following Tuesday, the nation elected William Clinton as its next president.

Only five days later, a kind of despair had already set in, at least according to an unflattering report in The New York Times. Clinton’s supporters, wrote David Rosenbaum, “clearly recognized that the policy changes Mr. Clinton promised daily during the campaign can only take effect slowly, incrementally and painfully.”

Bundy was waging a political fight of his own. The premise of “Chicago Wine Party” involves a proposed 2-cent beer tax. About halfway through the episode, Bundy, bedecked in anti-beer-tax buttons, gives a rousing address:

The USA has been run too long by people who know the issues. People that watch the news on TV, read books, generally pay attention... well, no more. 'Cause now it's time that WE had a say in the future of America. Family...the Bundys are gonna elect a President.

It took 25 years, but the Bundys now have their man in the Oval Office. And while the election of Trump may have been a middle finger thrust at the coastal establishment by the white working class, it was also an expression of grievances legitimate and pervasive. Trump channeled those grievances masterfully for his campaign, but the urgency of those days is gone.

A protester walks toward Mar-a-Lago estate, where President Donald Trump stayed for Easter weekend in Palm Beach, Florida, on April 15.YURI GRIPAS/REUTERS

Trump is a fighter, but before November 8, 2016, he only fought for himself. He never served in the military. He rarely gave to charity. “He’s a terribly self-indulgent individual,” says Robert Dallek, the noted presidential historian, who doesn’t think the weight of the presidency has “fully taken hold yet.” It may never. In his firing of FBI Director James Comey, his humiliation of Attorney General Jeff Sessions, his casual disregard of ethics rules, Trump has made it clear that he sees the White House as little more than a branch office of his marketing business, the Trump Organization.

As his crude dismissal of Comey demonstrated, Trump has little interest in understanding the scope of the executive branch, of limits set by tradition and the U.S. Constitution. And he will always defend his gilded image, even when he should be defending loftier goals. There have been countless reports in recent months that Trump supporters “don’t care” about the investigations of his campaign’s potential collusion with Russian hackers and the Kremlin. What that statement—often treated like a revelation—misses is the obvious fact that Trumpdeeply cares about the Russia probes. Judging by his Twitter account, there are many days when he cares about nothing else.

Dallek compares Trump unfavorably to presidents like Lyndon B. Johnson, who endlessly “cajoled” legislators to pass landmark civil rights and anti-poverty bills. For all his dealmaking skills, Trump hasn’t shown much ability to negotiate with Congress, probably because it would require a knowledge of what members of Congress want, need and, above all, fear. And that would require doing homework. It’s much easier to just threaten Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowski on Twitter. It’s also a lot less effective.

Trump reminds Dallek of Warren G. Harding, whom he calls “the least effective president” before the current one. “He didn’t have the big picture or the small picture,” Dallek says of the man known as Wobbly Warren. “He was not very bright.”

Trump plainly wants his legacy to reflect that slogan on the baseball hat donned by his supporters. He wants to be the man who pulled America out of its postindustrial malaise, silenced talk of national decline and China’s ascent. But he can’t do that if he keeps sinking into his own debilitating malaise, weighed down by his shortcomings and an unwillingness to address them. He is entitled to rage at insults and defeats. Achilles raged, too. But then Achilles fought, leaving aside personal slights to charge the ramparts of Troy. Trump’s approach is the approach of Al Bundy. It begins in rage. It ends there, too. Both the president and the shoe salesman are driven by their unreasonable demands and unsoothable grievances to the couch, where they sit in front of the television, stewing.