Obviously, nobody has yet dared to tell Trump that he did something both ludicrous<br />and vile by accusing President Barack Obama of wiretapping his campaign; instead, administration officials spent weeks trying to come up with something, anything, that would lend substance to the charge.<br />It’s clear the White House is proposing huge tax breaks for corporations<br />and the wealthy, with the breaks especially big for people who can bypass regular personal taxes by channeling their income into tax-privileged businesses — people, for example, named Donald Trump.<br />Every report from inside the White House conveys the impression<br />that Trump is like a temperamental child, bored by details and easily frustrated when things don’t go his way; being an effective staffer seems to involve finding ways to make him feel good and take his mind off news that he feels makes him look bad.<br />According to The Times, this left Treasury staff — who were nowhere near having a<br />plan ready to go — “speechless.” But nobody dared tell him it couldn’t be done.<br />Let’s not act as if that thing released on Wednesday, whatever it was, was something like, say,<br />the 2001 Bush tax cut; I strongly disapproved of that cut, but at least it was comprehensible.<br />The reason I use scare quotes here is that the single-page document the White House circulated<br />this week bore no resemblance to what people normally mean when they talk about a tax plan.<br />But that would require a certain level of maturity — which is a quality nowhere to be found in this White House.<br />The answer, according to the White House, was yes, or maybe no, or then again yes, depending on whom you asked and when you asked.<br />So why would the White House release such an embarrassing document?
