CHRIS CRUCIAL: A MAJOR unforced error by Donald Trump 🤦‍♂️

PLUS: The 1 thing you need to know from the RFK hearing

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1. The Gang that Couldn’t Shoot Straight 🔫

(These are not members of the Trump White House)

In the first week of Donald Trump’s second term in office, he and his senior aides came in with a plan and relentlessly executed it through a series of executive orders and other strong-arm tactics.

It looked, to all the world, like they had their shit together.

Then came Monday night when, seemingly without warning, the Office of Management and Budget released a directive to freeze ALL federal grants and loans — totaling trillions of dollars.

The plan, such as there was one, appeared to be to put all grants and loans on ice until the administration could assess whether or not the money was being spent on so-called “woke” programs including diversity, equity and inclusion programs that Trump had eliminated via executive order.

Except, well, it wasn’t very well thought out. Or thought out at all. Here’s the New York Times on the breadth of the freeze:

The precise scope and impact of the freeze was revealed in party by the declarations of state officials in a lawsuit filed Tuesday to block the administration’s order. In Arizona, $200 million was inaccessible as of midday Tuesday.

Colorado, Rhode Island and New Jersey said they had been locked out of the “Payment Management Services” system, which processes billions of dollars each in year in grant payments to the states.

Washington State said that as much as 32 percent of its fiscal year budget was potentially at risk, and that even a temporary pause “would interfere with critical state programs” including substance abuse treatment, school lunches, highway maintenance and child care for low-income workers.

On Wednesday around midday, less than 36 hours after the initial directive,OMB sent a terse memo making clear that the freeze had been “rescinded.”

Here’s a visual explanation of what happened — via “The Simpsons” (the part of Donald Trump is played by Mayor “Diamond” Joe Quimby):

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt tried to insist that “this is NOT a rescission of the federal funding freeze” but, of course, it was.

This sort of stuff was the everyday reality of Trump’s first term. Over and over again, he and his administration would make some big move only to have to pull it back or revise it or see it overturned by the courts. (To be clear: This happened with Joe Biden too — particularly on student loan forgiveness.)

In fact, a number of senior political types — in both parties — would confide to me that they weren’t all that worried about Trump’s ability to make drastic changes because he and the people he listened to were ill informed at best and incompetent at worst.

Cold comfort, maybe. But definitely something people told me!

But that has NOT been the story of Trump’s second term to date. I have been shocked by the efficiency with which he has pursued an attempt to consolidate power in the executive branch — and to bend the broader federal government to his views.

To be clear: This is not an endorsement (or a rejection) of what Trump has done. Rather, it’s to note that he looked like he a) knew what he wanted to do and b) knew how to do it. And that was a big surprise to me at least.

But, on his 8th day in office, Trump stepped on a rake. I, again, give you “The Simpsons”:

So, here’s the key question: Is the first week of Trump’s 2nd term the rule and this botched federal freeze announcement the exception? Or are we looking at a 2nd term that looks a lot like the first one — with Trump lurching from controversy to controversy and looking, for all the world, like someone who didn’t, uh, read the book?

Let me offer a necessarily-incomplete answer: