“White House officials are furious with Bill Pulte, the Federal Housing Finance Agency director, who talked the president into suggesting a 50-year mortgage plan,” says the lede to a Politico story that at no point simply draws the obvious conclusion that the President of the United States of America is a mental invalid who can be “sold a bill of goods” on something so patently fucking stupid.
Pulte “just sold POTUS a bill of goods that wasn’t necessarily accurate. He said ‘FDR did it, you can do it, it’s gonna be a big thing.’ But he didn’t tell him about all the unintended consequences,” a person “familiar with the situation granted anonymity to discuss internal thinking” told Politico, as though they were talking about their irresponsible younger half-brother who should not be letting their Alzheimer’s patient dad use the stove to make soup and not a supposed billionaire real estate developer who as such should have an encyclopedic knowledge of property finance instruments.
“Bad advice” is the excuse you use when a complex military special-ops mission to eliminate a dangerous terrorist goes wrong. Or some arcane public health policy revamp unintentionally ends up misdirecting a resource critical to other programs. Or an energy credit initiative creates a loophole that unscrupulous actors exploit to loot public coffers without making any meaningful investments in electrical grid infrastructure. Some experts have a tendency to overestimate their own expertise or simply lie and that can overwhelm the judgment of an otherwise competent and lucid leader.
That’s not what happened here. Trump’s a fucking idiot and one feeling pressured by his own failures to make good on his campaign of lies, so he said yes to the monumentally stupid idea of offering 50-year mortgages without actually considering the implications of it. And the Alzheimer patient’s daughter screaming at her dipshit brother for playing Xbox when he was supposed to be watching dad only goes so far as an analogy since she’s not in denial about the old man’s condition.