The honeymoon period for Steve Mnuchin, as for the rest of the Trump administration, did not last long. But for the first few weeks of his tenure as secretary of the Treasury, Mnuchin was still giddy over the potential to slash the nation’s tax rates and unleash that sweet, pent-up economic growth. “Let me first say that our economic agenda, the number one issue is growth and the first, most important thing that will impact growth is a tax plan,” Mnuchin gushed on CNBC, still glowing after being confirmed by the Senate the week before. “So we are committed to pass tax reform. It will be very significant.” The plan would, he said, be done by August, when Congress leaves for recess.

That was before Donald Trump and the House G.O.P. leadership spectacularly failed to repeal or replace Obamacare in March, something that Trump had insisted he would have to do before getting to tax reform. Strike one for that August deadline, and for the notion that Trump—who said he would scrap the Affordable Care Act “on day one”—had any sway with Congress. The upshot was that the White House would be moving on to tax reform, Trump said, giving Mnuchin a fighting shot at hitting his self-imposed late-summer target. But then, over the last week, the house of cards came tumbling down again. Trump announced that, actually, he wanted to give health care another go, despite failing twice. The Associated Press reported that the White House had been forced to ditch its original tax reform plan, and would be starting from scratch. Congressional Republicans continue to disagree over key funding mechanisms. Gary Cohn started sending smoke signals that the project could take longer than anticipated.

On Monday, Mnuchin admitted that the jig was up. A tax overhaul by August, he told the Financial Times on Monday, was “highly aggressive to the point of not realistic.” So naturally, Donald Trump, he of literally no impulse control or forethought, had this to say on Tuesday, once again throwing his Treasury secretary under the bus:

“We’re in very good shape on tax reform. We have the concept of the plan. We're going to be announcing it very soon. But health care, we have to get the health care taken care of, and as soon as health care takes care of we are going to march very quickly. You're going to watch. We're going to surprise you. Right, Steve Mnuchin? Right?”

Clearly, the president has not yet made it to the “Nobody knew [tax reform] could be so complicated” stage of the learning process. That sound you hear is Steve Mnuchin calling up his old buddies in the foreclosure industry and asking if they’ve heard of any employment opportunities for a senior manager with plenty of experience under his belt.

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Donald Trump is a hypocrite part CXXXVII

On Tuesday afternoon, Donald Trump signed an executive order initiating a 220-day review process that will “focus on preventing foreign workers with H-1B visas from . . . undercutting American labor at less cost,” which, in the Trump administration’s eyes, is “an abuse” of the system. Whether or not Trump‘s mandate to “Buy American, Hire American” will meaningfully translate to more jobs for Americans and, conversely, less jobs for immigrants, particularly in Silicon Valley, or if today’s E.O. was simply yet another photo-op, remains to be seen. What is clear, and likely will not come as a shock to anyone paying an iota of attention to the reality TV show-in-chief, is that as a businessman, Trump (and his brethren) didn’t always buy American or hire American, as he now wants to require companies to do. CNBC enumerates Trump’s many instances of hypocrisy: