There’s still a small, increasingly fading hope in the United States — and indeed much of the world observing our “transition process” — that Donald Trump will suddenly transform through some magical wizardry into a more or less conventional president of the type we’ve seen in the 44 previous holders of that office.
But if you believe that’s going to happen, you haven’t been listening to his every utterance for the past 18 months.
As president #41, the now-beloved George H.W. Bush put it so memorably in the line written by the incomparable Peggy Noonan: “Read my lips.” Of course he was referring to the second half of that memorable phrase, namely, “no new taxes.”
That was 1988. By 1990, a Democratic Congress had pushed through any number of new taxes to cut the budget deficit, which Bush had to sign. Of course Bill Clinton brought that up in his run for the presidency two years later, and Bush became a one-term president.
There are several big differences today, however.
First, Trump has a Republican Congress that seems poised to slavishly ratify even the wackiest ideas and appointments. But second and most important, Donald Trump doesn’t seem to care very much at all what people say or think. He just plans to continue being The Donald.
So the world needs to quickly get back to lip reading. It also needs to recall every specific thing that Donald Trump says. Because he certainly seems to remember what the world has been saying about him.
Take his latest rounds with the media. First, he summoned the entire leadership of America’s television news juggernauts to his Trump Tower aerie in New York for what his mouthpiece, Kelleyanne Conway called a “fence-mending session,” then launched into a lengthy harangue about how bad a job they were doing covering him — and incidentally using most unflattering images. Oh and his strict off-the-record ground rules meant no one could report on any of this.
Apparently @realdonaldtrump still hasn’t learned that there’s no off-the-record with more than two people in the room, let alone scores of journos and their bosses.
But then we woke up on Tuesday and there was more. This time it was the print press — the granddaddy of them all — the august New York Times. The paper thought it had an off-the-record, then on-the-record sit-down interview with the President-elect in Trump Tower. At least that’s what the paper put out at 6:30 in the morning. Then, minutes later came Trump’s riposte: “I cancelled today’s meeting with the failing @nytimes when the terms and conditions of the meeting were changed at the last moment. Not nice.”
Nice. Clearly The Times hadn’t been reading its own clips.
But all this only scratches the surface, as Trump himself even suggests in his endless succession of tweets, which for the moment we will have to settle for in lieu of a press conference or even an on-the-record interview.
Indeed, President-elect Trump seemingly wants to dominate and control his own narrative. After kicking media leaders figuratively down the stairs of Trump Tower on Monday, he promptly released his own taped vision of his first 100 days (no questioners, no questions), then promptly tweeted that Nigel Farage, Britain’s Mr. Brexit, would make a great UK ambassador to the Trump court.
Despite British Prime Minister Theresa May pointing out that Downing Street names its own ambassadors, Boris Johnson, the UK’s Foreign Secretary, was asked questions about Trump’s suggestion Tuesday in the Houses of Parliament, and it has continued to be discussed as a serious option on UK media.
And the beat goes on. Yes, the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) is dead — at least to Trump. On his vast financial interests that everyone is waiting for him to divest — as have 44 of his predecessors — he tweeted, “Prior to the election it was well known that I have interests in properties all over the world. Only the crooked media makes this a big deal!”
Yes, the still-crooked media.
So when nations gathered in Morocco for the COP22 environmental conference last week, hoping to move to the next step in climate modification before the world drowns in melting ice, it would be good for them to take seriously the words of candidate Trump — global warming denier then and now.
And when European leaders gather Thursday with Ukraine’s president to explore that nation’s growing separation from Vladimir Putin’s Russia, they might listen to the drumbeat of praise for the Russian demagogue from his American counterpart that marked much of the political campaign season in the United States.
Yes, we would do well to heed Peggy Noonan’s words and read Donald Trump’s lips — and his tweets, a medium unavailable to Bush 41.