Ever the boy who acts out to get the teacher’s attention, Donald Trump is staying true to himself, issuing a flurry of ill-conceived orders, tweeting blasts at the media and dispatching his aides to assert “alternative facts.”
With a stumbling swagger, he spent the first week of his presidency creating one mess after another, proving himself immune to the awesome responsibility that comes with inhabiting the office held by George Washington and Abraham Lincoln.
The presidency isn’t enlarging Trump. It is reducing him to his essence; a man who acts with fear-based impulse and childishly mocks those who were moved by the pain of his victims.
On Saturday and Sunday, Americans flocked to airports across the country to protest Trump’s order temporarily banning refugees from six Muslim-majority countries and indefinitely banning them from a seventh, Syria. His order was immediately blocked by a federal judge, and leaders around the world decried America’s retreat from its basic values.
Even the United Kingdom’s foreign minister, Boris Johnson, who was once considered his country’s version of Trump, called the executive order “divisive and wrong.”
Trump, who shows no signs of acting as an ordinary president, is no doubt thrilling some of his supporters. However he does hold the most powerful job on the planet, and the planet would be calmed if he engaged in some on-the-job training. Were he inclined to reflect, he could consider the chaotic start of his presidency and absorb a few lessons.
1. America is exceptional, but not in the way he thinks
In Trump’s view — which seems framed by his dystopian pessimism, “American carnage,” and movies about World War II, the United States is a powerful but besieged nation that must turn its back on much of the world, including refugees. This impulse denies the spirit of hope, generosity and courage that makes America great and replaces it with a defensive crouch.
As Trump pulled up the drawbridge on refugees and more than 130 million Muslims, he acted with remarkably un-American cruelty, implementing the kind of religious prejudice that the Constitution rejects. People here and abroad understand that the United States was built and is continuously enriched by immigrants and strengthened by unmatched diversity. America’s exceptional image in the world includes a strength based on open engagement and confidence — in our values and ideals — which were betrayed by the irrational fear Trump demonstrated with his executive order.
2. Other nations are sovereign
For a man who has spent a lifetime insisting that he is a smart and strategic fighter, our new president seemed clueless as he sparred with Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto over his demand that the United States be paid for constructing its own southern border wall.
Because it would be readily breached, the wall that Trump promised to build as he campaigned for election is more symbol than necessity.
However, he maintained his demand in order to show he will keep his promises. The trouble here is that the people of Mexico, and Pena Nieto himself, refused to be cowed by the bully of the North. Mexico’s President enjoyed a surge in popularity as he canceled a planned state visit to Washington, and now Trump faces the prospect of building his folly with up to $25 billion of American tax dollars.
Stubborn to a fault, Trump is considering a tariffs war to fund the wall, but this money would be paid by American consumers in the form of higher prices for everything from cars to Mexican beer. The same tariffs would damage the Mexican economy and thereby revive the flow of immigrants northward, as people seek opportunity.
3. The White House always leaks
In private business, Trump used a combination of rewards (high pay) and threats (lawsuits) to keep his team united in support of his public image. Over the course of decades, few staffers spoke in ways that contradicted the boss. In Washington, Trump’s first week in office saw insiders confessing to The New York Times that they have schemed to stop the president’s Twitter rants and pushed back against his impulsiveness. The Washington Post reported that some aides regard him as a “clueless child.”
The reality of life in the national capital includes the fact that everyone is wired into the press, and leaking persists because it works. A president who has likened the intelligence community to Nazis, as Trump did, cannot deny that he did so and expect to go unchallenged.
Similarly, a president who requires that aides support him with lies and distortions, as Trump did in his pique over the most crowds at his inaugural, is inviting the same aide to give off-the-record complaints to friendly reporters.
Aides like press secretary Sean Spicer and advisor Kellyanne Conway were political actors before Trump, and they will remain in their profession after he departs the scene. They should be expected to tend to their own images and relationships — with an eye toward a time when Trump is gone.
4. The campaign is over
CNN’s Poppy Harlow went to Kentucky last week to gauge how Trump’s core supporters regard his frenzied start. Many seemed baffled by the controversies stirred by the new president, especially Trump’s focus on a conspiracy theory about millions of illegally-cast votes.
“Just move on,” was the message voiced by a local judge named Steven Mays. “I don’t care” about voter fraud said Leighandra Shouse, “I have more important things to worry about.”
The specious claim about fraudulent votes represents Trump in all of his irrational anxiety. Having spent years trying to delegitimize his predecessor with suggestions that he wasn’t a US citizen, Trump apparently fears that his election, which depended on the way the Electoral College favors rural states, isn’t quite kosher because he lost the popular vote by almost 3 million votes. His mandate has been further weakened by evidence of Russian meddling in the campaign.
Altogether, the election outcome is so discomforting for Trump that he seems unable to stop campaigning. The self-defeating aspect of this behavior is evident to people like Judge Mays who recommend that Trump let go of the past and focus on his new job.
By talking about the non-existent fraud and declaring he will order an investigation, Trump keeps the uncertainty about his election alive.
5. Reality demands flexibility
Presidential failures are often born of a commander-in-chief’s refusal to adapt. George W. Bush entered office with a keen hatred for Saddam Hussein based on the trouble the Iraqi dictator caused when his father was president. In the wake of the attacks of September 11, 2001, the Bush team focused on Hussein as the chief sponsor of terror. When scant evidence emerged to prove the case, the Bush team declared war anyway. The ill-conceived action resulted in a long, tragic war that marked Bush’s presidency as a failure and fully destabilized the Middle East.
Although Bush represents a stark example, all presidents have found that they must fight against preconceptions and maintain an open mind. Here a president’s leadership style matters. Those who sow fear in the hearts of their aides risk surrounding themselves with sycophants who deprive them of key information.
Imagine how different the Nixon presidency would have been if he had been served by more men and women who challenged his paranoid inclinations. Consider the trauma that Bill Clinton and the nation would have been spared if he could have been honest about Monica Lewinsky with an adviser who could have pushed him to deal with the scandal in an honest way.
The presidency confronts everyone who assumes the office with mind-bending challenges. The White House is both an isolating bubble and a fish bowl. The bubble makes it difficult for a president to hear and see what is going on in the world. The fish bowl can amplify a politician’s paranoia because, in many ways, he is being observed and criticized in a way that surely feels unfair, unsparing and unrelenting.
Those who have responded well to the demands of the job — Franklin Roosevelt, Ronald Reagan and, in some ways, Barack Obama — have been open-hearted and willing to learn. More attentive than attention-seeking, they studied the world and the problems that were presented to them and responded in creative ways. FDR defied a reluctant Congress to aid a besieged Great Britain. Reagan forged ties with Gorbachev. Obama reached out to the Muslim world.
So far Trump has shown no inclination to learn from these examples. Instead he’s behaving as if he’s the first person ever to hold the job, and he’s free to make up the rules as he goes along.