Morning Fog

Delusions of Grandeur - As Gambia Goes, So Goes Our Nation?

I confess. We watched the ABC David Muir interview with Trump. We felt we needed to be informed.

Disclaimer: rather than watch it in real time, and have to lose sleep with the predictably awful revelations dancing in our heads, we recorded it and watched it the next day. I suspect this is good advice for anyone who anticipates getting a dose of Trump. 

So as I said, yes, we watched. And were appalled. 

Let's concede that some of the man's ideas are viable (e.g., the security of our borders can and should be improved), even if his proposed solutions are either draconian, costly, impractical, or all three. 

But the issue is not so much policy, as the continuing strong impression he gives us: that he is so "puffectly" convinced of his own merit and infallibility that he continues to obsess about losing the popular vote. One week in is early, but not too early to conclude Trump continues to "believe" in "alternative facts."  It's worse because we assume his advisors have sought to talk him out of such idiocy, and he has refused. One columnist I read recently suggested Trump isn't "lying" when he makes these incredible pronouncements, because he actually believes them. If so, that would seem to be the textbook definition of delusion. Now that he's President, the best that can be said then is that the grandeur of his office is besmirched by his continuing delusions about himself.

Synchronous with Trump's first week in office, another story was unfolding in tiny Gambia's capital city Banjul, where a president voted out of office was refusing to leave, prompting intervention by Senegalese forces. "Groundhog Day" is only a week away now - I had to wonder whether we'll relive the Gambian experience right here in Washington DC, in four years (or eight?), with Trump crying foul, refusing to accept the election results. Would we need to call on Canadian and Mexican (¡Mexican!) troops to help us out, or see him carried away screaming in a straightjacket? The mind boggles. But so does Trump's inordinate vanity. He must, as the saying, get over himself.  He seems constitutionally incapable of doing so. 

 

Presidential Inaugurations - And Farewells

Today, Donald Trump will be inaugurated as the 45th President of the United States. Inaugurations are important as the beginning of a new administration, but they are pretty routine affairs. An oath, a bible, a speech, a march and some parties. But substantively they are more of a wrap-up of the campaign than a fresh look at the future. I feel sure Trump, being Trump, will find some ways to break with tradition. Maybe he can find a new oath, or deliver his entire address in sentences of five words or fewer.  I don't think we will learn much from watching.

More interesting, I think, are Presidential farewells, in which the public can benefit from an outgoing President's distillation of whatever he has learned from the experience of four or eight years of battle. He may choose to brag a bit, or even a lot, but if he is a thinker at all, he will impart wisdom that will be quoted by future historians and politicians. It's a tradition set by our first President, good ol' truthful George, who warned against the development of political parties, advice that was immediately ignored but which we might look back on wishfully today, as the Mitch McConnell dinosaurs roam our landscape.

Much more recently, gee, wasn't Obama's farewell address last week a really graceful, class act? Not something I suspect we'll ever see DT matching. It's too soon to know what, if anything, that Obama said will become part of political lore, but it will likely be remembered a while for the circumstances under which it was delivered.

At this juncture, however, I'd like to focus on a different farewell, one offered by another Republican - Dwight Eisenhower. You may remember Ike as the fellow who, despite being himself a military man of high reputation, warned against the insidious potential of the "military-industrial complex." Yet a brief glimpse at Trump's cabinet picks shows that that very phenomenon has arrived.  Eisenhower was concerned about costs, but also about the power of an oligarchy.  Today, wherever we look, even if we occasionally see appointees who aren't actually millitary or industrial, the foxes are in charge of the henhouses. Eisenhower would have known what to think of that, and so would his Democratic predecessor Harry Truman.  It's just plain poor judgment, and dangerous for democracy.  So begins the Trump Presidency.

 

 

More About Respect

Last week I addressed the question of appropriate "respect" for our President-elect. For more and better on that topic, see Dana Milbank's column in today's Washington Post. 

Trump - A Nightmare, Or Remotely, Possibly, A Dream?

I've written my share (and more, probably) of critical posts about The Donald - I don't think he's Presidential timber, and most of what he spouts as policy is pretty awful.

Now and then, though, I get some weird flashes that suggest he might actually .... do some good as President.

How, you ask?  Good question.  There's a lot we don't know about Trump but one thing that seems fairly clear now is that he's a joker.  His obfuscation, his seemingly off-the-cuff pronouncements, his sure sense (whether calculated or not) of enraging his opponents and/or playing to his base; his flip-flopping -- all these are part and parcel of the persona. His style of baiting-by-utterance is really pretty common in certain circles. 

Second, we know (or think) that he sees himself more as a hard-headed and pragmatic businessman, than as a dogmatic politician.  After all, he once embraced (some) liberal causes in the past. He is playing along with the Republican Party (in a way, they're the guys that brought him to the dance), including even charmers like Mitch McConnell.  He needs them. How long can he, will he, tolerate some of their ridiculous extravagances of political regressiveness before seeing through them ? Is he not just playing along with them, but playing them too?  By October this year, when, after all their 60+ years of  fighting health care at every turn, and after so much wasted time voting to repeal Obamacare more times than we can count, they report they still don't have their alternative ready, what will Trump do?  

So, for those who want a faint ray of optimism, dream on:  Trump, once inaugurated, quickly  steps into a phone booth and emerges, no longer as Mr. Smegma, but as Mr. Pragma.  He backs away from his fiery populist rhetoric and gets to work on businesslike problem-solving, pushing back against the reactionaries in "his" party, insisting on accomplishments that will bring some of the improvements he has promised.  In so doing, he breaks the confrontational, superpartisan deadlock of the current Republican leadership. That would indeed be an accomplishment, for all of us, and even for the Republican Party, which might thereby be saved from its otherwise inevitable atrophy and irrelevance.

Admittedly, it's unlikely.  Extremely unlikely.  And yet ... his personality lends it a very remote glimmer of possibility. 

There's an interesting corollary too:  If the above-outlined scenario ever occurred, Trump would need allies somewhere. It's a good argument that the Democrats' tactic should be not to combat Trump at every turn, not to become ever more left-radical, but instead to see if the tender lamb of compromise can be brought back into the chamber without being slaughtered.  

Respect

Sean Spicer, who by most accounts is soon to be the public voice of Trumpism, complains recently that the media still aren't giving Trump "the respect he deserves."

But let's look at what Trump "deserves."  It's easy to say that any human being unqualifiedly deserves respect (kudos, Aretha Franklin). OK, we can give Trump that one - he is clearly human. We know this because of his many human qualities, such as constant changes of opinion, a tendency to lie but to be unhappy when someone calls him on it; vanity, and selfishness. 

And we respect people for things they have achieved, even if we may think that what they achieved is undesirable, or even reprehensible. Tycoons may amass fortunes by dealing ruthlessly with competitors or labor unions, so we might respect their accomplishment without applauding their means of achieving it.  Again, Trump merits respect in this sense too - he's rich, and a lot of people respect that.  He's famous, and many respect that. When Zsa Zsa Gabor died a month or so ago, someone commented that she was one of the first people who became famous without being famous FOR anything.  Such celebrity, and the respect it brings, are common these days - Trump is a Zsa Zsa for the 21st century.

Respect for power? Absolutely. If you crave power yourself, others who have attained it may automatically garner your respect.  So Trump respects Putin. And you have to respect someone who has control over you or who can make or break you. Mr. Spicer presumably respects Trump. As potential victims/beneficaries of Trump's decisions, American citizens need to respect him for his power to do them good or ill. In war and diplomacy, respect comes to powerful nations and their leaders in similar ways - for fear of what they can do. Putin respects Trump. For obvious reasons, this kind of power-based respect is often either weak, counterfeit, or temporary. When power is lost, so is respect. Put a question mark after "Putin respects Trump?" 

Yet I think Spicer is really claiming something more for Trump. He wants acknowledgment of political legitimacy for someone who is a political bastard. Is it enough that Trump won the election? Leaving the popular vote aside (our system is not founded on that, so let's forget it), there are many questions about how the campaign was won. First are the ethics of his tactics, ranging from simple political "white lies," to serious misrepresentations, on through casting doubt on the fundamentals of the electoral system, and formulating his message to appeal to all the most anti-democratic elements of our political spectrum.  Not to mention the issue of Russian meddling. Trump is trying desperately to swat down the Russian connection, but his efforts to blame it on the Democrats make him less legitimate, and his bald dismissal that it "didn't affect the outcome" is unprovable at best, and irrelevant to the real issue.

Even if Republican operatives and voters have no difficulty seeing Trump as legit, the political opposition will very naturally have difficulty in doing so. Meanwhile those whose job it is to remain neutral and objective (i.e., the media, including those many elements that favor Trump) must continue to withhold "respect."  Mr. Spicer's job, beginning January 20, will be to create the grounds on which that respect could be built, to convincingly explain away all the doubts. If he is wise, the task must seem both Herculean and Sisyphean; if he expects "respect" in this case just to pop out full-blown, he's unwise. 

 

 

Teachable Moments

Even as I was noting last week that the winter solstice has a role in triggering optimism, there was plenty of empirical evidence to suggest it's true.

Climate scientists profess to believe that they can polish their presentation of the facts and persuade our future President that climate change is real.  People who have health insurance for the first time in their lives (but who voted for Trump because "they didn't think he really meant it") hold out hope that he'll reverse course on repealing the ACA when he realizes how much they will lose. The intelligence community expects that the evidence it will present today to the President-in-waiting will leave him convinced that political cyberattacks were the work of Putin and his gang, and perhaps even that Russia is not our "friend."  I'm sure we all hope that the man, once inaugurated, will do something to cure his Twitter diarrhea.  And so on.

I fear though that all these cockeyed optimists will find their expectations far from the mark.

The real issue, I think, is whether Trump is temperamentally, psychologically, teachable. All the evidence suggests he is not. Was it the old Pogo cartoon in which one character's catchphrase used to be, "Don't confuse me with facts, my mind is made up!"?  No matter; Trump is a guy who comes to most issues with a preconceived opinion. Moreover, as he tells us himself, he knows things better than any expert - knows ISIS better than the generals, and knows cyber-espionage better than intelligence experts. And if his own predilections and prejudices weren't enough to render him resistant to conflicting opinions and facts, his surrounding himself with people just like himself should help insure that no errant doubts will arise.

Persuade him? Educate him? It will be a tough go. Of course there are those who believe when he is President (believe it or not from his public statements and fawning press coverage, he isn't yet!) he will become some other person. Failing that, however, this apprentice may have to be fired before he realizes that preconceptions aren't a sound basis for governing.