Trump’s Tweets Are Ruining Him, But Do His Fans Care?
Phase two of the remaking of Trump.
Noah Rothman 2018-01-03
An internal conflict over the trajectory of the GOP’s evolution in the Trump era quietly reached a turning point in late 2017 that has become clear only in hindsight. The “originals”–who joined Trump’s campaign when no other Republican political professionals would–have been purged or sidelined. The president has opted to outsource his legislative priorities to conventional Republicans in Congress, and he has delegated the conduct of foreign affairs to responsible administration officials. The contemptible alt-right and their “America First” allies are beside themselves even as erstwhile Trump skeptics in the GOP are suddenly finding a lot to like about this presidency. But there is a danger in all this success. As establishment-friendly Republicans succeed in hijacking Trump’s administration, they risk adopting the #MAGA movement’s most debilitating conceits. Responsible Republicans might just convince themselves of the need to ignore the most glaring defect of Trump’s presidency: the president.
For many of the president’s die-hard defenders, the notion that policy-related accomplishments are the only metric by which a presidency should be judged has become a safety blanket. The tweets, they contend, are a distraction that preoccupies only the uninitiated in effete coastal enclaves. As National Review’s David French admirably demonstrated, Donald Trump’s old oaks engage in self-flattery when they insist that conservatives who remain skeptical of Trump are merely embarrassed by his compulsive habit of making a spectacle of himself. Indeed, they are; any person with a healthy self-respect ought to be. But these Republicans also believe earnestly that presidential statements should carry the weight of the office, whether they are issued on a social-media platform or from behind the Resolute Desk.
The delusion adopted by those most committed to #MAGA is that only they are capable of taking a truly objective look at this presidency, but they achieve this objectivity by being selective about what presidential behaviors they believe are worthy of their concern. They are doing the president a disservice. Trump’s Republican critics have managed to compel this president to abandon his most unfeasible panders to the populist wing of the GOP. The next phase of Trump’s transition into a competent chief executive will require him to relinquish his Twitter habit. Not only is it undermining his presidency at home, it is also stripping the president of authority abroad.
When the president’s Twitter account is used sparingly and with precision, it can be an effective tool to advance U.S. interests. Recently, the president issued a series of comments regarding ongoing unrest in Iran, in which he warned the Islamic Republic to moderate its behavior while galvanizing resistance against the regime. It’s doubtful these calls to action would have had their reach had they been issued as a sterile presidential memo. But these fleeting and laudable moments are eclipsed by the president’s attachment to bomb-throwing. And those bombs erupt with consequence.
When the president promotes violent videos purporting (erroneously, as it turns out) to show Muslim migrants in Europe engaging in violence advanced by a far-right activist, it ignited a scandal in London. This row eventually compelled the British government to postpone a scheduled “working visit” to the U.K., a development that would have been the cause of paroxysms had it been a Democrat recklessly alienating America’s closest ally.
When Trump tweeted at the government of Pakistan, declaring them to be double-dealing on the issue of terrorism, he was only stating a fact. When he threatened (and later followed through) with a demand to pull a piddling $225 million in foreign assistance for Pakistan over this frustrating fact, some saw it as a refreshing change in policy. But recklessly antagonizing political elites in a nuclear-capable Muslim-dominated state in South Asia carries risks, among them anti-American demonstrations in Islamabad and lost influence over a country whose cooperation the U.S. needs to combat terrorism and prevent Afghanistan from coming apart. The president’s fans may try to contend that this is all part of a carefully considered strategic realignment, but none have been able to articulate what that strategy is, exactly.
More critically from the perspective of Trump’s supporters, the president’s habit of tweeting recklessly only diminishes his stature at home. When the President of the United States attacks a morning television host for having cosmetic surgery, withdraws invitations to the White House for NBA players in a fit of pique, and announces his intention to judge the first annual “most dishonest and corrupt media awards,” he cheapens the office and belittles himself. When Trump tweets cavalierly about the prospect of a thermonuclear exchange with a rogue state, he thinks he is being entertaining. He’s not; he’s making people nervous. There is a reason why Donald Trump is presiding over a roaring economy and relative global peace amid a well-earned victory over the ISIS “caliphate” and yet has an anemic job-approval rating that only seems to rebound when he’s out of the spotlight.
With some exceptions, Donald Trump’s conservative critics in the pundit community have been pleasantly surprised by this administration’s turn away from reckless isolationism, protectionism, and radical immigration hawkishness. They’ve changed their views of the administration accordingly. By contrast, Trump’s diehard supporters appear to be allergic to this kind of introspection. Few of Trump’s committed apologists have entertained the obvious: The president’s exceedingly fragile ego and addiction to sowing division are sabotaging his prospects for success. It is fortunate that this president has surrounded himself with people who appear to have little use for those diehards, or else this presidency may not be salvageable.
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Trump’s Tweets Are Ruining Him, But Do His Fans Care?
Must-Reads from Magazine
The Confused and the Confusing
"I don't get confused."
Noah Rothman 2018-04-19
Nikki Haley, America’s ambassador to the United Nations, is not confused. “With all due respect,” she said in a pithy and empowering statement to Fox News anchor Dana Perino, “I don’t get confused.”
She issued this pointed assertion in response to National Economic Council chief Larry Kudlow, who accused Haley of getting “ahead of the curve” and suffering a “momentary confusion” when she announced on Sunday morning that the Trump administration planned more punitive sanctions on Moscow over its support for the murderous Assad regime in Syria. But Haley seems to have been on firm ground when she made those remarks.
Shortly after Donald Trump’s address last Friday night announcing strikes on Syrian targets, the Republican National Committee distributed to its surrogates a set of “White House talking points” previewing a new round of “specific additional sanctions against Russia.” President Donald Trump reportedly intervened as late as Sunday night to put a halt to a policy that was all but in motion. The only person who was confused here seems to have been the president. Kudlow later apologized for his remarks about Haley’s competence.
The bewildering 24-hour period between the coordinated announcement of new Russia sanction and the administration’s retreat from that policy is typical of this administration. The source of the White House’s confusion is not hard to identify.
Before Haley suffered the insults of those dedicated to insulating Donald Trump from the consequences of his indecision and ambiguity, former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson was the man in the barrel. Tillerson surely thought he was representing American diplomatic interests when he revealed last September that the U.S. was “probing” North Korea for an opening that might lead to direct negotiations. “Save your energy, Rex,” the president tweeted. The comment cut the legs out from under his chief diplomat, who he said was “wasting his time” by seeking talks with the Kim regime.
When Tillerson conspicuously continued to lobby the North Korean government for an introductory first meeting “without precondition,” a spokesperson for the president’s National Security Council corrected him. There could be no talks, the NSC spokesman said, until North Korea stops testing missiles and nuclear devices for an unspecified period of time. “The President’s views on North Korea have not changed,” the White House said. But the White House was engaging in back-channel communications with the Kim regime with the goal of a face-to-face encounter between both nations’ principals.
The president’s Northeast Asia policy is about as clear as his Middle East policy. When Trump announced to an Ohio crowd in late March that the U.S. would withdraw its approximately 2,000 troops from Syria “very soon,” to let “the other people take care of it,” it came as a surprise to his administration. State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert said she was “unaware” of any plan to pull troops out of Syria, and Pentagon officials had spent that same week previewing plans to augment U.S. deployments to Syria. The White House later disclosed that Trump had been convinced of the virtue of maintaining a footprint in Syria indefinitely.
In fact, the president has a bad habit of forcing his staff and allies to clean up after his messes.
When Donald Trump explicitly agreed to a Democratic proposal to make the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrival program permanent without reciprocal border security legislation at an on-camera meeting with legislators, he had to be reminded that his comment did not reflect the GOP’s position. The transcript of the event was initially written to omit the president’s injudicious comments.
In a similar meeting with lawmakers regarding American gun policy, Donald Trump declared his support for legislative measures that would expeditiously strip guns from the hands of potentially dangerous people. Due process rights, he said, were a secondary consideration. The remarks sent Trump’s GOP allies reeling, and White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders quickly dialed the president’s position back to one that was recognizably Republican.
Former Press Secretary Sean Spicer has had to correct the president for misstating the number of Guantanamo Bay detainees released under the Obama administration. In response to Trump’s comments about the value of raciallycharged protests that culminated in violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, last summer, the White House released a statement clarifying that Trump “of course” condemns white supremacists.
The White House has had to walk back Trump’s criticism of German trade policy, his claims about specific terrorist events in Sweden, his support for blanket tariffs on a variety of commodities, his intention to leave three college basketball players in a Chinese prison in response to personal criticism from one of the player’s fathers, and a statement about whether or not the travel ban was (as Trump called it) a “ban.”
The White House corrected the president’s myriad eye-popping assertions made before an audience of Boy Scouts last year, confirming that no one called Trump to congratulate him on “the greatest speech that was ever made” before this audience. They were also compelled to admit that Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto did not call Trump to confess that the flow of Central American migrants north through Mexico had ebbed to a trickle as a result of Trump’s policies on the border.
Trump has reserved for himself both sides of the issue when it’s come to major U.S. policy initiatives such removing the U.S. from the Paris Climate Accords, corporate tax rates, whether ObamaCare will be stabilized or allowed to “explode,” and almost every aspect of America’s strategic relationship with Russia. Trump has promised to eliminate the carried-interest loophole, reduce individual tax brackets to just three tiers, and create targeted tax credits for working parents with elderly or young dependents—proposals Congress simply ignored.
If there is confusion within the administration as to what Donald Trump’s policy preferences are at any given moment, the president only has himself to blame. Nikki Haley might have been the first administration official to refuse to take the fall for Trump’s lack of clarity, but she is unlikely to be the last.
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Identity Politics in the Hereafter
Grievance even in grieving.
Sohrab Ahmari 2018-04-18
As if the peddlers of identity politics hadn’t done enough to poison Western culture in the here and now, they have now set their sights on the afterlife.
That is the metaphysical meaning of the expression “rest in power,” which has replaced the old “rest in peace” among the woke crowd. When a member of an intersectionally oppressed group passes away, a properly woke mourner offers “rest in power” in condolence, in the solemn hope that the departed might take up in the hereafter the power which was denied him or her (or xir) in this earthly vale of tears.
Thus, when Nelson Mandela’s second wife, Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, passed away earlier this month, the appropriate condolence was “rest in power.” Ditto for Vel Phillips, the African-American judge and Wisconsin secretary of state, who died on Tuesday. Even the late Barbara Bush received a “rest in peace and power” farewell and from none other than the Women’s March, though use of the expression in the former first lady’s case was not without controversy. Many wokesters took to Twitter to object, and they didn’t even need to spell out why: Barbara Bush was white and, worse, a Republican. Better that she rest without power—if at all!
The attempt to carry the struggle beyond the grave is a reminder that liberal identity politics is a quasi-religious or quasi-spiritual movement. On Earth, it makes radical claims for group justice, even as it denies any universal standard of justice. In the realm beyond death, it restages the same old campus and Twitter battles against structures of oppression. Even in the afterlife, we are supposed to check our privileges, unpack our biases, and problematize and dismantle hierarchies. Even the afterlife is the battlefield of race against race, sex against sex, trans against cis, and so on.
Onward to the beyond, then, comrades! Amen, I say to you, today you will be with me in Paradise fighting the patriarchy.
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Pompeo and Circumstance
Podcast: North Korea talks and Trump's legal troubles.
John Podhoretz 2018-04-18On our latest COMMENTARY podcast we wonder at the fact that Democrats are going to vote en masse against Mike Pompeo as secretary of state for no real reason other than that they don’t like Trump—and how this marks the fulfillment of a degradation in the advise-and-consent process that’s been accelerating for the past couple of decades. Also, we talk about Stormy Daniels, alas. Give a listen.
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Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistical Deficits
The other last refuge.
JOHN STEELE GORDON 2018-04-17
Someone in the 19th century (Mark Twain attributed it to Benjamin Disraeli, but that’s dubious) said that there are three forms of lying: lies, damned lies, and statistics. If you would like a beautiful example of the last category of mendacity, check out David Leonhardt’s April 15th column in the New York Times, entitled (try not to laugh) “The Democrats Are the Party of Fiscal Responsibility.”
In it, he compared the deficits run up by each Democratic and Republican administration from Jimmy Carter on to the present with the GDP of that time. Precisely how he did this is anything but clear. Is he, perhaps, confusing the debt with the deficit? For instance, he has the ratio for George H. W. Bush’s term as 0.4 percentage points. But the total deficits in those years were $932 billion and the total GDP was $23.9 trillion. That’s 3.8 percentage points. And how the national debt could double in eight unprosperous years under Obama while the “change in deficit, in percentage points of GDP” went down 0.1 percent is totally mystifying
Thus, Leonhardt committed the cardinal sin of statistics: using obscure methodology, which is the way people lie with statistics—presuming they are not just making the numbers up.
Whatever his methodology, Leonhardt was comparing apples and oranges. For instance, he ignores such factors as the raging inflation of the Carter years, when income tax brackets were not adjusted for inflation, pushing people into higher and higher brackets when their real income had not increased at all (This, of course, was one of the reasons why Carter carried fewer states in 1980 than Herbert Hoover won in 1932).
Leonhardt implicitly ascribed to the president the power to shape the budget and, thus, the deficit. But presidents have been effectively bit players when it comes to federal spending levels since the wildly misnamed Budget Control Act of 1974. It was not Bill Clinton who slew the deficit dragon in the 1990’s but the Congress, which the public transferred to Republican control in 1994 for the first time in 40 years following an outcry over Democratic profligacy. The Republican Congress increased spending by a mere 18 percent between 1995 and 2000, while the roaring economy increased tax revenues by 51 percent.
Nor did Leonhardt take into account the phony accounting the federal government uses to obscure reality. Officially, we ran surpluses (meaning, by definition, that income exceeded outgo) in 1998, 1999, 2000, and 2001. But the national debt went up, not down, in each of those four years.
Nor did he take into account the fact that recessions cause government spending to go up and government revenues to go down—something quite beyond the control of Congress or the President. The brutal recession of the early 1980’s (when unemployment reached 10.8 percent), for instance, skewed Reagan’s numbers while Carter’s four years were largely recession-free.
There’s plenty of blame for both parties, of course. As Jesse Unruh famously said, “Money is the mother’s milk of politics.” But in the last forty years, the only time the federal government made a serious, sustained effort to rein in the deficit was when a Republican Congress was writing the checks.
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Eating Their Own
A frontal assault on soft targets.
Noah Rothman 2018-04-17
The ubiquitous coffeehouse chain Starbucks is at the center of a scandal—the familiar kind fueled by new media’s obsessive litigation of grievances that have a perceived societal dimension. This one occurred in Philadelphia where two young black men were humiliated and led out of the café in handcuffs by police. They were accused of trespassing and declined to leave when asked, saying that they were merely waiting for a friend. The story of the incident went viral, and it became a scandal—justifiably so. The decision to prosecute this episode of harmless loitering is suspicious, and the insult these men suffered deserves redress. Asking whether racial bias was a factor here is a perfectly valid question, and that deserved to be investigated. But that’s not what has happened.
Within 24 hours of this incident, the store’s manager had issued a formal apology. So, too, did the corporation. Twenty-four hours after that, that supervisor resigned. If there was an investigation here, it was a quick one. The store itself soon became the site of protests. “Anti-blackness anywhere is anti-blackness everywhere,” one protester chanted. “We don’t want this Starbucks to make any money today,” another demonstrator told reporters. By 1 p.m., the protesters had achieved their aim; the store was forced to close for the day.
It wasn’t long before this incident involving one Starbucks location and three people came to be seen as a reflection of this sprawling multinational company and the United States as a whole. Rosalind Brewer, Starbucks COO and a young African-American woman, called the incident a “teachable moment for all of us” and recommended “unconscious-bias” training for every Starbucks staffer. Starbucks CEO Kevin Johnson joined ABC’s “Good Morning America” to personally apologize to the men involved in this incident when protesters interrupted his appearance. “A whole lot of racism, a whole lot of crap, Starbucks coffee is anti-black,” they chanted. You can’t blame these demonstrators for noticing that the terms of engagement had broadened significantly.
Who knows? Maybe there is a culture of implicit racial bias at Starbucks. On Monday, as protesters were shutting down this Philadelphia-based branch, another Starbucks location in Los Angeles was also being accused of racial bias. In January, a white non-customer at that location managed to finagle a bathroom entry code out of a barista when a black non-customer could not. Maybe these two incidents—separated by almost four months and 3,000 miles—are related. Maybe it was wise for national news media and the chain’s protesters to skip right past personal agency and permissive local cultures to assume this is a reflection on all 13,900-plus U.S. Starbucks locations, to say nothing of the society in which they are situated. After all, that’s precisely what the chain’s executives did. In fact, the Starbucks C-suite’s willingness to lend credence to the accusation that their company was rotten with pervasive racial prejudice likely fueled the pushback that the chain received from social-justice activists.
Starbucks is one of an increasing number of firms that wears its liberal politics on its aprons. A few years back, its baristas were encouraged to write “race together” on their customer’s cups explicitly to encourage discomfiting racial dialogue in their stores. It has aggressively promoted same-sex marriage on its products and has financially backed Planned Parenthood. In response to President Donald Trump’s “travel ban,” Starbucks dedicated itself to hiring at least 10,000 refugees. The company’s increasingly impatient shareholders have routinely questioned the value of alienating socially conservative coffee-drinkers, but now it seems time to question whether its affinity for the left is yielding diminishing returns even among its allies. It is difficult to avoid concluding that the scope of these protests is augmented by the fact that, for the social justice left, Starbucks is a soft target.
Starbucks isn’t the only progressive ally that has received no special dispensation for being “woke.” A Washington Post report on Tuesday illustrates the Starbucks phenomenon with a dispatch from a liberal church dedicated to racial justice and economic egalitarianism that has come under fire from its confederates. According to the Post, the racial conflict at the 1,100-member All Souls Unitarian Church in Washington D.C. is indicative of a number of racial conflicts that the Unitarian Universalist Association has helped resolve in the last year.
The scandal involves the resignation of an African-American reverend who alleged that she was passed over for career advancement and judged more harshly than her white counterpart behind the pulpit (who, by the way, claims to have dedicated his career to the promotion of social justice). She even alleged that the congregants of this racially conscious church were themselves subtly racist because of the “micro-aggressions” she endured. Specifically, that effrontery was evinced by the number of church-goers who referred to her by her first name rather than her title. Maybe all these men and women of faith were subtly racist; maybe they were just friendly. In either case, this particular community’s predisposition to treat even dubious allegations of racial bias seriously will ensure that this grievance is resolved to the complainant’s satisfaction.
It is easy to see why this kind of activism is more satisfying than, say, going on about Chick-Fil-A’s Christian values. Despite a six-year-long liberal campaign dedicated to educating the public on the deliciousness of its products, the benefits and time off afforded its employees, and franchising opportunities in underserved urban markets, this chain just keeps on expanding. Imagine that. Routinely rebuffed assaults on a fortified position are exhausting. They are nowhere near as rewarding as a direct attack on a receptive target that yields a quick and gratifying victory. That explains why social justice activists are increasingly focused on exacting concessions from like minds: young adult novelists, liberal filmmakers, Hollywood executives, painters, restauranteurs, university professors and administrators, socially conscious corporations, and the left-of-center politicians who have folded these activists into their core constituencies.
These intramural feuds are transforming the progressive movement from within, but it’s not clear that the social-justice movement has secured anything other than the illusion of efficacy.
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