Thursday, June 28, 2018

For all the visible damage the president has done to the nation’s standing, things are much worse below the surface.

Trump seems incapable of restraining himself from insulting other leaders.
His slogans hark back to the isolationists of 1940, and foreign leaders know it. 
He can read speeches written for him ,but he cannot himself articulate a worldview that goes beyond a teenager’s bluster.

He lays out his resentments, insecurities, and obsessions on Twitter for all to see, opening up a gold mine to foreign governments seeking to understand and manipulate the American president.


Foreign governments have adapted. They flatter Trump outrageously. 
Their emissaries stay at his hotels and offer the Trump Organization abundant concessions (39 trademarks approved by China alone since Trump took office, including one for an escort service). They take him to military parades; they talk tough-guy-to-tough-guy; they show him the kind of deference that only someone without a center can crave. And so he flip-flops: “so, so out of control, so dangerous”  after visits to Mar-a-Lago,  from being the leader of a parasitic country to being “a gentleman” who “wants to do the right thing but in the end all generally goes back to bashing, for doing “NOTHING” to help us.)

Trump unrestrained is of course a frightening prospect. His instincts are not reliable—if they were, he and his campaign would have kept their distance from Russian operatives. A man who has presided over failed casinos, a collapsed airline, and a sham university is not someone who knows when to step back from the brink. His domestic political circumstances, already bad, seem likely to deteriorate further, which will only make him more angry, and perhaps more apt to take risks. In a fit of temper or in the grip of spectacular misjudgment—possibly influenced by what he’s just seen on TV—he could stumble into or launch an uncontrollable war.

When he does face crisis, whether or not it is of his own making, "We The People" will discover just how weak his hand is, because no one—friends or enemies, the American public or foreign leaders—take anything that he promises or threatens at face value and another Donald Trump emerges: the Trump who paid $25 million to the victims of Trump University, who rages at The New York Times and then truckles to its reporters. 
Like most bullies, he can be stared down. But when he folds, American foreign policy will fold with him.




this dangerous and dispiriting chapter
 in American history will end, in eight years or four—or perhaps in two or even one, if Trump is impeached or removed under the Twenty-Fifth Amendment. 



But what will follow? Will the United States recover within a few years, as it did from the disgrace of Richard Nixon’s resignation? 
Alas, that is unlikely. Even barring cataclysmic events, we will be living with the consequences of Trump’s tenure as chief executive and commander in chief for decades. Damage will continue to appear long after he departs the scene.

Americans, after trying every other alternative, can always be counted on to do the right thing, Winston Churchill supposedly said. But who will count on that now, after the victories of a man like Trump? Other countries interpret Trump’s election as America’s repudiation of its role as guarantor of world order. 

An elite consensus that spans both parties means a government that does not shift radically from administration to administration in its commitments to allies or to human rights, in its opposition to enemies, or in its support for international institutions; that has a sense of direction and purpose that transcends partisan politics; that can develop the political appointees our system uniquely depends on to staff the upper levels of government. 
As long as that elite is honest, able, open to new talent and to considered course alterations, and tolerant of dissent, it can provide consistency and stability.

America’s astonishing resilience may rescue it once again, particularly if Trump does not finish his first term. But an equally likely scenario is that Trump will leave key government institutions weakened or corrupted, America’s foreign-policy establishment sharply divided, and America’s position in the world stunted. An America lacking confidence, coupled with the rise of undemocratic powers, populist movements on the right and left, and failing states, is the kind of world few Americans remember. It would be like the world of the late 1920s or early 1930s: disorderly and unstable, but with much worse to follow.

There are many reasons to be appalled by President Trump, including his disregard for constitutional norms and decent behavior. But watching this unlikeliest of presidents strut on the treacherous stage of international politics is different from following the daily domestic chaos that is the Trump administration. Hearing him bully and brag, boast and bluster, threaten and lie, one feels a kind of dizziness, a sensation that underneath the throbbing pulse of routine scandal lies the potential for much worse. The kind of sensation, in fact, that accompanies dangerously high blood pressure, just before a sudden, excruciating pain.






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1 comment:

  1. Trump unrestrained is of course a frightening prospect that should never be taken lightly as a man who presided over failed casinos, a collapsed airline, and a sham university is one who knows not when to step back from the brink. https://youtu.be/rU_EweSJfGE

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