There is substance. There is style. Trump’s style defeats his substance.
There is substance. There is style. If Obama was cool, Trump is hot. Another day, another bombshell. Calculated or not, they say one thing: unpredictable. Sit on the edge of your seat. Either the crowds at the inauguration were underreported and the media merit a denunciation; or the wall at the US border requires a personal confrontation with the president of Mexico. Either the policy of the day is bungled, such as a ban on immigration that includes legal US residents with green cards; or the policy is positive, yet comes with a flaming torch, such as the nomination of Colorado’s eminently qualified Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court, followed by Trump’s demand of the Senate Majority Leader to resort to the “nuclear option” (change in rules) to get him confirmed.
To be sure, slipped through this incendiary atmosphere are some very fine policies. Example: “draining the swamp” by banning administration officials from cashing in on their government experience and becoming lobbyists until five years after they leave government. Example: a rollback on the ridiculous lengths to which government regulations go (more on this below). Yet, the overwhelming style is not cool, but hot, red hot. Sometimes, all to the good: threats against Iran for testing ballistic missiles, for example. Yet, from this heat, will there come light? What exactly is the administration planning vis-a-vis Iran? Beyond the fire-eating rhetoric, no one knows. Then, in a kind of policy by free association, Trump listens to an interviewer call Russia’s Putin a killer and says we’re the same.
Can anyone even remember how all this started, on the second day of the administration — my, doesn’t that seem long ago? The media were accused of underreporting the size of the crowd at Trump’s inauguration, as if the crowd size makes any difference. The point seemed to be an opportunity to incite a quarrel with the media. Is there a method behind this madness? Perhaps — to get the media sidetracked and obsessed with an irrelevance. A clever strategy, indeed, if it were not for an uncomfortable point: truth. The media did not seem to exaggerate, though, to be sure, their obsession with the size of the crowd was as irrelevant as Trump’s. Like, he won. Get over it. Ditto for Trump, with his separate slice of anger over alleged fraudulent balloting that led to his loss of the popular vote. Get over it, Mr. President. You won, fair and square. We all know it. Why this white-heat need to respond to every detractor? Remember, the best retort is often silence or humor.
Peggy Noonan writes in the Wall Street Journal: “Mr. Trump has overloaded all circuits. . . . The president and his advisers are confusing boldness with aggression. They mean to make breakthroughs and instead cause breakdowns. The overcharged circuits are leaving them singed, too. . . . Prudence is not weakness, and carefulness is a virtue, not a vice.”
Not to mention, prudence is the best potential path to success. Had Trump and his advisers thought through the temporary refugee and immigration ban, had they first sought comment by leaders in Congress and, even more important, by the agencies responsible for enforcing it, they could have laid the groundwork for a well thought out strategy, not to mention, saved the mud all over their faces tossed by gross errors in defining exactly who it applied to, and why. Does this order negatively affect our troops in the field by making citizens of the banned countries less willing to work with them? Does this order irreparably alienate our allies? These critical issues, among others, seem not to have been considered.
There seems to be a desire for confrontation as much as a desire for new policies. In the nature of things, policies will elicit dissent. The best way to unify the country in light of this inevitability is to conceive, explain and execute controversial policies as carefully as possible. Trump’s reliance on the citizenry’s intuitive grasp of the need for his new policies is unrealistic, even as some of his policies do indeed strike us intuitively as right.
Example: overregulation. While admittedly not made on the federal level, some of the regulations this newspaper needs to live by would be laughable if they were not so annoying and expensive. For example, we need to pay a tax just for owning desks and chairs; we need to pay a tax for employing people. We’re not making this up.
While we are not sufficiently competent to determine whether a specific federal regulation the Trump administration wishes to do away with is superfluous, his willingness to reduce the regulatory state strikes us as beneficial overall.
It would be better, infinitely better, were these positives not enveloped in a style that seems to say, “take the enemy to the mat,” rather than to keep in mind the style of the “Great Communicator,” Ronald Reagan.
Another example of the good stuff clouded and shunted aside by the administration’s acidic style: the refocus on concern and action for lethally persecuted minorities, such as Christians and Yazidis in the Middle East. These are truly the forgotten victims of would be genocide. The way in which Trump rolled out his immigration ban had Jews recalling the Holocaust crimes against potential Jewish immigrants to the US, when, if done properly, the rollout of his ban should have generated a different Holocaust focus: acknowledging the brutal persecution of Christians and Yazidis by radical Islamists.
Good will. Ill will. Good policies. Bad policies. It will be difficult to sort them all out amidst daily shell shock from Washington. The style is good for attention-getting, but isn’t the presidency itself already a sufficient attention getter?
We read, also in Noonan, that nominee Judge Gorsuch’s first call was to Judge Merrick Garland. “If that is true, the Court is about to get classier.”
It certainly didn’t hurt Judge Gorsuch to reach out in this way. President Trump and his advisers should take the cue.
Copyright © 2017 by the Intermountain Jewish News
