By Jonah Goldberg
Tuesday, April 04, 2017
The conservative commentariat is full of suggestions
these days for how Donald Trump can salvage his first 100 days.
F. H. Buckley, the organizer of “Scholars and Writers for
Trump,” writes in the New York Post
that the president should “split” the GOP, align himself with Democrats, and
embrace Canadian-style single-payer health care.
Ross Douthat of the New
York Times says Trump should get a brain trust that can guide him on the
right policies, since he seems not to have many of his own.
Similarly, my National
Review colleague (well, boss) Rich Lowry penned a widely discussed piece
for Politico, “The Crisis of
Trumpism,” in which he argued that Trump’s basic problem is that he has no idea
what he wants to do or how to get it done. “No officeholder in Washington,”
Lowry writes, “seems to understand President Donald Trump’s populism or have a
cogent theory of how to effect it in practice, including the president
himself.”
These and other constructive criticisms all strike me as
reasonable (except for that Canadian health-care thing, which is bonkers). But
they’re misdiagnosing the malady at the core of the Trump presidency.
In the months after he secured the nomination, Trump and
his surrogates promised skeptics that he would not be a hands-on policy guy.
Instead, he’d rely on congressional leadership and, later, Mike Pence to do the
major lifting, while the president would go around giving speeches to Make
America Great Again.
Douthat is right that Trump could use a brain trust. But
some of us were told that Pence or Reince Priebus or Paul Ryan would serve that
role. Certainly they’ve tried. Moreover, there are countless policy agendas
sitting on the shelf for Trump to choose among.
Why so much chaos, then? A common answer you hear from
all corners is “the tweeting” — the horrible, horrible tweeting. But when you
talk to people with more hands-on experience in, or with, the Trump White
House, the better answer is that the tweeting is just a symptom.
Trump brings the same glandular, impulsive style to
meetings and interviews as he does to social media. He blurts out ideas or
claims that send staff scrambling to see them implemented or defended. His
management style is Hobbesian. Rivalries are encouraged. Senior aides panic at
the thought of not being part of his movable entourage. He cares more about
saving face and “counterpunching” his critics than he does about getting policy
victories.
In short, the problem is Trump’s personality. His
presidency doesn’t suffer from a failure of ideas, but a failure of character.
For the last two years, when asked how I thought the
Trump administration would go, I’ve replied, “Character is destiny.” This
wasn’t necessarily a prediction of a divorce or sexual scandal, but rather an
acknowledgment of the fact that, under normal circumstances, people don’t
change. And septuagenarian billionaires who’ve won so many spins of the
roulette wheel of life are even less likely to change.
It’s true that Trump has racked up some wins — a few
relatively easy executive orders and the Supreme Court nomination of Neil
Gorsuch, who’ll wind up taking the late Antonin Scalia’s seat one way or
another.
Good news is not defining his term, though. Trump’s
off-the-cuff claim that President Obama “wiretapped” him ate up a third of his
first 100 days and hurt his standing with allies and voters alike. If you
believe that this was some brilliant 4-D chess gambit hatched at Mar-a-Lago,
you must believe that plummeting to 35 percent approval was part of the plan,
too.
The president is this presidency’s worst enemy, and
there’s no sign of improvement ahead.
Trump detests apologizing or expressing regrets for his
actions. He’d rather just change the subject or attack. He likes demanding that
other people apologize for the same reason that he won’t: He sees admitting
error as a personal defeat.
But in politics, apologizing is a way to ask for a fresh
start, not just from others but from yourself. If he apologized for his rocky
start and asked for a do-over, Trump could replenish some of his squandered
political capital. I hope he does, but I won’t bet that way because, again,
character is destiny.
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