By Rich Lowry
Friday, December 01, 2017
The president of the United States wakes up some mornings
seemingly determined to convince as many people as possible that he’s unsuited
to high office.
Fortunately for him, he has a Twitter account allowing
him to act on this impulse immediately and without any filter.
On Wednesday, Trump retweeted three videos from an
apparatchik of an extremist party in Britain purporting to show acts of
violence by Muslims. One of them is reportedly a fake.
He followed up with a tweet calling for the firing of Morning Joe host Joe Scarborough on the
basis of a noxious conspiracy theory. (A woman with a heart condition died in
Scarborough’s district office when he was a congressman. Ever since, a kooky
fringe has accused him of murder.)
It’s difficult to exaggerate how mind-blowing these
tweets are.
If a friend on Facebook shared the fake Muslim video,
you’d hesitate to credit any of his opinions going forward, let alone bestow on
him the biggest megaphone on planet Earth.
If a candidate for town council called for an
investigation of Scarborough for allegedly murdering one of his interns, you’d
doubt his fitness to decide whether to approve a zoning permit for an
Applebee’s, let alone to wield the world’s most fearsome nuclear arsenal.
Yet Trump’s presidency operates on a largely separate
track than his Twitter feed and his other off-script interjections and
pronouncements. His domestic policy is so conventional that it could have been
cooked up by Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell — and, in fact, it was. He’s pursued
a largely status quo foreign policy, except more cautious than Barack Obama’s
and, especially, George W. Bush’s.
Amid the miasma of manufactured controversies, Trump’s
presidency is, as Mark Twain is supposed to have said of Wagner’s music,
“better than it sounds.”
A common criticism of Trump is that, via his attacks on
offending journalistic outlets and jurists, he’s endangering the Constitution.
He’s certainly violating norms of how a president should conduct himself and
speak. But if you got news only of Trump’s official acts and knew nothing of
his ongoing commentary, you’d think a rigorously rules-bound president occupied
the White House.
The defining feature of Trump’s judicial nominees is a
firm commitment to interpreting the Constitution and the laws as written. Trump
has rolled back Obama administrative actions on immigration, the environment,
and health care that at best pushed the envelope of executive authority and at
worst were frankly unconstitutional.
On the legislative front, Trump is getting closer to his
first major victory, in pursuit of the stereotypical Republican policy goal of
deficit-financed tax cuts.
In the real world, the economy is growing at a nice clip,
and the stock market is humming along, showing no signs that it believes that
the republic is about to be destroyed by a “Mad King.”
None of this is to suggest that Trump’s governing and his
tweets are entirely distinguishable. Some of the tweets have had consequences,
and, if nothing else, they are a dismaying window into his state of mind.
The firing of James Comey was a product of the kind of
grievance Trump displays on Twitter, and he’s going to pay a price for it for a
long time. Trump’s missives obsessively attacking CNN have created a pall over
the Department of Justice’s suit to block the AT&T-Time Warner merger. The
specter of the confrontation with North Korea playing out in insults over
Twitter is unsettling, to say the least.
But the tweets don’t constitute the sum total of the
administration. It’s possible that Trump sees Twitter — and his other provocations
— as a way to stir the pot, entertain himself, stoke his base, flog his enemies
and vent his frustrations separate and distinct from decisions of government,
undertaken under the influence of, by and large, impressive, well-meaning
advisers.
Trump’s presidency is much better than his Twitter feed.
Although he stands ready and willing to convince you otherwise, 280 characters
at a time.
No comments:
Post a Comment