signalmankenneth
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The pithiest summary of Donald Trump’s last presidency was by the comedian John Mulaney. He compared it to a horse being set loose in a hospital. “No one knows what the horse is gonna do next,” Mulaney said, “least of all the horse. He’s never been in a hospital before!”
The prevailing theory about Trump’s second term is that the horse now knows its way around the hospital. I have my doubts. Whatever practical knowledge Trump picked up in the first term is outweighed by the accelerating cognitive decline he displayed over the past year. He was a weak president before, and he may be an even weaker one this time.
In saying this, I don’t dispute that Trump’s instincts are dangerously authoritarian. Nor would I argue that a bumbling maximum leader is harmless—quite the opposite, in fact. Trump’s last presidency did serious damage. He redistributed income upward to the rich; he separated children from their parents at the border; he secured an anti-Roe majority on the Supreme Court; and he reduced the proportion of the population covered by health insurance just as a deadly pandemic arrived to kill 40 percent more people than in Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, and the United Kingdom.
But as the latter two examples demonstrate, not all these ghastly outcomes were deliberate, and indeed Trump’s mismanagement of Covid probably cost him reelection. In memoirs, participants in Trump’s first term don’t describe Trump as an evil mastermind. They describe him as vain, foolish, petty, mercurial, and easy prey for con artists and crackpots of every stripe. The result was bedlam. He was a horse loose in a hospital.
In a 2020 journal article, “Immature Leadership: Donald Trump and the American Presidency,” the Tufts political scientist Daniel Drezner argued, persuasively, that Trump’s presidency was hampered by “his temper tantrums, his short attention span and his poor impulse control.” Trump’s tantrums “led to poor decision-making and pathological staff strategies for coping with it.” Trump’s short attention span resulted in “a series of policy announcements that generate[d] poor follow-through and implementation.” Trump’s poor impulse control persuaded many foreign diplomats “to discount many of his threats.” What this added up to, Drezner concluded, was a weak presidency.
A strong president imposes discipline on his team. Infighting is kept to a minimum and stays out of the newspapers. That doesn’t come close to describing Trump’s first term, during which rival White House power centers leaked like a sieve to an ever-grateful Washington press corps. One Trump aide titled his administration memoir Team of Vipers.
Trump’s second presidency hasn’t even started, and already the members of his inner circle are at one another’s throats. The Washington Post’s Ashley Parker, Josh Dawsey, and Michael Scherer describe “shouting matches, expulsions from meetings and name-calling.… As during Trump’s first term, competing factions have begun to run roughshod over each other.” The Wall Street Journal’s Brian Schwartz and Andrew Restuccia quoted an unnamed Trump adviser using the term “knife fight” to describe the competition for treasury secretary between Scott Bessent and Howard Lutnik. (Bessent got the nod, and Trump nominated Lutnik for commerce secretary.)
Weak impulse control prompted Trump to make four seriously outrageous Cabinet nominations. These all face serious resistance from Senate Republicans, and one of them (Matt Gaetz) withdrew less than three weeks after Election Day. Some see Gaetz’s nomination as a diversionary tactic to draw attention away from the other three—Tulsi Gabbard (director of National Intelligence), Pete Hegseth (Defense), and Robert Kennedy Jr. (Health and Human Services)—or as a stalking horse for Pam Bondi, the Trump apparatchik nominated for attorney general after Gaetz withdrew. If that was the strategy (and I don’t believe it was), Gaetz’s rise and fall occurred too quickly to do the others any good. It’s seldom wise to ascribe shrewdness to anything that Trump does.
That said, Trump’s second term won’t be short on terrible political appointments, and Trump’s inherent weakness as president will create a power vacuum for many of these miscreants to exploit. That’s where the danger of his presidency lies.
For example, no president in his right mind—not even a very conservative one—would ever hand power to Stephen Miller. But Miller enjoyed quite a lot of influence in Trump’s first term, and he’ll have even more in his second. Trump is anti-immigrant because it plays well politically. Miller is anti-immigrant because he’s an angry fanatic.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/donald-trump-weakling-problem-110000128.html
The prevailing theory about Trump’s second term is that the horse now knows its way around the hospital. I have my doubts. Whatever practical knowledge Trump picked up in the first term is outweighed by the accelerating cognitive decline he displayed over the past year. He was a weak president before, and he may be an even weaker one this time.
In saying this, I don’t dispute that Trump’s instincts are dangerously authoritarian. Nor would I argue that a bumbling maximum leader is harmless—quite the opposite, in fact. Trump’s last presidency did serious damage. He redistributed income upward to the rich; he separated children from their parents at the border; he secured an anti-Roe majority on the Supreme Court; and he reduced the proportion of the population covered by health insurance just as a deadly pandemic arrived to kill 40 percent more people than in Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, and the United Kingdom.
But as the latter two examples demonstrate, not all these ghastly outcomes were deliberate, and indeed Trump’s mismanagement of Covid probably cost him reelection. In memoirs, participants in Trump’s first term don’t describe Trump as an evil mastermind. They describe him as vain, foolish, petty, mercurial, and easy prey for con artists and crackpots of every stripe. The result was bedlam. He was a horse loose in a hospital.
In a 2020 journal article, “Immature Leadership: Donald Trump and the American Presidency,” the Tufts political scientist Daniel Drezner argued, persuasively, that Trump’s presidency was hampered by “his temper tantrums, his short attention span and his poor impulse control.” Trump’s tantrums “led to poor decision-making and pathological staff strategies for coping with it.” Trump’s short attention span resulted in “a series of policy announcements that generate[d] poor follow-through and implementation.” Trump’s poor impulse control persuaded many foreign diplomats “to discount many of his threats.” What this added up to, Drezner concluded, was a weak presidency.
A strong president imposes discipline on his team. Infighting is kept to a minimum and stays out of the newspapers. That doesn’t come close to describing Trump’s first term, during which rival White House power centers leaked like a sieve to an ever-grateful Washington press corps. One Trump aide titled his administration memoir Team of Vipers.
Trump’s second presidency hasn’t even started, and already the members of his inner circle are at one another’s throats. The Washington Post’s Ashley Parker, Josh Dawsey, and Michael Scherer describe “shouting matches, expulsions from meetings and name-calling.… As during Trump’s first term, competing factions have begun to run roughshod over each other.” The Wall Street Journal’s Brian Schwartz and Andrew Restuccia quoted an unnamed Trump adviser using the term “knife fight” to describe the competition for treasury secretary between Scott Bessent and Howard Lutnik. (Bessent got the nod, and Trump nominated Lutnik for commerce secretary.)
Weak impulse control prompted Trump to make four seriously outrageous Cabinet nominations. These all face serious resistance from Senate Republicans, and one of them (Matt Gaetz) withdrew less than three weeks after Election Day. Some see Gaetz’s nomination as a diversionary tactic to draw attention away from the other three—Tulsi Gabbard (director of National Intelligence), Pete Hegseth (Defense), and Robert Kennedy Jr. (Health and Human Services)—or as a stalking horse for Pam Bondi, the Trump apparatchik nominated for attorney general after Gaetz withdrew. If that was the strategy (and I don’t believe it was), Gaetz’s rise and fall occurred too quickly to do the others any good. It’s seldom wise to ascribe shrewdness to anything that Trump does.
That said, Trump’s second term won’t be short on terrible political appointments, and Trump’s inherent weakness as president will create a power vacuum for many of these miscreants to exploit. That’s where the danger of his presidency lies.
For example, no president in his right mind—not even a very conservative one—would ever hand power to Stephen Miller. But Miller enjoyed quite a lot of influence in Trump’s first term, and he’ll have even more in his second. Trump is anti-immigrant because it plays well politically. Miller is anti-immigrant because he’s an angry fanatic.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/donald-trump-weakling-problem-110000128.html