National Post (National Edition)
Comment: Unpresidential president, McParland,
SHOULD A MAN SO INCAPABLE OF CONTROLLING HIMSELF BE ANYWHERE NEAR THE NUCLEAR TRIGGER?
One of the marvels of Donald Trump is his ability to surpass expectations. No matter how deeply you believe he’s fallen below any concept of what passes for presidential behaviour, he continues to surprise.
Even for the dangerously thin-skinned and mercurial resident of the Oval Office, however, Wednesday’s eruption was singular, and frightening. Should a man so incapable of controlling himself in moments of stress be anywhere near the nuclear trigger — even if it isn’t really a button to be pressed, as he claimed in one of his ill-informed tweets just this week?
Trump exploded Wednesday in an official statement released by the White House, the likes of which that sorry building has rarely, if ever, seen. If it had been scrawled by hand in crayon on a torn bit of paper it couldn’t have been more primal. Evidently pushed beyond the boiling point by some pointed and insulting words from previous friend and supporter Steve Bannon, Trump claimed he barely knew the man, had never listened to him much, and owed him nothing for the part he’d played in making him president.
“Steve has been a friend of mine for a long time, I like Steve a lot,” Trump once said of Bannon, a key force behind the fiercely right-wing Breitbart news operation. Even after Bannon lost a White House power struggle and was dumped by Trump, the president lauded his talents. “Steve will be a tough and smart new voice at Breitbart news … may be even better than before,” he said at the time.
All that was forgotten yesterday. In fact, as is frequent with Trump, it ceased to exist as fact.
“Steve Bannon has nothing to do with me or my Presidency,” Trump raged. “When he was fired, he not only lost his job, he lost his mind.”
Claiming Bannon was “only in it for himself,” he unleashed four bitter paragraphs of invective at a man viewed as having provided a fundamental policy structure for the amorphous and imprecise agenda Trump brought to the presidency.
“Now that he is on his own, Steve is learning that winning isn’t as easy as I make it look,” he said. Bannon, he charged, “spent his time at the White House leaking false information to the media to make himself seem far more important than he was. It is the only thing he does well. Steve was rarely in a one-on-one meeting with me and only pretends to have had influence to fool a few people with no access and no clue, whom he helped write phoney books.”
Bannon’s sin was to have mocked Trump’s son and cast doubt on Trump’s insistence that an investigation into Russian links with his campaign is “fake news” fed by enemies intent on bringing down his presidency.
Bannon is quoted in a new book by author and columnist Michael Wolff as characterizing a controversial meeting between top-level Trump people and a Russian delegation as “treasonous” and “unpatriotic.” The meeting, which included Trump’s son Donald Jr., son-in-law Jared Kushner and campaign manager Paul Manafort, was allegedly held in hopes of getting promised dirt on Hillary Clinton in the midst of the presidential race.
Though nothing came of the meeting, it is now a central element of the Russian probe. According to Wolff, Bannon said he expects investigators to “crack Don Jr. like an egg on national TV.”
That Trump would comprehensively disavow a disciple he once so firmly embraced probably won’t surprise many people by now, accustomed as the world has become to the president reversing course, identifying black as white, and boldly making claims easily disproved by a moment or two on Google. And it probably isn’t a surprise to anyone but Trump himself that the rapid turnover at his White House — new chief of staff, new official spokesperson, new cabinet members, new advisers — was inevitably going to result in tell-all books fuelled by the recently departed, whether they were fired, quit or fled the scene of the chaos before it could swallow their careers.
Ousted press secretary Sean Spicer has already promised a tome shedding “new light on the headlinegrabbing controversies of the Trump administration’s first year” to be published this summer. Did anyone expect the disgraced Michael Flynn would keep quiet forever? And is it even humanly possible for someone like Anthony Scaramucci to keep his yap shut if he thinks there’s a buck in it? Trump’s inner circle is transparently heavy with chancers keen on cashing in quickly before it all goes belly up. That’s part of what’s so worrying about Trump: he can’t control himself, his secretary of state thinks he’s a moron, and the only people he listens to are the ones, like Bannon, who feed his worst instincts.
It’s the tone of the latest outburst that’s put the world more than usually on edge, as it coincides with a parallel taunting session Trump launched this week against North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong Un. Fresh from an extended Christmas break, Trump fell immediately into a slanging match with Kim over the comparative size of their nuclear arsenals.
“North Korean Leader Kim Jong Un just stated that the ‘Nuclear Button is on his desk at all times,’ he tweeted. “Will someone from his depleted and food starved regime please inform him that I too have a Nuclear Button, but it is a much bigger & more powerful one than his, and my Button works!”
Apart from the juvenile tone, the tweet was immediately criticized as unwise and unpresidential. “This is not a game. This is not about can I puff my chest out bigger than yours,” said former vice-president Joe Biden.
There are real fears that the high-level game of nuclear chicken could accidentally set off a shooting war. Kim has shown himself to be determined to win respect for his isolated country’s nuclear capability, boasting in a New Year’s message that North Korean weapons could reach any part of the U.S. mainland. Trump seems incapable of understanding that daring a dictator to launch a war is not the mark of a wise or well-balanced individual.
In her failed 2008 presidential bid, a Clinton campaign ad asked voters who they trusted to deal with a moment of international crisis.
“It’s 3 a.m. and your children are safe and asleep. Who do you want answering the phone?” it asked.
It’s pretty certain few people would pick a foolhardy man who can’t steady himself long enough to deal rationally with a tell-all book by an aggrieved former friend.
IT’S THE TONE OF THE LATEST OUTBURST THAT’S PUT THE WORLD MORE THAN USUALLY ON EDGE.