STOP GIVING TRUMP THE BENEFIT OF THE DOUBT
After Donald Trump signed the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act in December, a number of companies gave their employees onetime bonuses, ostensibly sharing their new corporate windfall. As a PR stunt, those checks were a savvy investment; they allowed the companies to pander to the administration and made themselves look beneficent without incurring any long-term obligation to their workers.
Critics of the new law tried to point out that one-time bonuses are not the same as pay increases, and that the overwhelming majority of corporate savings from the tax cut was likely to go to shareholders.
Five months later, contrary to Republican claims, wage growth has been anemic. Instead of sharing the wealth with employees, companies have spent record amounts of money buying back their own stock.
Watching this unfold should have helped inoculate commentators against Trumpist bamboozlement. It has not. In March, Trump spontaneously accepted an offer, conveyed to him by a South Korean envoy, to meet directly with the North Korean leader, Kim Jong Un. North Korea has sought a oneon-one meeting with a sitting American president for years, believing it would legitimate it as a global power, but previous administrations have refused.
Nevertheless, credulous commentators praised Trump for bringing North Korea to the table. And pundits, including some who are broadly critical of the president, hectored us to give him credit.
In The Daily Beast, Rory Cooper asked us to entertain “the possibility that Trump actually is on the precipice of this type of geopolitical achievement.” Jeff Greenfield wrote an essay in Politico Magazine headlined, “Thinking the Unthinkable: What if Trump Succeeds?” He urged those of us appalled by the president to “to consider seriously the proposition that this misbegotten president has somehow achieved an honestto-God diplomatic success.”
To be fair, there is one sense in which this is true. Due to Trump’s ignorance and vanity, South Korea’s dovish leader, Moon Jae-in, has been able to manipulate him into a position where he might make concessions to North Korea that no other president would dare. Given the risk of war, Moon’s maneuvering has been admirable.
Now, three weeks away from a summit that may or may not actually happen, reports show a president terrifyingly unprepared for high-stakes diplomacy. After being conciliatory for several weeks, Kim Jong Un has started pushing back against the United States, exactly as experts predicted he would.
Even a casual newspaper reader — which, of course, Trump is not — knows that when North Korea talks about “denuclearization,” it doesn’t mean unilaterally giving up all its nuclear weapons. A hastily arranged meeting between two bellicose egomaniacs, premised on a basic misunderstanding, is unlikely to resolve one of the world’s most intractable geopolitical conflicts; a flimsy agreement that roughly preserves the status quo seems like a best-case scenario. Yet for weeks, the pull to give Trump pre-emptive credit for a hypothetical victory has felt like a cultural undertow; you had to plant your feet firmly to resist it.
Pushing against such a current can be hard for fair-minded journalists, who rightly pride themselves on being open to new information and willing to re-examine their own assumptions. But Trump, whose only real talent is the manipulation of reality, exploits this impulse.
Of course, we all have a motive in playing along with the fiction that Trump has achieved a Korean breakthrough — it might stop him from starting a war. But it’s one thing to humor our idiot president, and another to let the gravitational pull of presidential power, and the deep desire for a minimally competent leader, warp reality. We all want to be open-minded, but con men should never been given the benefit of the doubt.