Clash of cultures with Trump in speech at the U.N.

Say this about President Donald J. Trump: He never fails to astonish. For in his maiden speech before the General Assembly of the United Nations Tuesday morning, he stunned his critics by his repeated, respectful bows to hoary tradition even as he opened up unusual attacks on other nations and rival ideologies -and issued an unprecedented vow from a podium of peace to mount a military assault to “totally destroy” another country.

In that iconic chamber of great hopes and unfulfilled dreams, both the world struggle and the Trump struggle converged for a fraught 40 minutes before weary-eyed diplomats and amid wearying problems.

Trump won little applause from the delegates of the 192 other nations that comprise the General Assembly, but that is neither the point nor was it the goal of the president’s speech. In perhaps the most remarkable address ever delivered by an American chief executive, he mixed reverential rhetoric about the 72-year-old international organization (“the beautiful vision of this institution”) with language seldom if ever heard from a chief of state within the Assembly’s walls (“one of the worst” ... “an embarrassment” ... “vile and sinister” ... “loser terrorists” ... “band of criminals”).

Conventional news stories will emphasize Trump’s vow to destroy North Korea if the United States is forced to defend itself and will stress his use of the description “Rocket Man” for North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. But Trump, fond of disparaging nicknames like “Crooked Hillary,” used the “Rocket Man” elocution two days earlier and has issued similar threats to Pyongyang before.

Instead, Trump’s remarks underlined the struggle that rages within the new president between his (and many of his advisers’) yearning to fit inside the customary comportment and rhetoric of the American presidency and his instinct to shatter those conventions. In no president in recent times -- not in Ronald Reagan, whose conservative supporters once pleaded, “Let Reagan be Reagan”; nor in Richard Nixon, who ordered his subalterns to highlight his warm, compassionate side, even his sweetness, while he commanded punishing bombing raids on Hanoi and belittled student protesters at home -- has this struggle been so agonizing to the White House, so frustrating to the president himself and so bewildering to the public.

There were, to be sure, moments of eloquence in the Trump speech, the touch that Theodore Sorensen brought to John F. Kennedy, that Ray Price brought to Nixon and that Peggy Noonan brought to Reagan.

In his remarks, Trump said, “We have it in our power, should we so choose, to lift millions from poverty,” an echo of Thomas Paine’s hopeful plea in “Common Sense” (“We have it in our power to begin the world over again”), which Reagan often used in his 1980 presidential campaign and Trump employed in the penultimate line of his written budget message to Congress in May. Ten times he used the word “respect” (“respect for law, respect for borders and respect for culture”); three times he used the word “beautiful” (describing what he called the “pillars of peace, sovereignty, security and prosperity”). Once -- perhaps in a bow to Edmund Burke, revered by the conservatives who revile him -- Trump, who customarily rejects established and establishment thinking, spoke of “the wisdom of the past.”

And though he used the word “sovereign” 11 times, often emphasizing American prerogatives, Trump nonetheless sought to align himself firmly within American presidential tradition on diplomatic matters, including praise for the Marshall Plan. He quoted the remarks of Harry Truman, the first president to address the United Nations, in saying “our support of European recovery is in full accord with our support of the United Nations.”

In his first address to the General Assembly, in 1961, John F. Kennedy summarized the conundrum of the time: “(T)he great question which confronted this body in 1945 is still before us: whether man’s cherished hopes for progress and peace are to be destroyed by terror and disruption.” Trump, too, faces threats from terror and disruption. The presidency is a continuum of challenge.

Overall, the jarring collision of the customary and the extraordinary was a symbol of the conflicting currents inside the Trump White House. Trump’s remarks remind us that that conflict has not yet been resolved -- or that the lack of resolution between customary and extraordinary is itself the motif of the Trump era.