Trump shockers should be no surprise
Anyone who was surprised by the unilateral way President Donald Trump decided to invoke steel tariffs, meet with North Korea’s leader or sack his secretary of state hasn’t been listening.
After all, Trump signaled how he’d operate when he was asked two years ago whom he consults for foreign policy advice. “I’m speaking with myself, number one, because I have a very good brain and I’ve said a lot of things,” Trump said in a March 2016 appearance on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.”
“I know what I’m doing, and I listen to a lot of people, I talk to a lot of people,” he continued. “My primary consultant is myself and I have a good instinct for this stuff.”
So far, the results have been distinctly mixed. Trump subsequently tempered or reversed sweeping positions he espoused in free-wheeling sessions with members of Congress on immigration and guns, and measures in neither are close to enactment. On both tariffs and North Korea, reality may yet dampen the dramatic announcements Trump made without the restraint or advice of the aides he didn’t consult — or doesn’t have. And despite saying he and Mike Pompeo have “a very similar thought process,” there’s no guarantee he’ll pay more attention to his new secretary of state than he paid to Rex Tillerson, whose advice he ignored on tariffs, North Korea, climate control and other issues.
On tariffs, it has been widely reported that Trump decided to slap levies on steel and aluminum imports without benefit of serious staff analysis and over the objections of chief economic adviser Gary Cohn, who subsequently quit. But his action did represent his deeply held personal beliefs that trading partners have taken advantage of the U.S.
By the time he issued a formal order, the president made some concessions to the fact the chief victims were going to be U.S. allies like Canada, rather than would-be adversaries like China. Not for the first time, Trump’s bite proved somewhat less than his bark.
Even more spur-of-themoment was his decision to meet North Korea’s Kim Jong Un, whom he previously derided as “little rocket man” and threatened to destroy unless he scrapped his nuclear program. Hearing from South Korean envoys of Kim’s interest in a meeting, Trump abruptly reversed his prior disdain for talks last week and agreed to meet him.
The South Korean foreign minister’s announcement took almost everyone in his administration by surprise. It reminded me of how President Richard Nixon caught his vice president, Spiro Agnew, by surprise 47 years ago by announcing his ground-breaking trip to China while Agnew, who opposed it, was also in Africa.
Neither the lack of preparation nor the presence of any senior advisers to counsel a more deliberate approach deterred the president from what some saw as a dramatic effort to change the subject from weeks of stories about White House chaos and, more recently, a porn actress’ allegations of a 2006 affair with Trump.
Aides disputed that explanation. “President Trump isn’t doing this for theater,” Pompeo said on Fox News Sunday. “He’s doing it to solve a problem.” But solving the Korean impasse will be incredibly difficult since most analysts doubt Kim will agree to abandon his nuclear weapons.
In Pompeo, Trump gets a more-consistent defender than Tillerson, who never denied the NBC News report he called the president a “(expletive) moron.” But Pompeo also has criticized Russia more directly than the president, accusing it of meddling in the 2016 election and preparing to do so in the future. Now, Pompeo will have to deal with the headstrong chief executive who thinks he doesn’t need experts to do his job.
Tuesday’s announcement showed once again that Trump knows how to produce dramatic headlines. But results require the more measured and consistent approach he has yet to show he can take.