Welcome to the Snapchat presidency of Donald Trump
David Brooks
Normal leaders come up with policy proposals in a certain conventional way. They gather their advisers around them and they debate alternatives — with briefing papers, intelligence briefings and implementation strategies.
Donald Trump doesn’t do that. He’s tweeted out policy gestures in recent weeks, say about the future of America’s nuclear arsenal. But these gestures aren’t attached to anything. They emerged from no analytic process and point to no implemental effects. Trump’s statements seem to spring spontaneously from his middle-of-night feelings. They are astoundingly ambiguous and defy interpretation.
Normal leaders serve an office. They understand that the president isn’t a lone monarch. He is the temporary occupant of a powerful public post. He’s the top piece of a big system, and his ability to create change depends on his ability to leverage and mobilize the system. His statements are carefully parsed around the world because presidential shifts in verbal emphasis are not personal shifts; they are national shifts that signal changes in a superpower’s actual behavior.
Donald Trump doesn’t think in that way, either. He is anti-system. He has no experience being accountable to anybody, to a board of directors or an owner. As president-elect, he has not begun attaching himself to the system of governance he’ll soon oversee.
If anything, Trump is detaching himself. He’s detached himself from the intelligence community that normally serves as the president’s eyes and ears. He’s talked about not really moving to the White House, the nerve center of the executive branch. He’s sided with a foreign leader, Vladimir Putin, against his own governmental structures.
Finally, normal leaders promulgate policies. They measure their days by how they propose and champion actions and legislation. Trump doesn’t think in this way, either. He is a creature of the parts of TV and media where display is an end in itself. He is not really interested in power; his entire life has been about winning atten- tion and status to build the Trump image for lowclass prestige. The posture is the product.
When Trump issues a statement, it may look superficially like a policy statement, but it’s usually just a symbolic assault in some dominance-submission male rivalry game. The primary thing is bashing enemies.
Over the past weeks, we’ve treated the president-elect’s comments as normal policy statements uttered by a normal president-elect. Each time Trump says or tweets something, squads of experts leap into action, trying to interpret what he could have meant, or how his intention could lead to changes in American policy. But this probably is the wrong way to read Trump. He is more postmodern. He does not operate by an if-then logic. His mode is not decision, implementation, consequence.
His statements probably should be treated less like policy declarations and more like Snapchat. They exist to win attention at the moment, but then they disappear. Trump is not a national leader; he is a national show.
If this is all true, it could be that the governing Trump will be a White House holograph. When it comes to the substance of actual governance, it could be that President Trump is the man who isn’t there.
The crucial question of the Trump administration could be: Who will fill the void left by a leader who is all facade?