Trump fails to impress with his hand-to-hand combat
Maureen Dowd
“Please stop smiling,” I politely asked Barack Obama as I passed him in Boston’s airport.
It wasn’t just any smile. It was that infectious, magical grin that we didn’t see all that often after 2008.
No answer was forthcoming since I was only talking to the former president’s glossy image, cuddling with Michelle on the cover of People.
But there is something disorienting about seeing Obama look so genuinely blissful, while so many others freak out about his successor.
As TMZ put it Friday, when it published pictures of Obama grinning and golfing at St. Andrews in Scotland: “Barack Obama’s not just on vacation — he’s on the most EPIC vacay, and it’s starting to feel like he’s rubbing it in your face.”
If everything is as dire as Democrats say, if the very Republic is in peril and the leader of the Free World is unstable, if President Donald Trump is trying to trample on Obama’s legacy and gut Medicaid and rip up the social safety net, why is Obama acting so carefree?
It is odd to watch the ex-president avoid any direct criticism of Trump while Democratic officials and former Obama advisers tweet and cable-chat all day, every day about Trump being a danger to democracy.
It’s a resistance in search of a leader.
“We’re beyond grief and into disbelief,” David Axelrod, Obama’s old guru, told me. “I feel like a 6-year-old has gotten controls of the 747 and we’re all strapped in our seats hoping either he’ll land the plane or somebody else will co-pilot. But meanwhile, we’re just getting jerked around in turbulence on a constant basis here.”
While Obama certainly ruffled feathers in Washington as president, it seems like nothing compared to the daily emotional traumas, family soap operas and Byzantine Russian scandal twists and turns gushing out of the Trump White House.
It looks like the three happiest guys in a jangled, coarsened, belligerent, riven country are Barack Obama, George W. Bush and John Boehner. But will we be OK? Trump thinks the way to represent America is with a caricature of strength, without understanding it comes across as weakness and boorishness.
Things have gotten into such dangerous territory with verbal and physical violence that in Montana Greg Gianforte bodyslammed a reporter hours before winning a House seat, and Turkey’s presi- dent, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, watched as his security goons roughed up protesters in front of the Turkish Embassy during his recent visit here.
Never before have allies had pre-emptive plans on how to counteract a U.S. president’s handshake. Trump’s are more like dominance tests than greetings. First Justin Trudeau in Washington and then Emmanuel Macron in Brussels prepared to out-grip him on his “I’ll-rip-your-shoulderout-and-show-you-who’sboss” handshake.
When Trump pushed aside Dusko Markovic, the prime minister of Montenegro, to get in front of the NATO pack, J.K. Rowling tweeted: “You tiny, tiny, tiny little man.”
Donald Trump is a faux tough guy. That is not even in the American tradition. All of our famously tough icons, on screen and in life, were able to exude strength without using brute force. And they did it while standing up for people, not smacking them down.