Trump distractions mask the potential for disruption

If the early controversies of the Reagan administration are any indication — the contretemps over whether the Agriculture Department should count ketchup as a vegetable in school lunches and whether Interior Secretary James Watt’s view that Americans should “occupy the land until Jesus returns” was national policy — the current furors swirling around the Trump administration are mere distractions.

It will not matter a decade from now whether Education Secretary Betsy DeVos believes pupils need guns to protect them from grizzly bears at school or whether Donald J. Trump believes his 304 electoral-vote majority is bigger than Barack Obama’s 365 in 2008.

Far more important issues are at stake, vital questions of national philosophy and governance that will shape the profile of the nation for the remainder of the first quarter of the 21st century, perhaps beyond. Here are some of them: — Are domestic politics and issues affecting the economy and lifestyle the principal focus of the United States — or does the country have a role, and a stake, in world affairs?

The United States has answered that question in different ways at different times in its history.

For most of its early years, when the country’s name took a plural verb (“the United States are ...”) the focus was inward; the country was still a work in progress — economically, culturally — and had a fast-changing national identity.

Later, with the issues of slavery and secession settled, the country took a singular verb (“the United States is ...”) and, with the advent of a quixotic foreign policy under Woodrow Wilson, the country began to look outward.

Now Trump speaks of “America First,” an unfortunate phrase given its provenance in the effort to keep the nation out of World War II, and his inaugural address made his vision clear.

— What is the place of the American elite and of the conventions of American domestic and foreign policy?

In selecting his issues and his advisers, Trump rejects the established order and embraces the new and insurrectionist.

His dismissal of former Gov. Mitt Romney of Massachusetts, first for his credibility as a presidential candidate and then as a potential secretary of state, was not an impulse but a statement.

— What value does the Trump team place on continuity?

Great powers, from the Holy Roman Empire to the British Empire and, in more recent times, the United States, place great value on stability and its handmaiden, continuity.

The last outsider Republican president, Reagan, made great efforts to blend into the parade of presidents by paying fealty to the established buoys of American policy.

Bill Clinton, who ran as an outsider, was a devout student of presidential precedent and a careful cultivator of traditional American customs and alliances.

This is not Trump’s style, nor his inclination.

At the center of Trump’s skepticism of continuity is his conviction that prior policies were the province, and the product, of a cabal of elitists who saw their own interests as congruent with the national interest.

The answer to these questions, not the events of the day, will determine the lasting significance of the Trump era — four or eight years that have the potential for being not the conservative era that its liberal critics fear but something far more disruptive: a radical departure in American history, welcomed by some, reviled by others.