THE DONALD TRUMP SHOW What the spectacle-focused presidency has brought us
As he prepared to desecrate Independence Day, Donald Trump promised the “show of a lifetime.” It was, instead, a pale imitation of the martial displays mustered by the world’s dictators combined with a poorlydelivered speech riddled with basic errors. Rather than the show of a lifetime we got more proof that the man isn’t up to the job.
For the record, despite what the president said, American troops did not take over enemy “airports” during the War of Independence and, since the battle of Fort McHenry was decades in the future, they did not fight there. The Continental Army was not, as Trump said, named for George Washington, and the British Gen. Cornwallis was not a native of Yorktown.
Though his speechwriters seemingly drew his text from an elementary school book, and though some of these errors were no doubt the result of simple flubs of what was on the teleprompter, a fifth-grade teacher would have given Trump a grade of C or below.
Why was his performance so poor? It was because he tried to go against type.
A ringmaster by nature, his decision to crash the annual celebration at the National Mall and add military hardware to the mix was classic Trump. He didn’t care that Independence Day is a mostly civilian affair, or that no president had addressed the nation on the Fourth in 70 years. He wanted to wrap himself in the flag and showcase himself as a Yankee Doodle Dandy.
But somehow between his demand for tanks and his speech, Trump lost control of the show and of his nerve. The Pentagon, having resisted previous demands for a big, un-American military parade, gave him a handful of stationary armored vehicles and a small number of aircraft. You’d almost think that the Deep State of conspiracy-minded Trumpsters had tried to make the show puny.
Except for his effort at ramrod posture, Trump himself seemed only half-committed to the performance. Maybe it was the statue of Abraham Lincoln looking over his shoulder or a desire to stage something serious to insert in a campaign ad.
Whatever the reason, he wasn’t Trump the Angry, or Trump the Mean. He was Trump the Embarrassing, unable to follow the text and incapable of recovering in a coherent fashion.
In the aftermath, the president surely recognized that he blew it by
trying to be presidential in a moment had he initially devised to be one of his typical acts of defiance. For years now, Trump has been a divisive, bombastic, insult-comic version of a chief executive. The real Trump gleefully trashes war-hero John McCain and insists there were “very fine people” among violent neo-Nazis in Charlottesville. He spits in the eye of convention and revels in the reactions he gets from more serious people.
He brags that he can be “with the exception of the late, great Abraham Lincoln…more presidential than any president that’s ever held this office,” but he doesn’t want that, because, I think he fears, it’s not what got him elected or what will get him reelected. More importantly, it’s just not who he is.
When Trump tries to be serious himself, he struggles, because it’s not in his nature. During his 40-plus years as a real estate promoter, media gadfly and reality-TV show host, Trump learned how to create a spectacle and came to value theatricality as an end unto itself.
As his children entered the trade first as props and then as TV co-stars, the Trumps became a family of entertainers. Don Jr., Eric and most of all Ivanka pretended to be competent businesspeople when in fact they were merely his heirs.
Their deficiencies didn’t matter until the clan moved into politics and, with the aid of Vladimir Putin’s minions, into government.
The Trump family circus reached a new level of audacity in the week leading up to his holiday special as Junior echoed racist attacks on Democratic contender Kamala Harris and the president brought his daughter to a summit of world leaders and then to the Demilitarized Zone on the Korean Peninsula. There he walked into North Korea to meet the murderous dictator Kim Jong Un.
Any doubt that the DMZ follies were about the president’s image and ego were dispelled when he predicted his daughter would “upstage” his Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. At a U.S. Air Force base in South Korea, he had Ivanka and Pompeo sashay out like a couple of contestants at a talent show. He called them “a beautiful