Trump’s vainglorious tweets get in the way of governing
HWASHINGTON huge failure. It contained no aving coined uniform commitments and Bush Derangement no enforcement provisions. Syndrome Sure, the whole world more than a decade signed. But onto what? A voluntary ago, I feel authorized set of vaporous promises. to weigh in on its China pledged to most recent offshoot. What “achieve the peaking of CO2 distinguishes Trump emissions around 2030.” Derangement Syndrome is Meaning that they rise for not just general hysteria another 13 years. about the subject, but additionally The rationale, I suppose, the inability to distinguish is that developing countries between legitimate like India and China should policy differences on the one be given a pass because the hand and signs of psychic West had a two-century head pathology on the other. start on industrialization.
Take Donald Trump’s climateI don’t think the Westchange decision. The needs to apologize — or pay hyperbole that met his withdrawal — for having invented the from the Paris steam engine. In fact, I’ve Agreement — a traitorous long favored a real climatechange act of war against the American pact, strong and enforceable, people, America just resigned that would impose as leader of the free relatively uniform demands world, etc. — was astonishing, on China, India, the U.S., the though hardly unusual, EU and any others willing to this being Mr. Trump. join.
What the critics don’t Paris was nothing but hot seem to recognize is that the air. Withdrawing was a perfectly Paris Agreement itself was a plausible policy choice (the other being remaining but trying to reduce our CO2-cutting commitments). The subsequent attacks on Mr. Trump were all the more unhinged because the president’s other behavior over the past several weeks provided ample opportunity for shock and dismay.
It’s the tweets, of course. Mr. Trump sees them as a direct, “unfiltered” conduit to the public. What he doesn’t quite understand is that for him — indeed, for anyone — they are a direct conduit from the unfiltered id. They erase whatever membrane normally exists between one’s internal disturbances and their external manifestations.
For most people, who cares? For the president of the United States, there are consequences. When the president’s id speaks, the world listens.
Consider his tweets mocking the mayor of London after the most recent terror attack. They were appalling. This is a time when a president expresses sympathy and solidarity — and stops there. Mr. Trump can’t stop, ever. He used the atrocity to renew an old feud with a minor official of another country. Petty in the extreme.
As was his using London to support his misbegotten travel ban, to attack his own Justice Department for having “watered down” the original executive order (ignoring the fact that Mr. Trump himself signed it) and to undermine the case for it just as it goes to the Supreme Court.
As when he boasted by tweet that the administration was already doing “extreme vetting.” But that explodes the whole rationale for the travel ban — that a 90day moratorium on entry was needed while new vetting procedures were developed. If the vetting is already in place, the ban has no purpose. The rationale evaporates.
And if that wasn’t mischief enough, he then credited his own interventions in Saudi Arabia for the sudden squeeze that the Saudis, the UAE, Egypt and other Sunni-run states are putting on Qatar for its long-running dirty game of supporting and arming terrorists (such as the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas) and playing footsie with Iran.
It’s good to see our Sunni allies confront Qatar and try to bring it into line. But why make it personal — other than to feed the presidential id? Gratuitously injecting the U.S. into the crisis taints the endeavor by making it seem an American rather than an Arab initiative and turns our allies into instruments of American designs rather than defenders of their own region from a double agent in their midst.
And this is just four days’ worth of tweets, all vainglorious and self-injurious. Where does it end?
The economist Herb Stein once quipped that “if something cannot go on forever, it will stop.” This really can’t go on, can it? But it’s hard to see what, short of a smoking gun produced by the Russia inquiry, actually does stop him.
Mr. Trump was elected to do politically incorrect — and needed — things like withdrawing from Paris. He was not elected to do crazy things, starting with his tweets. If he cannot distinguish between the two, Trump Derangement Syndrome will only become epidemic.