Trump’s 1st week: He’s OK with more fog than clarity

Normally, at the end of a new administration’s tumultuous first week, it’s the pundit’s job to sit back and chin-stroke and explain everything that the president and his aides are doing right or wrong.

In the Donald Trump era, though, there’s a distinctive problem: Before he can be defended or criticized, we have to figure out what’s actually happening. And for several reasons, that’s going to be harder than ever before.

First: This is clearly going to be an administration with multiple centers of gravity, with more fractiousness and freelancing than in the relatively tight ships that Barack Obama and George W. Bush ran. The Trump White House has a weak chief of staff surrounded by rivalrous advisers. The Trump Cabinet is not necessarily on the same ideological page as his inner circle. Trump himself is famous for agreeing with the last person who bent his ear. So there is no trustworthy voice providing public clarity — least of all poor Sean Spicer.

Second: The establishment press is being pressured to lead the resistance to Trumpism, which makes it more likely to run with the most shocking interpretations of whatever the White House happens to be doing. The Trump inner circle clearly intends to encourage the press-as-opposition narrative as a way of shoring up its base’s loyalty. And then the technological forces shaping media coverage also encourage errors and overreach — a dubious story or even a misleading live-tweet can go around the online world long before the more prosaic truth has reached your Facebook feed. (A self-serving suggestion: In such a climate, the discerning citizen may come to appreciate anew the tortoiselike pace of print journalism.)

Third: Trumpism is an ideological cocktail that doesn’t fit the patterns we’re used to in politics. This means, as The Week columnist Damon Linker notes perceptively, that he’s guaranteed to do things that seem “abnormal” and that take both the press corps and D.C. mandarins aback — like, say, actually enforcing already-on-the-books immigration laws. The trick for the public will be figuring where what’s “abnormal” is obviously “alarming” and where it makes more sense to wait and see. Which will be hard for reasons one and two, and also because ...

... Trump himself is a loose cannon.

Of course, time will bring a certain clarity.

But if the fog lifts in some cases, it’s likely to chronically shroud the policymaking process on issues (health care, taxes, infrastructure, more) where Trump needs his congressional allies to have certainty about their shared objectives. And it threatens to descend more dramatically — with Stephen King-style monsters screaming in the mist — with every unexpected event, every unlookedfor crisis, in which what the White House says in real time will matter much more than it does right now.

For legislators, too much fog is paralyzing. For voters, it’s a recipe for nervous exhaustion. For allies, it’s confusing; for enemies, it looks like an opportunity.

Trump is not a popular president. If he can’t provide clarity and reassurance and a little light around his agenda, it will be very easy for a fogbound presidency to simply run aground.