He is, if nothing else, a genius at playing to America’s most alarming tendencies.
What is there to add to the acres of pixels deployed to understand this past week?
A few thoughts. This should change everything and will likely change nothing. It remains a fact that 67 percent of Republican voters back Trump’s disgusting response to the neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville. That’s 34 percent of the country — which is only a little below where Trump’s current polling lies. Close to 80 percent of GOP voters approve of Trump’s presidency as a whole. Over the last week or so, in fact, Trump’s disapproval has dropped somewhat and his approval stabilized. Yes, it’s still dreadful by historical standards — but still enough to ensure that the loyal base will still intimidate the Republican elite into passivity.
We know now — even more indelibly — that no one can control Trump. His unprompted presser was his own impulsive revolt against his own aides’ caution — just as we now know, his tweeted ban on transgender service members was also a function of a temper tantrum. There are no guardrails in place if his temper were to start a war or civil unrest.
We know that new chief of staff John Kelly can’ t control the staff. Steve Bannon’s call to Bob Kuttner was, in many ways, worse than Scaramucci’s to Ryan Lizza. And Kelly was supposed to end all of that.
We know that even Trump’s belief that “fine people” marched alongside Nazi thugs in Charlottesville will not prompt Gary Cohn or James Mattis or Rex Tillerson or Kelly to resign. We know that even in that no-brainer context, almost no Republicans in Congress, including Paul Ryan, will criticize Trump by name. This incident in some ways inoculates Trump. If they let him survive this, they will let him survive anything.
Impeachment could make things worse, not better. If Mueller’s final indictment is not tightly connected to the president’s own collusion with Russia, but involves more general criminality in Trump’s business records or coterie, Trump would have an easy case to make to his base, and one he recently dusted off in his West Virginia rally. He could say that the Establishment is out to get him, and that impeachment is simply a way to nullify a fair election. Such a message will resonate. Even if a post-2018 House voted to impeach, I seriously doubt the Senate could find enough Republicans to reach the 66-vote threshold for conviction.
As for the solution offered by the 25th Amendment, this week was also instructive. If the cabinet cannot act after the president has destroyed America’s nuclear credibility and has claimed to have seen “fine people” marching alongside Nazis, they will never act. And again, this escape hatch is equally shut off by the populist maneuver — against the cabinet itself. We know, in other words, that these people will act only after a catastrophe has occurred, and not before.
I also suspect that Steve Bannon is not insane to be buoyant. If our politics in the near future is dominated by race — and especially by the question of Confederate statues — Trump will win. In culture wars, those who initiate the battle tend to lose it, and a campaign to remove statues across the country would be seen as just such a provocation. A poll this week that Cory Booker and Nancy Pelosi should take to heart reveals that 62 percent of Americans favor leaving the statues alone. Even a plurality of African-Americans — 44 to 40 percent — wants to keep them in place. That’s why Trump has pivoted to that ground.
And he has one more advantage this fall. He will have Hillary Clinton back as a foil, as she promotes her new book, whining about her electoral loss. Trump has no greater ally than Clinton. She won him the presidency; she could well sustain his presidency.
I wish I could be more optimistic. And surely I should be more optimistic after a president gets on the wrong side of a debate about Nazis. But there remains a deep darkness in America. And we should not be blind to Trump’s genius at exploiting it.
The thing I most miss about Barack Obama is his temperament. I think a lot of us underestimated how much it calmed us for eight long, fraught years. Nothing, it seemed, could ruffle his sleek, water-resistant feathers. He always gave the impression that everything was going to be okay, even if quite clearly it wasn’ t. His response to crisis was always no drama. His reaction to tragedy was instinctively humane, and occasionally inspired (just think of his eulogy speech after the Charleston massacre) . He never seemed to suddenly shift gait or look clumsy or swiftly change moods. He glided like a steady-cam through his own presidency. America, for Obama, was the preeminent world power and didn’ t need to prove its strength every day. His political opponents — even those foul racists who questioned his citizenship — were irritants to him, not mortal foes. The Republican fever would break eventually, he assured us. Nothing, it seemed, could get under his skin. His long game would work (and perhaps it will) .
But there was, looking back, a cost to this serenity. There was always a touch of complacency about it. He could get cocky and a little careless at times. In his coolness, he could easily underestimate what were, in fact, serious threats, such as the emergence of what he first called the “JV” team of al Qaeda, ISIS, or the potential for the Syrian civil war to ripple forever outward, or, more pertinently, the candidacy and possible election of Donald Trump.
He first mocked Trump relentlessly at that infamous 2011 White House Correspondents’ Association dinner: “Obviously we all know about your credentials and breadth of experience. For example… no seriously, just recently, in an episode of Celebrity Apprentice, at the steakhouse, the men’s cooking team did not impress the judges from Omaha Steaks. And there was a lot of blame to go around, but you, Mr. Trump, recognized that the real problem was a lack of leadership, and so ultimately you didn’ t blame Lil Jon or Meat Loaf, you fired Gary Busey. And these are the kinds of decisions that would keep me up at night. Well handled, sir.” Even at the same event, in 2015, Obama could say, with evident amazement and contempt: “And Donald Trump is Here. Still. [Laughter .] Anyway. [Laughter .] ”
Who exactly is laughing now? Last year, Obama simply stated as fact that Trump was not going to be president, period, fatally misreading the political tea leaves, and causing complacency on his own side: “I continue to believe Mr. Trump will not be president, and the reason is because I have a lot of faith in the American people.” His supreme confidence somehow persuaded him to back his defeated former opponent, Hillary Clinton, over his vice-president, Joe Biden, as his successor. For someone whose long game was critical to his success, this was a catastrophic misjudgment.
And when Obama’s intelligence services came to him last year and told him that Vladimir Putin was directly attempting to undermine the American election by trying to tilt it toward Trump, he did not hyperventilate. He didn’ t ring the alarm and go public, and risk being seen as, in some way, an agent of Hillary Clinton. He didn’ t want to intervene and polarize an already polarized country. He didn’ t want to give Trump ammunition in the middle of a campaign (proof either that Trump had gotten into his head or that his complacency about Clinton was deep) . And so, under his watch, the most sacred and vital ritual in our public life, the election of a new Congress and president, was compromised by a hostile foreign power. And before the election, his only clear action was to tell Putin, in a summit aside, to “cut it out.”
This was, it must be said, far too cool a response. He was president. An attack on our electoral system was an act of war against American democracy. And he kept the attack secret, and let it happen. Everything would be okay, as the Obama doctrine had it. Hillary was going to win anyway. But we now know it was not okay. And we live, in part, with the consequences of Obama’s complacency.
I wonder, as our national crisis deepens, if there might be some way for Obama to return to meet the challenge of the moment his complacency, in part, facilitated. So far, he’s taken a very George W. Bush position on being a former president. And there’s a dignity in this — in normal times.
