![]() ![]() When Julian Assange is benefitting Trump’s campaign, it’s “I love WikiLeaks!” now, with the Presidency won, the Justice Department is preparing criminal charges against him. One day NATO is “obsolete” the next it is “no longer obsolete.” The Chinese are “grand champions” of currency manipulation then they are not. Every day brings another outrage or embarrassment: the dressing down of the Australian Prime Minister or a shoutout for the “amazing job” that Frederick Douglass is doing. The urge to normalize Trump’s adolescent outbursts, his flagrant incompetence and dishonesty-to wish it all away, if only for a news cycle or two-is connected to the fear of what fresh hell might come next. When he restrains himself from trolling Kim Jong-un about the failure of a North Korean missile test, he is credited with the strategic self-possession of a Dean Acheson. This Presidency is so dispiriting that, at the first glimmer of relative ordinariness, Trump is graded on a curve. His Administration is not so much a team of rivals as it is a new form of reality entertainment: “The Circular Firing Squad.” Rather than demand discipline around him, Trump sits back and watches the results on cable news. The reporters who cover the White House say that, despite their persistent concerns about Trump’s attempts to marginalize the media, they are flooded with information. Little about this Presidency remains a secret for long. A reporter asks about the missile attack on Syria he feeds her a self-satisfied description of how he informed his Chinese guests at Mar-a-Lago of the strike over “the most beautiful piece of chocolate cake that you’ve ever seen.” Journalists are invited to the Oval Office to ask about infrastructure he turns the subject to how Bill O’Reilly, late of Fox News, is a “good person,” blameless, like him, in matters of sexual harassment. He is unserious, unfocussed, and, at times, it seems, unhinged. He thinks out loud, and is incapable of reflection. Trump appears to strut through the world forever studying his own image. When Kim In-ryong, a representative of North Korea’s radical regime, warns that Trump and his tweets of provocation are creating “a dangerous situation in which a thermonuclear war may break out at any moment,” does one man sound more immediately rational than the other? When Trump rushes to congratulate Recep Tayyip Erdoğan for passing a referendum that bolsters autocratic rule in Turkey-or when a sullen and insulting meeting with Angela Merkel is followed by a swoon session with Abdel Fattah El-Sisi, the military dictator of Egypt-how are the supporters of liberal and democratic values throughout Europe meant to react to American leadership? His bluster creates a generalized anxiety such that the President of the United States can appear to be scarcely more reliable than any of the world’s autocrats. Trump flouts truth and liberal values so brazenly that he undermines the country he has been elected to serve and the stability he is pledged to insure. But what was once a parochial amusement is now a national and global peril. This is the brand that Trump has created for himself-that of an unprincipled, cocky, value-free con who will insult, stiff, or betray anyone to achieve his gaudiest purposes. “Tell them it’s going to be a million square feet, sixty-eight stories.” “ Give them the old Trump bullshit,” he said. In 1980, when he was about to announce plans to build Trump Tower, a fifty-eight-story edifice on Fifth Avenue and Fifty-sixth Street, he coached his architect before meeting with a group of reporters. Trump has never gone out of his way to conceal the essence of his relationship to the truth and how he chooses to navigate the world. Impulsive, egocentric, and mendacious, Trump has, in the same span, set fire to the integrity of his office. The hundred-day marker is never an entirely reliable indicator of a four-year term, but it’s worth remembering that Franklin Roosevelt and Barack Obama were among those who came to office at a moment of national crisis and had the discipline, the preparation, and the rigor to set an entirely new course. His Presidency has become the demoralizing daily obsession of anyone concerned with global security, the vitality of the natural world, the national health, constitutionalism, civil rights, criminal justice, a free press, science, public education, and the distinction between fact and its opposite. For most people, the luxury of living in a relatively stable democracy is the luxury of not following politics with a nerve-racked constancy. On April 29th, Donald Trump will have occupied the Oval Office for a hundred days. ![]()
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