Portrait of a loose cannon
"Sickening," is the way Mitt Romney describes it. The word I'd pick would be "predictable." Everything we've known about Donald Trump for decades has pointed to the kind of administration he's running, and anybody who bothered to do his or her homework knew exactly what to expect in what such people understandably thought to be the unlikely event of his election.
As Nial Stanage puts it in The Hill,
The Trump White House, as portrayed by Mueller, revolves around an impulsive and angry president who issues orders that underlings often defy, ignore or seek to delay.
The depiction will enrage a president who fixates on the concept of strength and is hypersensitive about any suggestion that he is not in absolute control of his administration.
Stange quotes a White House strategist as observing that Trump can be “very impulsive and choose to pop off,” forcing his staff, subordinates, and advisors to make one of their major objectives to "save him from himself."
Mr. Trump's reputation as a temperamental and angry man with little impulse control is decades old. It was William F. Buckley who described him as a "narcissist" long before the current crop of mostly Democratic psychologists started suggesting that he suffers from Narcissistic Personality Disorder, a serious condition which for obvious reasons can be dangerous in a man with power. Whether one accepts the second-hand clinical judgment of people who have never even met him or not, it's no secret that Donald Trump is, first and foremost, about Donald Trump. Everything he says, does, reads, and hears seems to be filtered through the question of how it makes him look.
Again, whether or not one wants to go all Sigmund Freud on the man, anyone with much experience with human nature realizes that it tends to be weak people who obsess about being perceived as strong. Many Trump supporters- especially those who identify with him because they see themselves as powerless and view him as their champion- are attracted to what they see as his strength and toughness. This sorts well, of course, with how Mr. Trump sees himself. Mr. Trump's supporters are loudly contemptuous of "snowflakes" and crow about the metaphorical size of the president's testicles; the irony is that his pathetic sensitivity and overreaction to the slightest criticism clearly reveals him to anyone not hopelessly deceived by partisanship to be perhaps the biggest "snowflake" of them all.
He can dish it out, but he absolutely cannot take it.
To be obsessed with appearing strong and "macho" is often a tipoff that one is in fact personally very insecure. Strong, secure people seldom feel the need to make it a point to be perceived by others as strong and secure. Whether his supporters realize it or not, the man they more than once portrayed as a "lion" during his campaign for the White House behaves a great deal more like a scared, insecure, and weak little orange kitten. It is strong people who can afford to be kind; habitual bullies, on the other hand, betray their own personal insecurity and sense of weakness by their easy cruelty. To invariably respond to the slightest disagreement or criticism by lashing out in vicious and usually personal attacks says nothing complimentary one's self-esteem. Again, whether or not one chooses to invoke DSM-V in defense of one's perceptions, it's axiomatic that narcissists are damaged people who are extremely threatened by the slightest indication that somebody else sees them as, deep down, they know themselves to be.
The nation's interests are not well-served by having a leader who forms his judgments and determines his actions not based more on those interests and less on the protection of his own ego. But beyond that, a need to express ill-informed, impulsively adopted and attention-grabbing opinions is dangerous in a leader for other reasons. Marginal folks such as those who form his base may be less than disturbed by Mr. Trump's long-standing insistence that his predecessor was born in Kenya long after the absurdity of the notion was demonstrated beyond any possible doubt, but thoughtful ones cannot help but see it as raising questions about the man's judgment. And from the absurdity of solving the problem of illegal immigration by building a wall to his bizarre readiness to accept the word of Vladimir Putin and the FSB as to the (now thoroughly proven) involvement of Russia in the hacking of campaign computers during the 2016 campaign over the conclusions of the American intelligence community, Mr. Trump has made his pattern of preferring chaotic and unorthodox posturing to thoughtfulness in adopting his positions plain throughout his political career and even long before. That his original base was and is composed largely of similarly ill-informed, less-than-thoughtful individuals suspicious of authority, ready to accept any bizarre notion that happens to fit their preconceptions and prejudices regardless of the evidence that it even might be true, and if anything more likely to believe something because it is lurid and disruptive than because it's based on well-established fact and carefully reasoned does a great deal to explain the phenomenon of Donald Trump.
Many conservatives seem to miss the point that, however conservative his rhetoric, Donald Trump is not driven by ideology. His transformation from a pro-choice, pro-immigration admirer of Hillary Clinton and outspokenly partisan liberal Democrat to a pro-life nativist who thinks that Hillary not only is incompetent but belongs in jail over the course of a year or two might not be a dealbreaker for pragmatic conservatives grateful that he is willing to be their ally in advancing their agenda, but at least the more thoughtful of them are surely aware that he would turn against them in a heartbeat should he find himself in a situation in which it would suit his own political and personal interest to do so. Such pragmatism is understandable, at one level. But at another, it raises a question in my mind as to whether Mr. Trump's truly conservative supporters realize that, as the saying goes, one cannot lie down with dogs without getting fleas. The Alex Jones crowd, the open racists, the Klansmen, the literal Nazis, and the alt-right, in general, are not going to crawl back under the rocks from which they came when Donald Trump appeared simply because he's gone. While I have little doubt that Mr. Trump will be defeated in 2020, the problem will be even worse for genuine conservatives if he's re-elected. The fact is that the Republican party is now the party of the alt-right. They are its public personna. And they are now well aware of their ability to swing a presidential nomination, especially one in which those opposed to them split their support among a number of candidates; after all, they've already done it once.
They aren't going away when Donald Trump leaves the White House, whenever that may be, and it's not going to be easy at that point to turn the GOP into something that either can or should be taken seriously again by thoughtful voters. Even what was previously thought to be the extreme Republican Right before 2016- the Tea Party, for example- is going to have trouble controlling the Republican Party once Donald Trump is gone. Barring some kind of a massive and decisive repudiation of the Trump base by the Republican party, it's going to be their party from here on out- or at the very least, a party of which they are so powerful and vocal a faction that it will never be able to find itself again.
But I digress. Mr. Trump is a man driven by his own insecurities and massive ego, an ideological chameleon who has given an outrageously extreme, bizarre, and dangerous coalition a leader, a spokesman, and a common cause. The long-term consequences, I believe, will be far more grave than most conservatives realize. But for now, the issue is the one that has always made Donald Trump personally unacceptable to me as a president- even more so than Hillary Clinton, whom I opposed with every fiber of my being,
The Mueller Report portrays a weak, erratic man who is personally so unfit to be the president that those around him have to regularly subvert his will and deceive him in order to prevent him from wrecking not only his own career but the country. And that is precisely what those of us who had bothered to pay attention to Mr. Trump's personality and career before he announced his candidacy would have predicted.
That is why I believed that even Hillary- who at least would have had some notion what she was doing, some principles (however misguided) to inform her actions, and some ability to control her own administration and actually lead rather than being lead by her advisors- was more fit to be president than Donald Trump. Whether the country would have been better off is another matter, but had Hillary won in 2016 it would have left a Democratic party whose rank-and-file is far to her Left in chaos, and the GOP intact, to govern for the foreseeable future.
But as it is, Donald Trump fumes and threatens and tweets insults, absurdities, outright lies and non-sequiturs to the world and makes America its laughingstock while his subordinates run the country and try to keep that fact from him. Petty and silly Democrats used to suggest the ridiculous notion that somehow Dick Cheney was running the Bush administration while President Bush was simply humored by his staff; who could have believed that a similar state of affairs would actually come to pass when a far less intelligent, less able, and less qualified Republican would succeed him only eight years later?
Occasionally, despite all precautions, Mr. Trump blurts out enough sensitive information to visiting Russian diplomats to burn an Israeli intelligence asset and get the former head of Mossad to advocate no longer sharing intelligence information with the U.S. But with Secretary Mattis, General Kelly, Secretary Tillerson, and the others surrounding Mr. Trump best suited to actually keep him in check and avoid disaster leaving the administration one by one and placing Mr. Trump in the hands of less knowledgable and able babysitters, it's just as well that 2020 is only a few months away.
If only there were a greater prospect of Mr. Trump being replaced by someone significantly better.
As it stands, what anyone who simply had been paying attention back in 2016 could have predicted has come to pass. In Donald Trump, America has an erratic, impulsive, mean-spirited, insecure, self-centered, willfully misinformed, and unstable president who has to be kept out of trouble by others and deceived into thinking that he's actually running things. And every moment he remains in office, he remains a threat not simply to the welfare of the nation, but to our national security itself.
The American people realize this. Thank God. If only more of them had realized it in 2016, Jeb Bush or Carly Fiorina or Marco Rubio or even Ted Cruz would be president today, and we all would be better off.
ADDENDUM: Mr. Trump's attitude toward staff members who simply obeyed the law and cooperated with a lawful investigation is quite telling. It almost seems that he approves more of the aides who lied to Mueller and are apparently going to jail.
Well, not almost. Not some Mafia don, folks. Our Chief Magistrate.
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