Big Little Man
Charlie Sykes has made this point before: Mr. Trump is caught on the horns of a dilemma. As a narcissist, he wants to take credit for everything. But on the other hand, he is unwilling to accept responsibility for anything. So, as Sykes defines Mr. Trump's essential posture, it's "I alone can save you- but don't blame me if I don't."
Mr. Trump and his sycophants are very good at taking the advice of Josef Goebbels, who advised authoritarians to accuse their opponents of the very thing that they themselves are doing. Thus, the most prolific liar in the history of the presidency accuses the media of publishing "fake news." The greatest source of misinformation in Washington's history warns people not to trust what his critics tell them. A president who is apparently unacquainted with the Constitution invokes our Founders and their values in opposition to those very values. A man who regards himself as the world's leading expert on everything invokes the seizure of the airports from the British by the Continental Army during the Revolutionary War and absolves his friend Vladimir Putin and the FSB of any interference in the 2016 election despite the conviction of several FSB agents on charges of interfering. A man who loudly proclaims his innocence of any wrongdoing- in fact, who daily slanders anyone who criticizes or disagrees with his infallible self, and accuses first a duly appointed special prosecutor and then a House committee of conducting a "witch-hunt" while pointedly stonewalling investigations which an innocent man would likely want to use to clear himself.
The amazing thing is that one man could so completely and consistently refuse to be accountable or transparent and still have such a relatively large number of Americans uncritically accept his every word as gospel.
And when all is said and done, Donald Trump has the ideology and instincts of an authoritarian, but he lacks the guts. The buck doesn't stop at his desk. It doesn't even slow down. If anything it accelerates to hypersonic speeds. He never makes mistakes, and if he does, it's somebody else's fault. He's a little man trying to convince the world- and himself- that he's a big one. And in the last analysis, he's less of an existential threat than a comic figure.
But that doesn't mean he isn't dangerous. His incompetence and his compulsion to trust his own instincts and hunches more than the people who, unlike him, actually know what they're talking about is one reason the current COVID-19 crisis is as bad as it is, and even now, he has failed to provide a plan for the nationwide testing that inevitably must take place before it's safe to open up the economy again. Not only that, but we lack the equipment with which to do that testing on the necessary scale largely because he ignored the repeated warnings of both the scientific and intelligence communities that this would be happening. The same is true of the shortage of ventilators. Instead, he told us that COVID-19 was just the flu, no big deal, nothing to worry about.
Well, it wasn't just the flu, it is a big deal, and it's turning out to be one of the greatest crises in our nation's history. At a moment at which we desperately need a leader, we don't have a president, much less an authoritarian president, really. We just have somebody who plays one on TV.
"Performative authoritarianism," Bill Kristol calls it. And Charlie Sykes explores the implications here. Somebody recently observed that not only is Mr. Trump is too lazy to ever be a dictator, but he doesn't even know how to be a dictator. In fact. he doesn't even know how to be a president.
BTW, I strongly endorse this article by Matthew Continetti. It's one of the most rational and most hopeful things I've read in recent weeks.
Never think that because Donald Trump is fundamentally ineffectual that he's harmless.
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