The "Me" Presidency

This week, the President of the United States used his ubiquitous Twitter account to promote a series of anti-Muslim videos which are both fraudulent and intentionally inflammatory. He then attacked the British Prime Minister after she saw fit to criticize his use of the videos, which were produced in England. Unsatisfied with this performance, he then suggested that Joe Scarborough, former Republican congressman and co-host of the morning political talk show "Morning Joe" on NBC, was guilty of murdering a staffer in 2001.

There is little that can be said about the actions themselves that has not been said already. It has been suggested by many, including myself, that the president intentionally causes outrage for the sake of obscuring an inconvenient story in the news cycle or shoring up his political base. There is certainly ample evidence that his Twitter account has been put to those uses. But the scattershot nature of Trump's public indiscretions this week suggests anything but a coherent plan.

He seems to regard his impulses as ends in and of themselves. He says precisely what is on his mind with such cringe-worthy regularity that it is as if he thinks, to quote my favorite movie*, that "every thought that tumbles through [his] head is so clever it would be a crime for it not to be published." This is the man who ridiculed John McCain for being captured in Vietnam, suggested that Megyn Kelly's line of questioning was motivated by her menstrual cycle, claimed that Ted Cruz's father was complicit in the Kennedy assassination, engaged in a prolonged feud with the parents of a Muslim solider killed in Iraq over their criticism of his travel ban proposals, and suggested that a judge then trying a case in which he was involved was incompetent to try it because his parents were from Mexico, all before he was even elected.

Since he became president, he has pettily threatened and/or insulted multiple members of his own party who have dared to criticize his antics, claimed the former FBI Director manipulated the results of the Clinton email investigation as part of a personal vendetta, repeatedly accused the Republican special counsel appointed to investigate his presidential campaign of actively taking part in a partisan witch hunt, engaged in personal insults and irresponsibly over-the-top threats of nuclear war against North Korea, and lest we forget he also all but publicly instructed the Justice Department to criminally investigate his erstwhile political opponent.

These various insults, recriminations, tantrums, outbursts, etc. are the behavior of a person whose self-regard is so excessive that it cannot bear contradiction. Disagreement with him is a sign of stupidity, or weakness, or whatever pejorative occurs to him. He can't let conflicts go because he has to be right. He continues to return, unprompted, to how unfairly he feels he has been treated because he honestly thinks that anyone who really knew him would admit how great he is. That attitude has a self-reinforcing quality, as the people around him who want a part of his power shower him with extravagant praise, confirming his self-image.

All of this would be comically grandiose, if a bit pathetic, were he not the President of the United States. But when he is invested with genuine and vast power his qualities are alarming. This is something that we should be talking about constantly, because it is not normal. It has already had effects. Republicans who want to get into his good books compliment him personally in ways that are borderline unseemly as the administration continues to govern chaotically.

Senator Orrin Hatch (R-UT) recently claimed, ludicrously, that Trump was among the best presidents he had served with. Lindsey Graham, who last year called Trump "a kook... not fit to be president," recently lamented "this endless attempt [by the press] to label the guy some kook not fit to be president." When they say these things, they are encouraging a man who has shown a savage disregard for anyone other than himself in his reckless use of his platform as the most powerful man in the country.

They think of it as a trade, giving him power in return for him using it to help them enact their agenda. They will find, to their sorrow and ours, that they are empowering someone who does not have their interests at heart except to the extent that they coincide with his own, and will not tolerate the illusion of shared power.

Getting to the end of this, I feel frustrated. Every single thing I've said here has been said before, by me, on this platform. I'm consistently torn between the compulsion to keep pointing out that this isn't normal - in fact it's dangerous - and the self conscious fear that it has become repetitive, boring, or useless. The evidence continues to mount that Trump has already done and is currently doing irreparable institutional harm to our political system. "Limit the damage!" is hardly an inspiring battle cry, and the constant reminder that damage is being done can be both demoralizing and irritating.

But, unpleasantness notwithstanding, this is something that we have to keep talking about. The conflation of the person and the office, the inability to distinguish political and personal criticism, and the worship of power for its own sake are all dangerous trends that are accelerating under this president. If we are going to pursue a more genuinely democratic and egalitarian society, those trends need to be arrested and eventually reversed.




*The movie, for the curious, is The Social Network. The quote, like the rest of the scintillating dialogue in that film, was written by confirmed screenwriting genius Aaron Sorkin.