It is oddly reassuring to feel I might be wrong, but we could just be in the honeymoon phase
Closer relations with democratic Taiwan. Unflinching support for Israel. A pledge to restore America’s atrophied military power.
Deregulation and tax cuts that have already sent the stock market soaring. A cabinet with key slots assigned to individuals of impeccable integrity.
The record of this interregnum is enough to give a determined conservative #NeverTrumper like myself pause. Was I wrong? Did I badly misjudge things? Will America not only avert disaster but enjoy an unexpected renaissance? Is this rough orange beast slouching toward the White House the second coming of Ronald Reagan?
If so, having denounced Trump in op-ed after tweet after op-ed, I will be personally embarrassed. Worse, I also slammed his supporters for willful blindness at best and moral turpitude at worst, quite a few of them by name. If they turn out to be right, and I have made a monumental misassessment of President-elect Donald Trump, I will be deservedly dining on crow for the rest of my life.
However, I have not yet quite reached the point of repentance. Rather, as I look around at the emerging Trump administration, if I am not feeling vindication, I am perceiving something else.
First, Trump is in the honeymoon phase that is part of our democratic tradition. He is America’s next president, after all, and even his harshest critics want him to succeed, to make the country prosperous and to keep it secure. In some quarters (including my own), expectations have been so low that we are inwardly astonished when he exceeds them.
To be sure, exceeding them has not happened with great frequency. But Trump is also benefiting from something else. Reflecting the bitter divisions of the campaign, Trump’s transition (as no doubt will be true of the early months of his presidency) is turning out to be one of the nastiest honeymoons in the history of marriage. Yet some of the nastiness directed at the groom is working to his advantage. Trump and his entourage have been subjected to relentless salvos of over-the-top criticism — which are having a boomerang effect, discrediting his detractors and building support for their target. An anti-Trumper abusing Ivanka in front of her children on a JetBlue flight is part of a larger pattern.
At the same time, the outgoing administration of President Obama is failing so abjectly in core duties that one wonders if, under incoming President Trump, things could possibly get worse. The fall of Aleppo has illuminated a grim and seemingly endless landscape of national security failure. We are witnessing human suffering on a grand scale while simultaneously enduring strategic defeats, with Russia and Iran making headway in the Middle East and a refugee crisis in Europe merging with a terrorism crisis to jeopardize the post-war European liberal order. Obama’s foreign policy legacy is so appalling — and Obama and his apologists are so blithe about what they have wrought, while also stopping to shaft Israel at the United Nations on their way out — that it fosters the impression that Trump can only do better.
It is only human to hope that that will be true, and of course, we will have to wait and see. But the reality is, Trump can do worse, much worse.
We should not succumb to the pitfall of defining Trump’s manifest deviancy downward. All the signs of trouble that were present across his career and during the campaign are present today, plus more: the conspiracy theorists whom Trump has selected as his key White House national security advisers; the compulsive tweeting about everything from a dearth of U.S. nuclear weapons to the wounds inflicted by Saturday Night Live to his blossoming love affair with Vladimir Putin; the impulsive policy-making based upon whatever adviser or business partner or child has most recently entered or left the room; the cyber-bullying of critics, the threats against individual companies for daring to contradict him, the self-dealing, the incessant lying about matters trivial and great.
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Already the audience for these eccentricities extends to the heads of state of allies and adversaries. Soon, as Trump gains the power to move aircraft carriers or dispatch the Marines or make nuclear threats, their impact will be magnified by the awesome powers of the American presidency.
Beyond Trump’s erratic character, there is the troubling substance of the Trump Doctrine itself, encapsulated in the formula: Art of the Deal. If America’s relationship with the world is reduced to a balance sheet of profits and losses, as seems to be one of Trump’s core ideas, how will a country like Taiwan fare if its security turns out to be a bargaining chip in a negotiation with China over tariffs? How will Israel fare under a president who wants to “sort of be neutral” between Israel and the Palestinians, who also wants to back Israel to the hilt, while also bringing about the “ultimate deal” between the parties?
This is not strategic ambiguity; it is an incoherence replicated in Trump’s approach to every trouble spot on the globe. Will this presidency end well? Even as I continue to fear the worst, I sincerely hope, for the good of the country, that I will soon be dining on crow.
Gabriel Schoenfeld, a member of USA TODAY’s Board of Contributors, is a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute and the author of Necessary Secrets: National Security, the Media, and the Rule of Law. Follow him on Twitter @gabeschoenfeld.
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