If there’s one thing we have learned about Donald J. Trump over the last decade is that he loves to talk big and carry a small stick. He’s a man full of bluster and dominance displays which he employs both impulsively and tactically against friends and foe alike. But he almost always fails to follow through if he suspects that it carries the slightest risk.
He’s learned over the years that he can convince many people that he’s the ultimate strong man. But is he?
Trump sees himself as a hero, which I suppose is true for most people who run for high office. But he has been obsessed with creating a macho mage since he was a young man, inventing the persona of a high-flying playboy and master of the New York real estate world. But there was always the aggressive, tough guy demeanor going all the way back to the 1970s and 80s when Roy Cohn,the nefarious former counsel to Joseph McCarthy’s communist witch hunt committee, took Trump under his wing and taught him how to operate like a ruthless power player.
He counselled him to never admit guilt or wrongdoing of any kind, pretend that you’re in the right, no matter what. It cost Trump a lot of money over the years, as his businesses repeatedly went bankrupt and he failed at one venture after another winding up nearly broke by the end of the 90s. But his obsessive pursuit of fame and his insistence that he had never erred convinced the public that he knew what he was doing anyway. His mastery of that image brought him to a second act on television and ultimately to the White House.
But that doesn’t mean that being a belligerent blowhard isn’t the authentic Trump. In his first book “The Art of the Deal” he tells a (probably false) story about how he hit one of his teachers when he was in second grade. His classmates and the teacher had no recollection of this incident. But he almost certainly was a kid with a discipline problem. After all, his father sent him to military school. But he never lost his obstreperous disposition.
Still, when you think about it, the only people Trump has ever actually dominated on a personal level are all the women he’s credibly accused of assaulting over the years. He’s certainly verbally insulted many men but always from the safety of his powerful position. There’s actually very little evidence of him facing down a bully like himself. In fact, he reveres other strongmen on the world stage and shrinks into himself in their presence.
When Trump ran for president in 2016 he pretended that he had been a big Iraq war critic as a way of presenting himself as smarter than the rest of the GOP field, particularly former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush who was the frontrunner at the time. (There’s no evidence that he was against the invasion.) Republican voters were embarrassed by the Iraq debacle by that time and were happy to see someone promise that rather than get into foreign quagmires he would instead dominate the world by sheer force of his allegedly masterful negotiating prowess. Despite having run through most of his family fortune by making one terrible deal after another his reputation forged from reality TV convinced them that he could get it done.
Trump took office completely unprepared to make the kind of decisions a United States president is required to make. In that first term he had people around who tried to tutor him but they soon came to realize that he was unteachable. He literally believed he already knew everything he needed to know. It also became clear that he was not only incapable of admitting otherwise, he could not make a reasoned decision at all.
This was a particularly acute problem when it came to foreign policy. He didn’t understand any of the thorny complicated issues so he mostly just did the opposite of his predecessor, such as reversing the Paris Climate Accords and the Iran nuclear deal. He dealt with the allies as if they were adversaries and the adversaries as if they were allies — NATO, Russia and North Korea being prime examples. After all, it was easy to bully our friends. They weren’t going to require him to take some kind of action with unpredictable results like the adversaries would.
Nothing has changed in this second term and the stakes are now considerably higher. Two major wars are raging, one of which he promised to end the day after he was elected, apparently convinced that his good friend Vladimir Putin would be happy to do him a solid. That didn’t work out. And after crowing that nobody has ever done as much for Israel as he has, Trump is now standing by helplessly as Benjamin Netanyahu thumbs his nose at the U.S. and carries out his long-standing dream of regime change in Iran.
Once again, Trump doesn’t know how to decide whether to get in on the action and take credit for it or avoid the risk of it going sideways and being stuck with the consequences. His instinct was to join in when he saw how Fox News was celebrating the strategic genius of the Israeli strikes but then he got some blowback from his base and heard from various people about the possibility that the big bombs the Israelis want him to use to blow up the underground nuclear facilities might not get the job done. Others have been pointing out that Iran is actually a formidable foe with 90 million people and a professional military that could close the Straits of Hormuz and disrupt the world oil supply, hit some of the 40,000 troops stationed in the region or maybe even stage a terrorist attack on U.S. soil while the FBI has been redeployed from anti-terrorism to rousting innocent undocumented workers. He is undoubtedly more befuddled than ever.
Trump’s former national security adviser (and hardcore Iran hawk) John Bolton told the New York Times that in his experience, Trump is “frantic and agitated” in national security crises which is very believable:
“He talks to a lot of people and he’s looking for somebody who will say the magic words,” Mr. Bolton said. “He’ll hear something and he’ll decide, ‘That’s right, that’s what I believe.’ Which lasts until he has the next conversation.”
We can be thankful that so far, Trump’s weakness and confusion in the face of military action has prevented him from acting on his strongman impulses. So on Thursday he punted the decision for the proverbial “two weeks” in the hopes that something will come up to save him from having to do anything at all. It is to be fervently hoped that he is right about that.
He’s a circus strongman who puts on a big show for the crowd but in reality he’s just an old guy wearing a whole lot of stage make-up. Wizard of Oz?