Writing for Foreign Policy, conservative commentator and international relations expert Max Boot takes a look at Donald Trump's impact on America and writes, "America Will Survive Trump, But It Won't Ever Be the Same."
Arguing that Trump has not turned out to be as bad as we thought he might be, Max Boot points to some flimsy but acceptable evidence.
* Trump has not ordered the torture of terrorist suspects, and Hillary isn't in jail.
* Trump hasn't pulled troops out of Japan, South Korea, or Germany (even though they haven't increased their "subsidies" to the U.S.).
* Trump hasn't seriously tried to get Mexico to pay for the wall, and we still have NAFTA.
* Perhaps most importantly, he hasn't launched a trade war with China, or gotten us into a real war (yet).
In effect, Max Boot is giving Donald Trump credit (of sorts) for not acting like the unhinged lunatic many thought he would become during last year's campaign.
That's progress, I guess.
Still, Boot makes it clear why Trump hasn't accomplished anything he said he would on the campaign trail. Trump's policy failures, according to Boot, are a product of Trump being an incompetent and unprincipled megalomaniac, who's surrounded by a bunch of empty suits who might look the part but don't know what the hell they're doing.
Ouch.
Max Boot fills in the blanks below.
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Trump supporters can argue that he is more moderate in practice than his rhetoric would suggest. There’s an element of truth in this, but the more compelling explanation for his failure to make good on his promises is threefold.
First, Trump doesn’t really believe in much beyond his own awesomeness. He didn’t run for office to get anything done; he ran to stoke his own ego and pad his own bank account by increasing his visibility. Thus he would say outrageous stuff on the campaign trail, contradict himself 30 seconds later, and immediately segue to some non sequitur. He didn’t mean a lot of what he said — it was just something to rouse the rubes at rallies.
Second, Trump has been utterly incompetent. Even if he wants to achieve more of his agenda, he doesn’t know how to do it. As Daniel Dale of the Toronto Star puts it, he “talks like a strongman” but governs like a “weak man.” Maybe tax reform will get done — maybe — but so far he hasn’t signed a single major piece of legislation. Actually that’s not quite true: Congress did pass a law strengthening sanctions against Russia over the administration’s protests. Aside from a Supreme Court appointment, the only things Trump has succeeded in accomplishing are those he can do by executive order, thus doing on a far larger scale what he once criticized Obama for.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Max Boot is the Jeane J. Kirkpatrick senior fellow for national security studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. His forthcoming book is “The Road Not Taken: Edward Lansdale and the American Tragedy in Vietnam.”
The third reason why Trump has gotten so little done is that he’s surrounded by people who, by and large, don’t share his xenophobic, isolationist, protectionist “America First” outlook. Most of those who did — Michael Flynn, Steve Bannon, Sebastian Gorka — have been forced out because they were incompetent crackpots. Lacking any interest in ideas, Trump has staffed his administration with people based largely on superficial criteria such as appearance. That helps to explain why most of his senior appointees, including Rex Tillerson, James Mattis, John Kelly, H.R. McMaster, and now Jerome Powell as Federal Reserve chairman, look as if they are straight out of central casting. It also explains why former United Nations Ambassador John Bolton didn’t snare a job: Trump was said not to like his mustache. As a result, Trump is surrounded by aides who view him as a screwball to be contained, not a sage to be followed.
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Then we have the sexual harassment charges, which Trump effectively admitted to with his numerous Howard Stern interviews and his Access Hollywood "grab 'em by the p***y" comments.
We also have the lies. So many lies. During the first 263 days Trump racked up 1,318 of them. An average of about 5 a day.
Yet, Trump's supporters don't care about any of this. Their support for him is almost cult-like.
At the end of the article, Boot writes that the major difference between Donald Trump and President Nixon is that while "Nixon sought to subvert the rule of law in private," for some reason Trump has been able to do "it out in the open for all to see." Because 62 million Americans put him there, and we now tolerate Trump's actions in the White House, and on the global stage, we're normalizing the behavior of a modern Neanderthal.
This, in itself, is an accomplishment, of sorts. Specifically, Donald Trump has effectively lowered America's collective moral and ethical bar all by himself (OK, Fox News helped).
There's more in Max Boot's Foreign Policy article, but you get the point. We may survive Trump's presidency, but we are also witnessing the pollution of our human environment in real time.
And America won't ever be the same for it after Trump leaves.
- Mark
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