Trump, like Nixon, is incapable of change
Sooner or later in any administration, Casey Stengel comes to mind. The great Yankee manager, ending his career with the then-hapless New York Mets, looked down the dugout one dismal day in 1962 and asked, “Can’t anybody here play this game?” The answer for the Mets was no. It is the same now for the Trump administration.
Michael Flynn presides over a National Security Council that is widely seen as dysfunctional. Flynn, ousted from his previous job for an allegedly chaotic management style, has apparently not lost his touch. Now he has been accused of lying about whether he had discussions with the Russian ambassador about relaxing sanctions — before Donald Trump was inaugurated and while President Barack Obama was imposing new sanctions for messing around in our elections. In this administration, it seems, only the top guy is permitted to lie.
Reince Priebus, too, is under fire. The White House chief of staff is being criticized for the rollout of Executive Order 13769, which caught Cabinet members, Congress, the nation and foreign countries by surprise. It restricted entry into the United States from seven majority-Muslim countries. Demonstrations quickly erupted, and the courts intervened. In the end, the executive order may well pass constitutional muster, but nothing can surpass it in confusion, chaos and sheer cruelty.
Stephen K. Bannon, just recently of Breitbart News and now, suddenly, the White House’s top strategic thinker, apparently appointed himself to the National Security Council. From there, he wages battles furiously against the status quo in just about everything. A recent Time magazine profile of him reveals a fervid ideologue who thinks the next big war is just over the horizon, probably with the Muslim world. Back when he was running Breitbart, he said of Islam: “Our big belief, one of our central organizing principles at the site, is that we’re at war.”
Trump speaks before he thinks and, like some teenager with a phone hidden under the covers, indulges in name-calling via Twitter. In the presidential campaign, he publicly disparaged U.S. District Court Judge Gonzalo Curiel, who was overseeing lawsuits against Trump University, for being of Mexican heritage. Now, he knocks a federal appeals court for upholding a timeout on his executive order.
None of this should be surprising. Trump’s genius as a manager is apparent only to himself. He is inattentive and dishonest. He insults rather than consults and has spent an inordinate amount of time at his golf courses. Already he has reversed himself on the one-China policy and has sent mixed signals about Russia. He trashes trade agreements as if ending them will reverse globalization, and he responds to complexity with tweets. He would deal with Chicago’s murder rate by sending in the feds. To do what exactly?
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