An Unprecedented President

Trump’s speech was what any observer of his campaign rhetoric might have expected, for good and bad. Rooted in the view that contemporary American life is a nightmarish scene of unrelenting carnage, despair, and desolation caused by the simple unwillingness of our leaders to act in America’s interest, Trump’s rhetoric manages to exaggerate our problems and yet also exaggerate how easy it would be to solve them. It lets him set a low bar for himself yet also causes him to make promises no one could keep.

.. he believes that by building walls around our country we can break down the walls within our society.

.. Although I think it grossly understates the challenges of unity in our vast and diverse country, this is one serious answer to the challenge of solidarity in 21st century America, and it is in many respects a more coherent and appealing answer than the one the Left tends to propose.

.. The speech he delivered was normal for him, but not for presidential inaugural addresses.

.. He did not really run to occupy the presidency as it exists, and does not seem to think of himself as stepping now into a role he is obliged to carry out. He ran to disrupt a broken system, and to be himself but with more power and authority. He is our president, but he has not taken on the job with any clear sense of the presidency as a distinct function and office which he should now stretch and bend to embody.

.. This has not been easy to accept, and so we have tended implicitly to wait for the moment when Trump would put aside his childish antics and step up into the role.

.. Trump seems inclined to leave largely unfilled the part traditionally played by the president in our system while playing another part formed around the peculiar contours of his bombastic, combative, and at times surely disordered personality. That means that Trump’s team, the Congress, the courts, and the public will need to confront the implications of both the absence of a more traditional president and the presence of a different and unfamiliar kind of figure at the heart of the constitutional order. These are two distinct problems.

.. The presence of a bombastic populist in the White House could force some common sense on a political culture too dominated by abstract sloganeering.

.. And in foreign policy it looks likely to undermine the post-World War II system of liberal-democratic alliances in which the President of the United States has had a distinct role to play for seven decades, about which Trump appears to know or care very little. And the presence of an undisciplined, aggressive performance artist at the heart of our system of government, a figure whose excesses are not structurally counterbalanced by others in the system (in the way that the excesses of the traditional presidency are), could alter the public’s expectations of government and politics in ways decidedly unhelpful to American constitutionalism.

.. Instead, to a greater degree than any modern president, his time in office seems likely to be shaped by his own character and personality. This is not good news.

The President Who Buried Humility

Every president in my lifetime has been conceited. It’s more or less a job requirement. Bush had a bloated faith in his gut and his charm, while Obama fancied himself the smartest, most soulful person in almost any room.

.. During his only real news conference as president-elect, he mused that he could master the management of the country and of his business simultaneously, noting that while the law bars other government officials from such double duty, there’s no such formal restriction on the president.

“I would be the only one that would be able to do that,” he said. “I could run the Trump Organization — great, great company — and I could run the country. I’d do a very good job.” It was like a Russian nesting doll of self-infatuation: boast within boast within boast.

.. “I’ve done stuff no one else will do,” Reid volunteered, and then recalled — proudly, it seemed — the time during the 2012 presidential campaign when he falsely accused Mitt Romney of not having paid taxes. There was no modesty in that lie, and there’s no modesty in his apparent peace with it.

.. Still, he’s no Trump. Who is? Maybe Howard Roark, the protagonist of “The Fountainhead,” by Ayn Rand. Roark must defend his creative genius against the meddling of lesser mortals. Trump once described the novel as profound.

He has other Rand fans around him. Last month, The Washington Post’s James Hohmann identified a batch of cabinet nominees, including Rex Tillerson, who are taken with her philosophy and work.

The traditional way of reporting on a president is dead. And Trump’s press secretary killed it.

“This is called a statement you’re told to make by the President. And you know the President is watching,” Fleischer wrote. (MSNBC’s Mika Brzezinski pegged it as “Sean Spicer’s first hostage video.”)

Spicer’s statement should be seen for what it is: Remarks made over the casket at the funeral of access journalism.

As Jessica Huseman of ProPublica put it: “Journalists aren’t going to get answers from Spicer. We are going to get answers by digging. By getting our hands dirty. So let’s all do that.”

Saturday made clearer than ever that President Trump intends to make the American media his foremost enemy.

Trump wants a flat-out war with the nation’s media for one well-calculated reason: Because he believes it will continue to serve his political purposes, as it has for months.