Crisis will inevitably strike, so America needs stability and strength. Will Trump be ready?
2008 and the years just after (the crash and the weak recovery) had changed everything in America, and that the country was going to choose, in coming decades, one of two paths—a moderate populism or socialism—and that the former was vastly to be preferred, for reasons of the nation’s health.
.. Undergirding my thinking is the sense that a big bad day is coming—that we have too many enemies, and some of them have the talent to hurt us, and one or more inevitably will.
.. our country is stressed to the point of fracture culturally, economically, politically, spiritually. We find it hard to hold together on a peaceful day, never mind a violent one.
.. The priority is stabilizing and strengthening what we have, and encouraging wherever possible an atmosphere of peacefulness and respect.
.. This Thursday he may have launched a Republican civil war: The Freedom Caucus had better “get on the team, & fast. We must fight them, & the Dems, in 2018!” That will help promote harmony.
.. Mr. Trump revealed that he has no deep knowledge of who his base is, who his people are. I’ve never seen that in politics. But Mr. Trump’s supporters didn’t like the bill. If they had wanted a Republican president who deals only with the right, to produce a rightist bill, they would have chosen Ted Cruz.
.. I had worked in a White House. I had personally observed its deeper realities and requirements. Their sense of how a White House works came from news shows and reading, and also from TV shows such as “House of Cards” and “Scandal.” Those are dark, cynical shows that more or less suggest anyone can be president.
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Crisis reveals the character, the essential nature of a White House. Seventy days in, that is my worry.
SCOTUS Hearing Revealed The Character Of Neil Gorsuch AND Senate Democrats
he was so consistent and respectful, that opinion pieces have taken to denying him support, but not blaming him for it. To do otherwise would seem monstrous in the face of the kind of character on display by the Colorado Judge who some say may have learned at the knee of Kennedy, but will likely rule in the vein of Scalia.
.. Gorsuch’s immediate, and obviously habitual, graciousness to someone who sneezed was a moment worth noting.
.. Opposition to Gorsuch is absurd given his bi-partisan support, his qualifications, and his qualities as a man, and yet come it will.
.. a kind man
A Gift for Donald Trump
At the heart of Trumpism is the perception that the world is a dark, savage place, and therefore ruthlessness, selfishness and callousness are required to survive in it. It is the utter conviction, as Trump put it, that murder rates are at a 47-year high, even though in fact they are close to a 57-year low.
It is the utter conviction that we are engaged in an apocalyptic war against radical Islamic terrorism, even though there are probably several foreign policy problems of greater importance.
.. Fraternity is the desire to make friends during both good and hostile occasions and to be faithful to those friends. The fraternal person is seeking harmony and fair play between individuals. He is trying to move the world from tension to harmony.
.. But look at how many of any day’s news stories are built around enmity. The war over who can speak in the Senate. Kellyanne Conway’s cable TV battle du jour. Half my Facebook feed is someone linking to a video with the headline: Watch X demolish Y.
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.