The president thrives on conflict and runs his White House as if he were the producer of a television show, placing characters in situations pumped up with tension and setting up tantalizing cliffhangers to keep viewers tuning in.
.. Although the idea of imposing tariffs on some imports was cheered at Trump’s campaign rallies, Republican lawmakers and members of his administration have argued that instituting penalties on steel and aluminum could prompt other countries to impose retaliatory tariffs that hurt American farmers, producers and manufacturers, including in states that were key to the president’s unexpected win in 2016.
.. “We have a very big meeting at 3:30,” Trump said. “I’d call it an economic meeting, something we have to do to protect our steel, our aluminum in our country.”
.. Trump wouldn’t say exactly what he had planned, but promised that it would be “very fair” and also “very flexible.” As reporters shouted out questions, the president confirmed that he would implement the tariff numbers
.. “I’ll have a right to go up or down, depending on the country, and I’ll have a right to drop out countries or add countries,” Trump said. “We just want fairness. Because we have not been treated fairly by other countries.”
.. Trump briefly mentioned the specifics of the new tariffs, but he mostly spoke longingly about the golden days of U.S. manufacturing and criticized countries like China and Japan for their “aggressive” practices.
“Our factories were left to rot, and to rust all over the place,” Trump said at one point. “Thriving communities turned into ghost towns. . . . The workers who poured their souls into building this great nation were betrayed, but that betrayal is now over.”
.. Trump asked some of the workers to speak. A worker from Kentucky said the tariffs would allow his plant to run at 100 percent capacity instead of 40 percent. Sauritch, the union leader from the Pittsburgh area, spoke emotionally about his father, Herman, losing his job in the 1980s because of an increase in imports.
“Well, your father Herman is looking down” from heaven, Trump said. “He’s very proud of you right now.”
Trump Revives ‘The Apprentice’
If the tariffs cost jobs, Joe Biden will ask every laid-off worker: Who got you fired?
A few hours before former Goldman Sachs president Gary Cohn quit as the White House’s chief economic adviser, Donald Trump described his favorite management practice:
“I like conflict. I like having two people with different points of view, and I certainly have that. Then I make a decision. But I like watching it, I like seeing it, and I think it’s the best way to go.”
In other words, the Trump presidency is a lot like a season of “The Apprentice.”
That TV series ran for years on NBC, with Donald Trump presiding over teams that were frequently asked to perform ridiculously impossible tasks.
Trump’s White House Is a Black Hole
The Republican Party is learning what should have been obvious from the outset: Mr. Trump’s chaotic personality can’t be contained.
.. combining it with the awesome power of the presidency virtually guaranteed he would become more volatile and transgressive.
His presidency is infecting the entire party.
.. The Republican Party once championed the principles of liberty and limited government, yet Mr. Trump is indifferent to them.
Republicans once sought to strengthen relations with Mexico; today they delight in antagonizing our neighbor. Not long ago, Republicans made outreach to Hispanics a top priority; today the signals that the president and his party send are that Hispanics are alien, unwelcome, nothing but trouble.
In 2012, Republicans defended Mitt Romney when he said Russia was our biggest geopolitical threat; today they are wholly untroubled by its effort to subvert the 2016 presidential election.
.. Republicans have long argued that human rights should play a central role in American foreign policy, from the presidency of Ronald Reagan through George W. Bush’s. Today human rights are viewed at most as an afterthought.
.. At the national level the Republican Party has become a destructive and anarchic political force in American life.
.. Rather than nourishing a sense of gratitude, he stokes grievances.
.. One White House aide, asked by The Washington Post whether John Kelly, the president’s chief of staff, could have been more truthful or transparent about the dismissal of the staff secretary Rob Porter, answered honestly: “In this White House, it’s simply not in our DNA. Truthful and transparent is great, but we don’t even have a coherent strategy to obfuscate.”
.. All of this is antithetical to conservatism. On balance, Republicans are seeking to conserve very little
.. “Some men just want to watch the world burn.”
.. The Republican Party once prided itself as a defender of objective truth against postmodernism. Today, it has become the party of perspectivism — the view, articulated by Nietzsche, that all truth claims are contingent on a person’s perspective rather than on fundamental reality. “It is our needs that interpret the world,” Nietzsche wrote in “The Will to Power.”
.. the institutional expression of Donald Trump’s distorted and impulsive personality.
.. Party leaders who were once willing to challenge Mr. Trump, to call him out now and then, are now far more compliant and therefore far more complicit.
.. Mr. Trump was and remains the people’s choice — evidence that, while the president has accelerated the worst tendencies of the Republican Party, he is not solely responsible for them. He did not appear out of thin air.
.. Americans are longing for a more ennobling, less exhausting political leader.
.. people are tiring of the incessant conflict created by politics these days.
.. But as long as Mr. Trump is president, they will feel this way. He won’t change, and neither will the Republican Party. That’s how institutional corruption happens, from the top down.
Trump Likes Controversy, Conflict Less So
The distinction is important, and it is woven through Trump’s operating style during his first year in office
He likes controversy, but he isn’t all that fond of conflict... He relishes stirring up controversy, and, in fact, believes stirring the pot advances his reputation as an outside agitator and improves his position by keeping adversaries off balance. But he usually keeps controversy at arm’s length, using his Twitter feed or offhand comments to attack and posture.By contrast, when he finally comes face-to-face with both friends and foes, his actual positions are often less contentious and rigid than his public posturing suggests. His Twitter bark is worse than his personal bite.
.. Thus, he angrily withdrew the U.S. from the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade pact, but then he walked into the very den of economic globalists at the World Economic Forum in Davos last week to say that he is prepared to negotiate a new version of it... He ordered the U.S. out of the Paris accord on climate change, but told British interviewer Piers Morgan over the weekend that, thanks in part to the personal intervention of French President Emmanuel Macron, who, “as you know, I like,” he might rejoin the accord... When he is standing apart from negotiations over a new immigration system, he denigrates his Democratic counterparts, saying they have no interest in securing the border and are “only interested” in obstruction. But in a room with congressional leaders he sounded ready to do a deal with them, and even provide political cover for those who agreed.. He also complains openly about other aides, including Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and the White House chief of staff, John Kelly. But he then promptly backs away and praises them, as if he had never whacked the hornet’s nest in the first place. When he wants someone to leave, he is more likely to drop hints he wants them to depart on their own, or have someone else send them overboard, than to fire them himself... “Donald Trump enjoys controversy and to a degree thrives on it,” says Christopher Ruddy, chief executive of Newsmax Media and a presidential friend. “Controversy helps ratings, taking a page from his very successful showbiz career.”
But, he adds: “He often stakes out very extreme positions. He does this partly for rhetorical effort or to stake out a negotiating position. It’s worked for him in business so he’s applying it to politics.”
.. The problem is that the president’s allies and enemies alike, at home and abroad, have a hard time figuring out where bluster ends and reality begins.
.. Jason Miller, who was communications director for the Trump presidential campaign and remains in touch with the White House, suggests viewing the president’s approach as a “one-two negotiating tactic…Tweets are a one-way written message delivery vehicle to lay down markers, while in-person meetings are an opportunity to show progress and cooperation that get us one step closer to the desired outcome.”Mr. Miller advises members of Congress that “the president is only going to bring up issues he genuinely wants to find consensus on…There’s always room for compromise after policy markers are laid out.”