The Presidential Pivot Will Never Arrive
President Trump’s Strategy of Calculated Continuously Crafted Chaos
GRAL FROM SHUTTERSTOCK.COM
“When a person shows you who they are, believe them the first time” is advice from the late legendary poet and scholar Maya Angelou.
It is time for us to take that advice. America’s 71-year-old real estate mogul and celebrity turned President and Tweeter-in-Chief will never make the presidential pivot. The sooner we recognize this simple fact, the sooner we will be able to settle on a political strategy to deal with our nation’s very real problems. Donald J. Trump has proven over and over again that he is incapable of rising to the occasion to which the Office of the Presidency demands.
President Trump’s tweeting addiction is consuming the nation and a vast majority of Americans would like him to simply stop with the tweeting from his personal Twitter handle. According to national polling, more than 60 percent of registered voters believe President Donald Trump should stop using his personal Twitter account. Now even a plurality of Republicans thinks the President should knock it off. Each day the world awaits in anticipation of what America’s President will assert next via 140-characters. The President’s use of his social media accounts is a propaganda strategy. The mainstream media and through them, the American public is falling right into an asymmetrical political battle and President Trump is winning. It is time for us to rethink how we engage and respond to America’s Tweeter-in-Chief.
There have been plenty of articles written about President Donald the Terrible. Columnists and journalists are writing compelling critiques of a novice, embattled, vengeful, erratic, unfocused, and exhausted president. In fact, there are still arguments hoping for a presidential pivot. Jonathan Rauch, writes in The Atlantic, that “perhaps we’ll get Grown-up Trump, an unorthodox and controversial president who, whatever one may think of his policies and personality, proves to be responsible and effective as a chief executive. But we might get Infantile Trump, an undisciplined narcissist who throws tantrums and governs haphazardly.”
Ezra Klein writes more poignantly, “there is danger in Trump’s authoritarian impulses, he’s got a conspiracy theorist mind and he has very little impulse control particularly when attacked. He has a demagogue’s instinct for finding enemies, a bully’s instinct for finding weaknesses. He is uninterested in policy, unrestrained by shame.”
Michael Starr Hopkins puts it more bluntly in “He Had No Business Becoming President.” He writes, “there is no tax break in the world that can justify supporting a man who continues to lie to the American people with [out] hesitation.” In a later piece, Hopkins writes, “the way Trump speaks to and about his fellow Americans isn’t a rebuke of a politically correct culture, it’s a temper tantrum by a man who has access to the nuclear codes.”
Each of the examples, I cited approach our current political crisis through a traditional lens where institutions mattered and precedents were protected. Unfortunately, Trump’s political asymmetry requires us to rethink precedents and historical norms.
The era of giving President Trump the benefit of doubt and hoping that he will somehow make a presidential pivot is what Albert Einstein calls insanity, doing the same thing over and over again expecting different results. The current status of politics is not guided by any traditional order and we must recognize this fact before it is too late. We have all collectively failed to recognize that Donald J. Trump has given us a roadmap to how he plans to govern, he has never deviated from his methods of calculated continuously crafted chaos.
The Tweets Speak For Themselves
Trump tweets have dominated most news cycles since President Trump took the oath of office and it is only getting worse. The White House has declared that Trump tweets are official presidential statements. The President’s press officials have routinely argued that “the President’s tweets speak for themselves.”
In fact, Press Secretary Sean Spicer has gone to the podium and stated that “the President’s tweets speak for themselves” dozens of times. Other elements of the Trump messaging apparatus including his two famed propagandists, Kellyanne Conway and Sarah Huckabee Sanders, doubles-down and reinforce the Trump strategy of calculated continuously crafted chaos. This is the political asymmetry of President Trump and it is leaving all of us disoriented, particularly the news media.
Trump lies, doubles-down on lies, issues misstatements and alternative facts. Trump speaks with authority to his 32 million Twitter followers many who are his most loyal supporters but also journalists and news pundits who elevate his lies with 140-character assessments of their own. The cable news networks open and close each news hour with updates and recaps of President Donald’s latest twitter victims. The Administration then dispatches its surrogates and spokespersons to put the plan of calculated continuously crafted chaos into overdrive. The result is three or four days of distractions all resulting from a single tweet or a string of 140-character “statements.”
President Trump started using this strategy of distraction the moment he took the oath of office and tweeted about the size of his inauguration. He avoids real scrutiny by constantly lying, blaming others, taunting, and showboating. He is using the executive’s bully pulpit in the worse possibles ways and yet we still are waiting for this presidential pivot moment. President Donald J. Trump has shown us who he is and it is time for us to start believing him.
