Petty, Small, but Non-Trivial
Our dear leader is turning out to be precisely what we expected: he is petty, small, yet non-trivial. The damage he is doing to America is going to accumulate into an irreversible tide. We can only hope that enough of the voters who were duped into supporting him come to their senses and allow an opposition to rise in both 2018 and 2020.
Trump is clearly a very weak man. He seems easily led. He has no opinions of depth. He has no qualities of leadership other than outright bullying.
People are aghast at his demolition of decades of decorum and honest tradition. I simply respond by saying that he is a small time New York bully whose failure in real estate led him into reality television where he learned the art of manipulation, puffery, and self-aggrandizement. The current chaos in his administration is a true reflection of his style. Don’t forget that all those famous deals he crows about have destroyed value: he would have been better off today had he simply invested his very large inheritance in an index fund. In other words his vaunted business capacity would have cost his shareholders money and he would have fired decades ago had he any shareholders.
And this is a vital thought to keep in mind: Trump has never had to lead using the development of consensus. He has always had the privilege of being a dictator within the confines of small family business. In this case by small I mean the governance structure not the sprawling array of deals scattered across the globe. He relies on a very small group of people. He acts through that small group. They filter all the information he receives and make sure it conforms with whatever they perceive his current ideas are. His own sources of information are extraordinarily narrow. He has no active desire to learn. He is an easy target of conspiracy theory. He believes what he says and gathers virtually no evidence upon which to make decisions. He is thus entirely representative of most Americans who are too busy conducting their lives to ponder great issues of state.
This is why his attitude so resonates with many. His own narrowness is a direct reflection of their own. The difference being, of course, that a president is supposed to open up to broad analysis and discussion before making a decision. Trump sees no need for such consideration. He is convinced he already knows the answers.
Within all this weakness the most damaging is Trump’s desperate need for flattery. His ego is so fragile that he has to be correct no matter what reality is. Thus we see his tantrums when reality conflicts with his preconceptions of his own greatness, and the pettiness of his character when reality contradicts him.
All this is uninteresting in the small time head of a family business. No one would care. But in a president these traits are likely to bring great disrepute and harm to the country.
He is neutering government departments right when we need them to interpret and implement his policies. Take, for instance the State Department where he has peremptorily fired the entire upper management. This was a petty and childish move under any circumstances — many of the people ousted were Bush appointees and thus loyal Republicans — but it was truly stupid when it came a day before the insanity of the refugee ban. The State Department is now incapable of reaching out to our allies and helping assuage concerns.
Perhaps this was deliberate. Trump’s inner circle is dominated by Bannon, a white racist nationalist, who views the State Department as a major impediment to the execution of his extremist plans. When we discover, as we have, that Trump asked Giuliani how he could enact a total Muslim ban without breaching the constitution, and was advised that a travel ban targeting terrorism rather than religion was the way to go, we understand the depth of depravity within this administration.
I hesitated to use the word “Fascist” during the election because I would prefer to reserve it to describe regimes beyond the range of modern sensibility, but with Bannon holding sway and dominating Trump’s every move, I am beginning to falter in that regard. Let’s see how this unfolds before adopting that nomenclature entirely.
Nonetheless, Trump is clearly not concerned with the constitution or with the great traditions of American governance. He needs to be watched and resisted at every step.
He is a petty, small, and weak man, but his impact will be non-trivial. America will survive him, but its reputation will not. The only question is: how much damage can he do before we get rid of him?
