Trump Is a Weak Man in a Strongman�s World

Without his bodyguard of generals, the president is becoming the overseas
arsonist his 2016 critics feared.
Oct. 19, 2019
President Trump during a meeting in the Roosevelt Room of the White
House.Credit...Erin Schaff/The New York Times

Ross Douthat

By Ross Douthat

Opinion Columnist
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For a long time in arguments about the perils posed by the Trump
presidency, my watchword has been: Trump is weaker than you think. Too weak
to pass legislation. Too weak to get his hacks appointed to Federal Reserve
seats. Too weak to use the bully pulpit, or any instrument, to boost his
approval ratings above roughly 42 percent. Too weak to prevent leaks or
maintain staff loyalty; too weak to plot dirty tricks without their swiftly
being publicized; certainly too weak to hold on to power via extralegal
means.

But if Trump�s weakness makes him less of a threat to the constitutional
order (such as it is) than some critics imagine, in foreign policy it�s a
different matter. There, a weak and flailing chief executive can do as much
damage as a ruthless and aggressive one. A domestic weakness that produces
gridlock and inertia, scandal and impeachment, is unfortunate but not
necessarily disastrous. A weakness on the global stage that tempts other
powers toward military aggression risks much more significant disasters.

Before he took office this was one of my major fears for Trump � that his
erratic, feckless qualities would inspire ambitious foreign leaders to test
him in ways that made Jimmy Carter�s presidency look like easy sailing.
Trump �need only be himself,� I wrote, �in order to bring an extended
period of risk upon the world.�

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Douthat, Michelle Goldberg and David Leonhardt.]

As with my other major fears (domestic unrest on a late-1960s scale and a
stock market plunge), the worst-case scenario did not initially
materialize. Trump�s foreign policy was hardly Metternichian, but filtered
through a bodyguard of generals his various impulses produced something
that almost seemed strategic: near-victory over ISIS, de-escalation in the
Koreas, a reasonable focus on containing China. And the world under Trump
was in certain respects more tranquil than the world of Barack Obama�s
second term.
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I gave the administration some credit for this. I hoped it would last once
the generals departed.

It isn�t lasting. Trump�s betrayal of the Syrian Kurds over the past week
is a moral travesty, but the Kurds have been betrayed by America before.
What distinguishes this fiasco is its utter thoughtlessness, its disconnect
from any strategic purpose, the sheer obviousness with which Trump allowed
himself to be rolled by Recep Tayyip Erdogan and the inability of his
advisers to salvage the situation before it led to war.

The constituent elements of the debacle � the blunder itself, the bluster
and excuse-making afterward, our pretend-strongman president�s transparent
admiration for the foreign tough guy � were all exactly what Trump�s
campaign style led one to expect. So were the dead bodies, the refugees,
the anger from allies, the glee from rivals. So was the message sent to
those allies and rivals, to Riyadh and New Delhi and Jerusalem no less than
Moscow and Beijing: that this American president can be easily hoodwinked
and flattered and bullied, and the only repercussions will be Mike Pence
showing up at your doorstep looking like a disappointed owl.

Even from his most reliable supporters, the defenses of Trump here have
been strictly comparative. It�s not as bad as the Iraq War/the Libya
intervention/the Syrian civil war/the rise of ISIS. The foreign policy
establishment is overreacting; far worse debacles happened on its watch.

And there�s some truth to this. Trump became president because the smart
people in charge of U.S. foreign policy failed in disastrous ways, and even
after this past week his own failures haven�t nearly matched their body
count.

But the comparative defense only holds up until it doesn�t. Maybe Erdogan�s
war can be contained, but maybe there�s a regional conflict and a
reconstituted ISIS downstream from this debacle � in which case Trump will
have repeated the blunders of his predecessors, but with vastly less
excuse.

And even if this particular crisis stabilizes, the decision-making approach
that Trump used makes Kaiser Wilhelm look like a model of cool
statesmanship, and its application in a crisis involving a real great power
could be catastrophic. Nothing about these events supplies any confidence
that his advisers can effectively direct him, or that the kind of advice
available to him (see Rudy Giuliani, shadow secretary of state) won�t keep
on getting worse. Nothing about the relative calm of years one through
three guarantees that the test isn�t lurking in year four.

Or in year five or six or seven, should Trump be re-elected. Which points
us to the central issue for Republican-leaning voters and Republican
senators alike. Both groups have grown used to Trump, in part because human
beings grow used to all things, but in part because the most alarmist
predictions, mine included, did not accurately describe his first two years
in office.

But those voters and legislators have to ask themselves, at the polls in
2020 or sooner in a Senate trial, what seems more likely to predict Trump�s
governance going forward: The relatively restrained pattern of the
McMaster-Mattis-Kelly period, or the unchecked impulses that just gave us
death and betrayal and humiliation for no reason, none at all, save that
our president is unfit for his job.

J.J. McCullough wrote:
> Trump Is a Weak Man

You are a leftarded coward who mungs the followup groups.

How'd you like your face kicked in, asshole?