Tuesday, January 30, 2018

He won, now praise him

For all his anti-establishment [campaign] bluster, Trump has proven to be a paper tiger as president. Instead of cracking down on Wall Street plutocrats, he’s appointed them to his cabinet and given them tax cuts. Instead of browbeating world leaders, he’s let them flatter him into submission with theatrically obsequious state visits. Instead of locking out the sneering media elites, he’s pantingly courted the approval of New York Times reporters and book-writing dandies from Manhattan. And while he hobnobs in Davos with the globalist glitterati, the ragtag team of loyal lieutenants who set out in 2016 to upturn the established order with Trump has been largely shoved to the sidelines or purged altogether from his White House.

[...]

Indeed, while Trump’s “populism” has manifested itself primarily in performative spasms of culture war, the most substantive policy victories of his first year in office have gone to the donor-class conservatism of Paul Ryan and his fellow swamp creatures in the congressional leadership. As it turns out, all they had to do was ask nicely.

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Shortly after his election, congressional sources said, a consensus began to form within the Republican caucus that any member willing to engage in a bit of ego-stroking had a good shot at gaining the president’s ear.

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In this Washington-wide scramble to cozy up to Trump, some Republicans took straightforward approaches. They held their campaign fundraisers at his eponymous D.C. hotel. They trekked to his golf course to pose for grinning pictures on the green and pitch him on their pet issues. They got themselves booked on his favorite cable-news shows and praised him effusively for this historic victory or that act of decisive leadership.

[...]

Others, meanwhile, opted for more creative acts of courtship. In perhaps the most famous instance, House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy assigned a staffer to sort through packs of Starbursts and fill a jar with just the pinks and reds so that he could present the president with his favorite flavors.

[...]

When immigration talks began to heat up on the Hill, South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham—who had spent years working on the issue—abruptly dropped his barbed criticisms of the president and took on a conciliatory, even admiring, tone. Graham made no effort to conceal the reasons for this sudden shift. “You could be dark as charcoal and lily white, it doesn’t matter as long as you’re nice to him,” Graham told CNN. “You could be the pope and criticize him, it doesn’t matter, he’ll go after the pope. You could be Putin and say nice things, and he’ll like you.”

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Often, it seems, the most powerful bartering chip a lawmaker has to offer the Trump White House is not a vote for a given bill or a pledge of support for a given policy, but rather an expression of personal affection for Trump himself.

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People who know him well say the president has taken special pleasure over the past year in watching the parade of pols who once greeted his candidacy with scorn line up to kiss his ring. The nastier you have been to him in the past, the more delighted he is when you want to make up.

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As The Wall Street Journal recently outlined in its “How-To Guide” for dealing with the commander in chief, each would-be Trump-whisperer has developed his or her own technique. When Trump wants to take serious trade action against other countries, for example, advisers will sometimes come up with reasons to stall, “hoping he’ll forget what he wanted done and move on to something else.” When Trump is weighing defense options, Mattis will gently steer him with a combination of flattery and Jedi mind tricks. “He says, ‘Your instincts are absolutely correct,’ and then gets [Trump] to do the exact opposite of what his instincts say,” a source told the Journal.

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Though he ran in 2016 as a foe of the billionaire donor class, Trump had spent much of his professional life before that trying (and tragically failing) to convince America’s corporate chieftains that he was more than just a cartoonish TV personality—that he was one of them. The resulting sense of victimhood he carried with him might have made for fiery stump speeches on the campaign trail, but it also meant that once he won, he was tickled to learn that real-life titans of industry like Exxon-Mobil CEO Rex Tillerson actually wanted to come work for him. To Trump, Nunberg said, they were like “big shiny toys” to be collected and proudly displayed—eliciting oohs and ahhs from all who beheld his glittering cabinet.

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Given the kind of team Trump had assembled, then, it is perhaps not surprising that the signature legislative accomplishment of his first year in office included massive tax cuts for corporations and rich people. He didn’t pitch it this way to voters, of course. In the weeks leading up to the passage of the tax overhaul, he repeated the claim that “the rich will not be gaining at all with this plan.” But inside the walls of his beachfront estate in Florida—mingling with people who had shelled out $200,000 for Mar-a-Lago memberships—he couldn’t resist showing off just a little.

Within hours after signing the bill into law, CBS News reported, Trump told attendees, “You all just got a lot richer.”
  The Atlantic
So, bow down to your leader.
Trump’s promise to voters in 2016 was simple: Put him in the White House, and he would bring a swift end to all this laughter [of other countries who are taking advantage of the US]. He would crack down on Beijing over currency manipulation, twist arms in Riyadh over oil prices, and blow up any multilateral trade deals he deemed unfair to U.S. workers.

But this hard-charging posture began to melt the moment Trump’s phone started ringing after the election. With heads of state and political leaders calling from around the world to congratulate him, Trump “tossed aside” the carefully honed protocols for such conversations, and chose to giddily wing it instead: He was, a senior transition official told The New Yorker, just “excited that important people were calling him.”

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[Taking advantage of his vanity, some foreign leaders] appealed to Trump by loading up his state visits with flamboyantly glitzy trappings. In Saudi Arabia, he was driven around the Murabba Palace grounds in a gold golf cart; in China, his welcome party included celebratory cannon fire, military bands, and young children with pompoms shouting, “Uncle Trump!”

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Dan Kurtz-Phelan, a former State Department official and the executive editor of Foreign Affairs, told me world leaders have developed a kind of shared playbook for dealing with Trump. They suck up aggressively (often mentioning the size of his electoral-college victory).

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“With past presidents, it was harder for flattery to change policy from black to white over the course of two hours.”

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Polls show that global trust in American leadership plummeted to historic lows in 2017. China is facing virtually no pressure from Trump on key issues like human rights and intellectual property, while longtime allies have been left to wonder about the resilience of their relationship with the U.S. And if all this is supposed to add up to an America First doctrine, few Republicans are able to make sense of it.

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The Global Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, is the kind of thing that Donald Trump never got invited to before he became president. In fact, the famously exclusive annual meeting for the geopolitical elite and the respectable rich (or “Davos Men,” as they are often referred to, with varying degrees of irony) epitomizes the establishment that Trump rose to power railing against.

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But from the moment Air Force One touched down in Switzerland, it seemed clear that Trump did not see himself as a gate-crasher. His invitation to Davos had been like the lifting of a velvet rope, and in this rarified setting, he was on his very best behavior.

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It might have felt like a moment of triumph for the president. But in Trump’s lifelong quest to gain entry into favored crowds like this one, he’s never been able to escape the gnawing fear that behind the obsequious smiles lurks a fundamental lack of respect.
And he has no earthly idea how to earn it. He never earned anything in his disgusting life.

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