Where's the plot?

Trump's presidency often seems less conservative or even pragmatic than just random. Is there anything to it beyond what he feels like at the moment?

My title “Where’s the plot” is pilfered from Abe Greenwald’s Newsletter in Commentary magazine. Greenwald wonders the same thing about Trump’s presidency that I, and my guess is many readers, have been puzzling about for some time: Does Trump’s tenure as President have even a ghost of coherence?

There was coherence galore in Reagan’s presidency, and in Obama’s. There was also a sort of coherence in Biden’s (hijacking by the Left combined with a heavy dose of old fashioned senility).

But Trump’s?

One often overlooked reason Trump won last year is that his overall political outlook certainly seemed to be closer to the center than that of Harris, who tried with gauzy generalizations, but largely failed, to paper over her Left-wing slant. The good news for Trump is that he won. The bad news for the country is that, aside from a few specifics like controlling illegal immigration and imposing tariffs, he seems to have no overall worldview other than that he is wonderful. As Greenwald puts it:

Donald Trump doesn’t do ideology. On foreign matters, he’s neither an interventionist nor a neo-isolationist per se, but he can do a perfect imitation of either one when he wants. He similarly approaches domestic matters on a case-by-case basis. He’s a tough-on-crime guy who makes exceptions for his side’s rioters, an anti-narcotics warrior who pardons Honduras’s former president and cocaine kingpin.

Trump’s wandering, hither-and-yon attitude toward criminal law especially rattles my cage, given that most of my career was as a federal prosecutor. On the one hand, he and his Justice Department, like the electorate, strongly support the death penalty — something I view as an essential if symbolic embrace of earned confidence in America’s right to defend itself and its legal traditions, and to give our most grotesque criminals the only punishment that even comes close to fitting the crime. On the other, his frequent use of the pardon power to undo earned convictions is little short of scandalous, rivaling Clinton’s and Biden’s. To be blunt, Trump’s use of clemency often strikes me as nothing but whim.

Mercy is one thing. Correcting the system’s inevitable mistakes is one thing. Wiping away the earned and proven consequences of criminal behavior simply because you feel like it is something else. One would be hard-pressed to think of anything more destructive to the rule of law. Or, come to think of it, more reminiscent of the behavior of — how shall I say this? — kings. The Left seems all bent over about Trump as the supposed king, except in the one area where the accusation fits best. Perhaps it’s because Trump is following the whatever-suits-you clemency path they spent years laying out for him.

Don’t get me wrong. If Trump were a Democrat, the MSM would be all over itself finding ways to praise, or at the minimum accommodate itself to, Trump for his “pragmatism.” And, truth be told, there is a reasonable case for not being overly tied to philosophical preconceptions. As Greenwald observes,

There’s a lot to be said for wearing one’s ideology lightly, as it frees one up to react to crises in unexpected and novel ways. And it allows for the flow of fresh thought. Trump has done that, often for the good. When it comes to our country’s enemies, they don’t know what to expect of him and can’t rule anything out.

Just so. You might want to check that out with whomever was guarding the gates at Fordow and Isfahan on June 22. For years and years, the world had grown used to the idea that the United States would endlessly criticize Iran’s nuclear program but would never actually do anything. Trump thought otherwise and acted. Making the world a markedly safer place has, in my view, been worth putting up with a good deal of Trump’s classlessness, contradictions and even dishonesty. How far that forbearance should go is a different question. As Greenwald continues,

Unfortunately, however, the same can be said about some of our allies.

And, as the above examples indicate, Trump’s complete rejection of any guiding doctrine can make his policies incoherent. That’s bad for all of us here in the U.S., Trump included. Because as his policies get more incoherent, more incongruous, he loses credibility. It’s hard to make the case that you’re waging a war on narco-terrorism in our hemisphere when you spring Juan Orlando Hernández from an American prison. The man was convicted of helping to smuggle 400 tons of cocaine, and Trump freed him after he served fewer than two years of his 45-year sentence.

In case of a national emergency — for example, the Cuban Missile Crisis — the country believed JFK and was, to the best of my memory, united behind him. He had won an election closer than any of Trump’s, but, even at 43, had a baseline seriousness to him that Trump’s erratic persona and looseness with truth has failed to achieve (or, if one wants to be less generous, has forfeited).

In a similar emergency, would the country unite behind Donald Trump?

In yesterday’s newsletter, I summed up why I believe we could be at the start of something like an administration meltdown. I listed a handful of reasons, but I left out this overarching reality: Trump is failing to make a convincing case for his actions. And not just when it comes to the showdown in South America. There are contradictions spread across the horizon. Why is the administration chasing after Vladimir Putin weeks after it slapped Russia with effective sanctions for the first time? Why is Trump planning to offer 600,000 visas to Chinese students while he’s simultaneously pressuring universities to reject international applicants? Why is the administration cuddling up to the Qataris instead of pressuring them to get Hamas to comply with its obligations as laid out in Trump’s peace plan? When there’s no obvious plot, you start to wonder [what the hell is going on].

With so much incoherence and no ideology, there’s nothing to hang on to by way of explanation. And the president really needs to explain a few things to the American people right now.

The reason I so much miss Reagan is not entirely than he governed with a coherent ideology, an ideology I’d been rooting for since I was a Goldwater campaign volunteer in high school. The reason is also that Reagan took care to explain to the country what he was doing and why. He talked to the American people seriously about ideas and how they translated into action. If, as the present evidence suggests, Trump can’t, his presidency and, I fear, the country, are headed for trouble.