WHAT THE U.S. PRESIDENCY NEEDS, IT WILL NEVER GET FROM TRUMP

…A true caricature of President Trump

President Trump will never have the character of a true US President

I have been going after the current president, even before he won the 2016 election.  Mainly, because I have always felt that Donald Trump was totally unqualified for the position.

I have come to another reason for my attitude.  That reason, is that I have had an attitude about anyone that should hold such a powerful position.

In my mind, anyone that is qualified to sit in that role in the White House, needs to have a particular idea for how they should act as the most powerful person in the world.

As a reporter for CBS, John Dickerson once wrote, “When one elects a president, character matters above all, or at least should. But we don’t always mean the same thing by “character”, and the meaning of that term has shifted over the years.”

By character, what I mean is that, they must have the capacity for restraint in an office that contains such power.

To put it in perspective, Mr. Dickenson put it correctly when he discussed our first president, George Washington.  Here is what he wrote:

“The US presidency was built on restraint. As the framers had designed the office in the summer of 1787, they picked George Washington to preside.  He was chosen, not because of his military skill or his speech-making, but for his restraint.  This was a trait the Founders hoped would contain the inevitable temptations toward a monarch in the office they were creating.  When King George III had heard that President Washington had planned to return to Mount Vernon after leading the continental army, the monarch reportedly said: “If he does that, he will be the greatest man in the world.” And, of course, Washington’s decision not to seek a third term set the precedent for presidential restraint for years to come.”

The conservative political scientist James Q. Wilson said that “character” was composed of two qualities: “empathy and self-control.”  Mr. Wilson defined empathy as “willingness to take importantly into account the rights, needs, and feelings of others,” and self-control was “the willingness to take importantly into account the more distant consequences of present actions.” Both qualities are built on restraint, or the ability to put public over self, and future over present.

Mr. Wilson continued: “In an office that contains such unplugged power, where that power expands in moments of emergency, the ability to demonstrate restraint is essential. It favors the public good over politics”. 

That ability is not Donald Trump.

Now we look closely at President Trump.

The age of Trump suggests the importance of a different definition of character, and the capacity for restraint does not exist with this individual.

In recent years, the situation has flipped for a president.  Restraint has become more of a deficit than a virtue.  In today’s election campaigns, they are devoted more to large promises of action, or displays of the candidate’s personal ambition.

Richard Ben Cramer wrote compellingly of “what it takes” to win a US election.  This was his account of the 1988 campaign in which George H.W. Bush won by making the first-generation immigrant, Michael Dukakis, seem almost un-American. “The race was so brutal, Bush’s strategist, Lee Atwater, later repented his involvement on his deathbed”.

In 2015 and 2016, “Donald Trump escalated this tradition. He denigrated John McCain and all POWs.  He mocked a physically disabled reporter; and he savaged Jeb Bush by suggesting his president brother had lied his way into the Iraq war and he should have been impeached.  Trump even suggested that the father of another rival, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), was implicated in the John F. Kennedy assassination.”

While in office, other previous US presidents had recognized a distinction between no-holds-barred campaign tactics and the restraint traditionally associated with governing.  Trump has not recognized any kind of restraint or empathy.  

He has only shown a concept of confronting all US allies, all the while as he accommodates the nation’s adversaries.  He continues to insult his own Cabinet members and he treats speaking the truth as being “totally optional”. 

What is surprising is that his supporters seem to applaud all of this, as his disruptive action being what they voted for….?

The presidential capacity for restraint, or the lack thereof, has come into focus as Trump confronts perhaps the two biggest and latest crises of his presidency:

A: the Covid-19 pandemic

B: the national and world uproar over the killing of George Floyd.

In responding to Covid-19, restraint was not in order. Indeed, the too late federal response doomed America to its disgusting global ranking.  

Where restraint was needed, however, was the quality that causes leaders to pause from the trading in politics to take the threat of a pandemic, or the threat of cyberattacks and the current economic collapse, seriously.  In fact, this should have been done before they all actually hit.

But it wasn’t.

President Trump should have had the capacity to design, and stick with, a national lock-down that was very painful, but was totally necessary.

Let's face it!  The president knows that his re-election is hinged on the economic success of his past 4 years.  That is why he keeps trying to open up the country, no matter how many Americans it kills.

In Trump’s response to George Floyd’s death and the eruption of the world’s protests, he has had a chance to show restraint. It was an opportunity for the president to play “importantly into the rights, needs and feelings of all blacks".

It could have been the president’s moment to answer meaningfully on behalf of a nation dedicated to racial equality.  He could have been the one US official to represent the entire nation, and even the world.

Instead, Trump swept aside the protesters at Lafayette Square and marched to St. John’s Episcopal Church to show his presidential strength.  As expected, there was no restraint, no empathy, and he then told lies about a 75-year-old protester hospitalized after being shoved to the ground by police.

He then had the gall to boast that he had done more for blacks than any other president except, perhaps, Abraham Lincoln.

The 2020 election must now revolve around a different kind of action.  Action from the voting public.

The economy is crushed, the country faces an opportunity for racial reconciliation, and even though the president keeps trying to make Covid-19 go away, it will persist up to and past Election Day.

The electorate will be hungry for answers, increasing the importance of restraint.  But one must understand that restraint is not the opposite of action, it is what shapes the action and what gives it, the appropriate meaning. It’s what gives the presidency the character it needs, but it will never get from Donald J. Trump.

Copyright G. Ater 2020