President Donald Trump melted down again not long after the New Year began.
So here’s something emblematic about our new year. Donald Trump is the first elected president not to name a White House science advisor in the first calendar year of his presidency. Which is certainly yet another leading indicator of the biggest know-nothing ever elected to the American presidency.
The post has existed, with various names, since 1940. That’s when former MIT Dean Vannevar Bush had a one-on-one meeting in the Oval Office with President Franklin D. Roosevelt. After 15 minutes, FDR said he was convinced, scrawled “OK - FDR” on Bush’s one-page memo, and that was that. To a smart, sophisticated leader on the world stage, some things are just obvious.
In the nearly 78 years since then, most presidents have named their science advisor before taking office. The second slowest, George W. Bush, named his science advisor in June of his first year in office, more than half a year before the point Trump is at now in his own benighted presidency. (Too bad Bush, a bright guy who I met and liked, listened to Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld in his first term rather than Colin Powell and Condi Rice.)
I dwell on this starting out not only because it is utterly outrageous for a president to have no science advisor in the 21st century, an increasingly sci-fi age, but also because it points up how determined Trump has become to play, frankly, to use a technical term, the ugly dumbass American.
In my New Year’s Eve piece, I posited that the 50th anniversary of 1968 was destined to be a crazy, tumultuous year. Well, we’ve started off even crazier than before, amidst some really spectacular stupidity.
Trump had long since established himself as the ultimate version of ‘The Ugly American’, the exemplar of ignorant arrogance in the world. It was brought to life in the classic 1950s novel by Eugene Burdick and William Lederer, with Marlon Brando starring in the early ‘60s movie version. (The title, ironically, actually refers to a homely and rather humble man who takes the time to learn about the culture he is supposedly trying to help.)
With a series of tweets and snarling pronouncements for the new year, Trump took things even farther down that bad stretch of road.
Trump threatened to attack nuclearizing North Korea with his “nuclear button.” Which is “bigger than” Kim Jong-un’s, he boasts. This, as South Korea was trying to open talks with North Korea, to at least negotiate North Korean participation in next month’s Winter Olympics in South Korea.
Trump threatened Palestinians with a cut-off of aid after they predictably rejected his almost universally unpopular proclamation of Jerusalem, acquired over the past 70 years by force of Israeli arms, as Israel’s very own capital.
When some foolish infighting amongst Iranian elites inadvertently ignited serious protests by impoverished Iranians against the Iranian establishment as a whole, Trump idiotically waded in on Twitter, blustering about all that the U.S. would supposedly do for an ill-defined regime change. Which of course aided Iranian theocrats in pushing back against the protests.
Trump blithered on about the complex relationship with Pakistan, forcing a cessation of much if not all of U.S. aid to the Islamic world’s only nuclear power. While Pakistani duplicity around jihadism is obvious — among other things, Pakistani intelligence having practically invented the Afghan Taliban to bring order after the Soviet defeat and subsequent American amnesia in and around the Soviet-Afghan War — Trump’s approach is inherently chaotic.
Small wonder then that Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis, as you see in this Pentagon transcript, wouldn’t comment on Trump’s tweeting and the still emerging policy on Pakistan.
Or, for that matter, on Trump’s endlessly belligerent Twitter attacks on North Korea, which have uniformly backfired on the stubborn billionaire bully boy. While Trump bloviated, Mattis encouraged South Korea’s Winter Olympics rapprochement with North Korea, facilitating it further by successfully pushing for a postponement of the latest round of US/ROK joint military exercises, which have always stirred up the DPRK.
One needn’t always agree with the retired Marine four-star — who, not incidentally, essentially countermanded Trump’s Twitter directive to ban transgender troops — to appreciate Mattis’s steady, thoughtful gravitas as SecDef.
Is there any gravitas to be found in the incredibly spectacular sh-t storm around the inveterately self-promoting New York media columnist Michael Wolff’s ‘Fire and Fury’ inside-the-White House expose of Trump’s ridiculously clueless and sleazy presidency? Erratic megalomania on full display.
Aside from deep respect for Wolff’s amazing chutzpah, that would be a big “Nope.” Once in the door, it looks like it was like shooting fish in a barrel for Wolff.
Trump looks even uglier and more preposterous than before, even if some of it sounds a bit too perfect. But one wonders just who is the biggest dumbass, the overweening, nerve-wracked Trump or the idiotically self-promoting Steve Bannon?
WTF are these guys thinking?
Did Bannon, presumably aware of the recording device, not realize that Wolff would use every last juicy thing he said about the Trumps, from the profound ignorance about the substance of the presidency to the “treasonous” links with Russians? Did he imagine that his relationship with Trump could survive that? Or that the backlash constituency he cultivated on Trump’s behalf would not, to a large extent, turn on him?
Trump is, after all, though it still plays like a bad SciFi Channel movie, the President of the United States. And Bannon is a guy with a big mouth, little writing ability, and billionaire backers who can still exploit President Trump.
And Trump, well, he is at least a shrewd New Yorker. He knew perfectly well who Wolff was. Here is what he should have said after he noticed the columnist hanging around the White House: “Michael, fantastic as always to see you. Again. Where are you staying? Excellent. I will drop by. These gentlemen will help you with your stuff as you make your way out.”
Instead he just blathered on to his next Twitter storm.
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