June
3, 2017
Dear
Mr. President,
This
following is a column written by Matt Bai.
He just said everything so perfectly that I couldn't resist cutting and
pasting the whole dang thing. So here you go:
"President
Trump woke up incensed Tuesday morning, apparently because after he finally got
through lecturing European leaders about how they had to take more
responsibility for themselves, Germany’s chancellor had the audacity to suggest
that European countries should take more responsibility for themselves.
“The
times when we could rely on others have passed us by a little bit,” was Angela Merkel’s takeaway from her most
recent meeting with Trump. She said European powers “needed to take our fate
into our own hands,” which prompted Trump to fire off an angry tweet assailing the
trade gap with Germany and vowing to make the country spend more on defense.
Because
what we really need are fewer BMWs manufactured in South Carolina and more of a
German military presence in Europe. That’s always worked out great before.
But
really, all this focus on Trump’s tweets and the stories about his boorishness
abroad should please the White House no end. The more the narrative focuses on
Trump’s toughness and bluster with our allies, the less anyone focuses on
what’s really been exposed in these opening months of his presidency.
Trump
is weak, and our rivals have figured it out. They’re walking all over the
American president in a way we haven’t seen since at least the days of
disco and Space Invaders.
None
of this seems to permeate the family circle of Trump’s White House, where, as
ever, mythology crowds out any notion of policy or reality.
As
Hope Hicks, Trump’s onetime corporate flack, put it in a breathtaking
statement this week that Trump himself might well have
authored, the president “has a magnetic personality and exudes positive
energy,” has “an unparalleled ability to communicate with people,” “treats
everyone with respect” and is of course “brilliant with a great sense of
humor.”
Out
here in the world that isn’t Narnia, though, we’ve all got enough of a sample
size now to know what kind of leader Trump is.
Trump
punches down. Like all bullies, he prefers to flex his muscle with those who
are inherently smaller, or where the stakes are impossibly trivial.
He’ll
hurl his cutting asides at an aide, or berate some poor guy at the National
Park Service who refuses to lie about the size of a crowd. He’ll mock Arnold
Schwarzenegger for low ratings. He’ll bravely shove
aside the president of Montenegro, which no one could
circle on a map.
Like
all Twitter trolls, he’s got an endless supply of insults to be dished out in
140 characters or less, using all caps and exclamation points, as long as he
doesn’t have to stand in front of you and look at you level.
Just
how tough is Trump when the adversary isn’t someone who works for him or serves
as a prop in some way? Ask the Turkish despot, Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
A few
weeks ago, just after Erdogan visited the White House, a bunch of Turkish goons
kicked in the heads of protesters outside the country’s embassy on
Massachusetts Avenue. Thanks to this excellent
video analysis from the New York Times, we know that
several of these thugs had ties to Turkey’s security service, and they could be
seen conferring with the Turkish president himself before deciding to plunge
into the crowd.
Erdogan
watched the bloody crackdown from behind the armored window of his car, two
miles from the White House.
America
does business with all kinds of characters, of course, and what you do at home
is your problem. But here we have certain laws and convictions, and when you
come to our country, people get to tell you what they think without being
bludgeoned.
What
did Trump, who talks so tough with other NATO allies, have to say about any of
this? Where was the outraged tweet blasting back at a foreign incursion in the
American capital? How many Turkish diplomats were expelled?"
Sincerely,
Amy
Beaton (and Matt Bai)
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