And this is where his weakness comes in. His campaign convictions seem to be devoid of the courage required to uphold them. In the campaign he talked big. He had the swagger down nicely. He conveyed the image of a man who wouldn’t be swayed by conventional vogues of thought or the opprobrium of elites. He would go his own way because that’s the only way he could drain the Washington swamp, craft new political dialectics, create a new governing coalition, reduce the level of American foreign-policy adventurism.
But that takes real guts. It’s psychologically difficult to venture into entirely new political territory, where no one has gone before. Talking about it is easy; actually doing it requires a fortitude beyond the capacity of any political weakling.
We are now reading that the conventional thinkers and the establishment denizens of the Trump administration are decimating the administration people who were with him during his campaign, when he devastated the conventional thinkers and establishment denizens who now are taking over his administration. In domestic policy, perhaps the stakes aren’t so high; the biggest loser is likely to be Trump himself. But in foreign policy the stakes are immense, and the loser could be the entire country.
How does one account for these signs that Trump’s governance is going to be significantly at variance with his campaign advocacy? It’s difficult to resist the suspicion that some of it has to do with a lack of conviction. He’s winging it—and has been since he descended that famous Trump Tower escalator in June 2015. And yet he talked as if he were a man of ironclad conviction, someone whose words presage his actions. In politics, when words and actions don’t mesh, we call that phoniness.
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