Trump’s Lack of Savvy and Commitment Weigh Him Down
Michael S. Rozeff
Trump loses. We lose. America loses. The “system” would have produced the same result had the other candidate won and had other Republicans won the nomination. Trump has shown time and again that, beyond his capacity to win the election, he lacks several things. He lacks political savvy when it comes to measures that he cannot handle unilaterally, that is, when he must deal with opposing interests and people. This is shown every day. It is shown by his failures to have planned out appointments of people to fulfill his agenda, instead surrounding himself with people who are against him and also filling posts with incompetents. Furthermore, he doesn’t have a line of information into his antagonists and doesn’t know how to put them in their place and outflank them. He acted as if Washington were a business he was leading, but it’s not. He’s swimming in shark-infested waters.
The second failing is that he lacks commitments based on sensible priorities, or has no well-defined priorities. If he had really wanted to alter the U.S. policy toward Russia, he should have started doing that on day one and used the political powers of his office; and that failure ties in with his lack of political savvy. In fact, he would have had to handle his campaign speeches in a different way to spell out priorities and then hit the ground running.
His third failing is that he has gross misconceptions, like his attitude toward Iran as compared with Saudi Arabia, and his misreading of foreign leaders.
What we have here in important respects is amateur hour. Clearly Trump has been unable to influence the legislative agenda and his own party members.
However, for all that, among all his bad decisions like increasing the military budget, Trump has clearly had the steel to withdraw from the Paris Agreement, to close down the CIA operation in Syria, to reach an agreement with Putin over some aspects of Syria, and to ban transgender persons in the military. He has attacked major media when it needed to be attacked. These are not moves that required him to deal with Congress.
Trump’s presidency continues to unfold. He has shown some tendency to circle back to issues he believes in. He is not going to throw in the towel just yet because of losing some battles. He has shown some resilience and some healthy anger. He has to translate his strengths into workable leverage and mitigate his weaknesses. Nobody’s perfect, and, although his political experience is slight, he is not any less capable than the sordid and dishonorable Lilliputians of hypocrisy and hate who’d like to terminate his presidency now.
