from The Atlantic (essential reading these days)
Why Trump Keep Creating Crises
by David A Graham
It’s easy to survey the last 10 days in America and be flabbergasted at President Trump’s tendency to inflict politically bruising crises on himself. I know this because I had just that reaction on Wednesday, trying to make sense of his abrupt signing of an executive order intended to end separations of unauthorized immigrant families at the border. The current moment is more acute than others, but it follows the template set by the aftermath of a white-supremacist march in Charlottesville, Virginia; brinksmanship with North Korea; the collapse of Obamacare repeal; the firing of James Comey; and any number of smaller, half-forgotten crises. Why doesn’t he learn?
But maybe the truth is that Trump keeps creating crises because he needs them.
The Trump candidacy was itself based on creating a sense of crisis. This was no small feat, given that Barack Obama was reasonably popular and the economy was growing. Yet Donald Trump adeptly manufactured a series of crises that helped convince slightly less than a majority of the country to vote for him, despite his manifold weaknesses as a candidate. He preached of a surge of immigrants, when border crossings were actually down; he painted a dark picture of widespread crime, even though crime rates are historically low; he warned of China stealing jobs and manipulating currency, when in fact both job loss to China and yuan devaluation had peaked years before. Crisis was the theme of both his nomination-acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention and his bleak inauguration speech.
“This American carnage stops right here and stops right now,” he said on January 20, 2017. Instead, his hyping of carnage has continued almost unabated, this week popping up as a counterpoint to wrenching stories about infants taken from their mothers at the border.
Conventional wisdom holds that at a time when the economy is booming, a president should be popular (Trump is not) and that a president would focus on that booming economy. (Trump isn’t doing that either.) He does fitfully boast about the economy, but it’s usually through the lens of complaining that the media won’t cover it. The media is usually too busy to cover it because they’re busy covering whatever crisis the White House has concocted that week. And the White House has concocted that crisis because it’s a way to bind the president’s supporters to him.
Trump is not a president for a time of smooth sailing and optimism; the only thing he shares with Dwight Eisenhower is a love of golf. Trump has styled himself a president for times of crisis. If things are good and boring, voters are apt to gravitate to a boring, competent administrator—a Jeb Bush or a Hillary Clinton, for example. Only in a moment of disaster would they gamble on Trump. Besides, Trump himself would be deadly bored if everything was going well.
So he keeps creating crises. His genius is focusing attention. He’s not an especially effective administrator of the federal government—it’s more shambolic than ever—and he’s not good at enacting laws, as demonstrated by his tiny list of legislative achievements. He can create a spectacle and draw eyeballs to it, though. Sometimes these crises work out well for him. His assault on NFL players over the national anthem seems to have riled up his supporters, and he successfully bullied NFL owners into a defensive position. In other cases, however, he overreaches. His statement that there were “very fine people on both sides” of the white-supremacist march in Charlottesville didn’t go over well. Neither, as it turned out, did separating infants from their parents.
the rest at the link
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