Logic behind Trump impulses

The most amusing part of the Trump transition has been watching its effortless confounding of the media, often in fewer than 140 characters.

One morning, after a Fox News report on a flag burning at some obscure New England college, Donald Trump tweets that flag burners should go to jail or lose their citizenship.

An epidemic of constitutional chin tugging and civil libertarian hair pulling immediately breaks out. By the time the media have exhausted their outrage over the looming abolition of free speech, judicial supremacy and affordable kale, Trump has moved on.

Trump has mesmerized the national media not just with his elaborate Cabinet-selection production, by now Broadway-ready, but with a cluster of equally theatrical personal interventions that by traditional standards seem distinctly unpresidential.

It’s a matter of size. They seem small for a president. Preventing the shutdown of a Carrier factory in Indiana. Announcing, in a contextless 45-second surprise statement, a major Japanese investment in the U.S. Calling for cancellation of the new Air Force One to be built by Boeing.

Presidents don’t normally do such things. It shrinks them. But then again, Trump is not yet president. And the point here is less the substance than the symbolism.

The Carrier coup was meant to demonstrate the kind of concern for the working man that gave Trump the Rust Belt victories that carried him to the presidency. The Japanese SoftBank announcement was a down payment on his promise to be the “the greatest jobs president that God ever created.” (A slightly dubious claim: After all, how instrumental was Trump to that investment? Surely a financial commitment of that magnitude would have been planned long before Election Day.) And Boeing was an ostentatious declaration that he would be the zealous guardian of government spending that you would expect from a crusading outsider.

What appears as random Trumpian impulsiveness has a logic to it. It’s a continuation of the campaign.

Trump is acutely sensitive to his legitimacy problem, as he showed in his tweet claiming to have actually won the popular vote, despite trailing significantly in the official count. His best counter is approval ratings. In August, the Bloomberg poll had him at 33 percent. He’s now up to 50 percent.

The mini-interventions are working, but there’s a risk for Trump in so personalizing his coming presidency. It’s a technique borrowed from Third World strongmen who specialize in demonstrating their personal connection to the ordinary citizen.

In a genuine democracy, however, the endurance of any political support depends on the larger success of the country. And that doesn’t come from Carrier-size fixes. It comes from policy – policy that fundamentally changes the structures and alters the trajectory of the nation.

Congress is where the fate of the Trump presidency will be decided.

This story was originally published December 9, 2016 at 6:25 PM with the headline "Logic behind Trump impulses."