Talk on Trump needs tempering

It’s time for some serious talk about Donald J. Trump, and I don’t mean it’s time to render an amateur psychiatric opinion on whether he’s fit to serve, mock him over a failed handshake, lay down odds on his impeachment or issue some grand call to action that will be long forgotten by the time all that morning caffeine has been metabolized.

This kind of talk is not helping us.

Before we go any further, let’s make one thing clear: This is not about giving in to resistance fatigue. The president must continue to be held accountable for every last decision he makes on our behalf.

But while we must continue to keep score, we also must be smarter about how we call the game. Our broadcasts echo across the world, and some powerful foes are listening.

When the fresh-faced Senator from Illinois went to his first G-20 in 2009, he called for a unified international response to the financial crisis that had torpedoed our credit markets, frozen trade and sent unemployment skyrocketing into the double digits. This was serious business, but we at least shared a common goal with our fellow elite nations then: righting the trajectory of the global economy.

As Trump’s friction with president Jinping of China has already displayed, the same sense of unity does not exist when it comes to putting the clamps on hostile nations – North Korea included. Shortly before President Trump left for this year’s G-20 in Hamburg, as we marked the anniversary of our country’s independence with fireworks and hot dogs, North Korea test-launched its first intercontinental ballistic missile – with the right trajectory, it was just powerful enough to reach domestic soil.

While the president spoke about his vision for the West in a lead up to Hamburg, thousands of North Koreans had their own fireworks display in celebration of the successful test-launch – something our president previously declared would never happen. It was easy to mock him over there, particularly when we’re mocking him over here with equal disdain.

Then, as the president was set for a high-stakes meeting with Vladimir Putin – an encounter chocked full of serious implications for world security – our pundits giddily shared their predictions that Putin would “eat his lunch.”

To be sure, there was ample reason to doubt the president’s strategic chops going into the meeting. But there was also ample reason to keep such thoughts from being splattered across the international news wires.

Our news media is not responsible for North Korea’s missile frenzy or Putin’s web of deceit, but our international foes pay painstakingly close attention to the messages sent by our news media, and the only message we’ve sent since January is that our country is polarized and our leadership disjointed. This surely isn’t dissuading them.

In many respects, this president falls short of our expectations for a commander-in-chief. But we are all smart enough to draw our own conclusions about the competence of our leaders, and we benefit more from facts and thoughtful, objective analysis than we do from hot takes and clickbait hit pieces.

Tempering our talk on Trump can only help our position at this point, and in this world climate, we need all the help we can get.

This story was originally published July 10, 2017 at 5:04 AM with the headline "Talk on Trump needs tempering."