President Donald Trump stood atop the long winding staircase of the public housing facility where he lives. He is all about vision. And Thursday night, he was beaming at the politically picture-perfect scene he saw spread across his South Lawn:
1,500 people, sitting virtually cheek-to-cheek in white government chairs jammed close so it all looked great on TV. It also sounded great, as the mics clearly picked up the crowd's chanting "Four more years!" by virtue of the fact that very few voices were muffled by masks.
It looked like Tulsa-on-the-Potomac. Trump saw it as a Mission Accomplished. Because as we watched on TV, there was nothing visible or audible that reminded us that we all are still imperiled by the still-uncontrolled killer COVID-19. Unlike all the other developed nations that minimized the pandemic's peril long ago.
Covering the news moment the same way you did (via TV), I had one advantage. I had an early draft of Trump's prepared speech (I'd found it online). So I knew Trump was about to give us his hardline assessment of the tragic non-COVID crisis we are now facing. And I especially awaited him to utter this confident pledge that he would swiftly end this racially shattering crisis that is tearing us apart:
"Our Convention occurs at a moment of crisis for our nation. The attacks on our police, and the terrorism in our cities, threaten our very way of life. Any politician who does not grasp this danger is not fit to lead our country.
"Americans watching this address tonight have seen the recent images of violence in our streets and the chaos in our communities. Many have witnessed this violence personally, some have even been its victims.
"I have a message for all of you: the crime and violence that today afflicts our nation will soon come to an end. ... The most basic duty of government is to defend the lives of its own citizens. Any government that fails to do so is a government unworthy to lead �"
OH NO! Boy is my face red! It turns out the words I just quoted for you actually weren't from Trump's Thursday night Republican National Convention acceptance speech, after all. They were from the convention speech Trump gave four years ago. My journalistically experienced eye discovered the goof when I saw (and analyzed in depth) this sentence: "Beginning on January 20th 2017, safety will be restored."
So here we are, still struggling with the same unsolved and tragically enflamed crisis Trump glibly pledged he'd end four years ago.
As we think about all that seems to go so wrong during Trump's presidency, we realize that whether it is flailing and failing against COVID-19 or enflaming and ignoring racial strife, there is one central flaw that is the core of Trump's leadership failures. It happens in business and politics. He is always all about name-calling and confrontation. He is incapable of helping by healing. He is not wired in a way that is capable of bringing us together. Not even in crises such as this clash in which the world has seen a policeman shooting seven times, at close range, at the back of a Black American who was not brandishing a weapon.
We have seen the repetitive pattern often enough to know it can and must be resolved by top-down leadership. And frankly, that is also the leadership failure that has prevented the United States from shutting down, distancing and defeating (or at least decisively minimizing) COVID-19.
Consider Trump's vision of governing to control COVID-19. He basically doesn't have one. In a crunch, Trump has been shamefully willing to convince and even con his most trusting true believers to expose themselves to this mass-killer pandemic by amassing at rallies, workplaces, everywhere. Why? Just so it will look like the virus has been conquered. And so he can claim he won. Never mind that he has become a mass enabler and mass infector.
Here's the big picture: It's become fashionable these days for my talking-head fellow pundits to opine about whether what they glibly call "Trumpism" will survive even if the grand old party of Republicanism doesn't.
Trump has shown no consistent embrace or implementation of any governing principles or philosophies such as conservativism, liberalism, socialism, communism, libertarianism. And what political scientists call populism actually comes down to, in Trump's World, just his name-calling and attack-politics. No overarching conceptual issues; he just became the first incumbent president to order his party to dispense with its platform altogether.
So "Trumpism" fails its one question, pass/fail test: There isn't an "ism" if there is no is. Trump's vision of leadership and governance extends no further than what he sees in his bathroom mirror. Trump's vision is an "ism" trumped.
