Trump Has Created a LALA land Full of Fantasies
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| Anna Rose Layden for The New York Times |
Opinion Columnist
New York Times
This week, I have been reading “Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump,” the recent volume from my newsroom colleagues Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan on the first year of President Trump’s second term.
It makes for compelling, often shocking, reading, and Haberman and Swan provide a great sense of the personalities involved in making the second Trump administration, as well as the relationships and dynamics that seem to drive his presidential decision-making.
Whenever I read an inside account of a presidency, I am on the lookout for anything that tells us something about the way the president in question relates to the office itself. Is there a particular way he manages the White House or attends to challenges and crises? On what issues does he defer to his staff members and subordinates versus take his own counsel? How does he deal with the endless stream of information and intelligence from a nearly infinite number of sources?
The growing complexity of the administrative state and the enlarged responsibilities of the office led presidents, beginning in earnest with Harry Truman, to create new, institutionalized processes designed to get the best and most accurate information available. In addition to practical considerations, this has been a way for presidents to combat one of the pathologies of executive authority: a tendency to value one’s own unique insight above all else. Even still, it is immensely difficult for presidents to avoid the trap, if you will, of getting high on their own supply.
Trump, according to Haberman and Swan, has not simply junked this process in its entirety — he has set up his White House to affirm his frequently arbitrary instincts above all other considerations. He has insulated himself from opposing views and made internal dissent verboten. At no point does Trump receive neutral information; just about everything is tailored to his whims, impulses and mercurial disposition. The result is that he is isolated from reality to the extent that he is practically living in a fairy tale.
Haberman and Swan describe a Trump who cannot see beyond the first few steps of any given action and is constantly taken aback by political obstacles and backlash. Recent controversies, from the depletion of our military’s stock of sophisticated munitions to worsening conditions on some of our naval vessels, are easier to fathom when you consider the strong odds that Trump is told precious little about the actual conditions of his war. More likely, he is told what he wants to hear: that America is winning and Iran is on the verge of surrender.
So far, much of the destruction of the second Trump administration is self-inflicted. It is Trump and his allies who have wrecked the administrative state, undercut science and mired the country in a new Middle East quagmire. There has not yet been an external crisis — the kind of catastrophic event that demands an active and effective leadership. Through their reporting, Haberman and Swan make clear that if and when this country faces such a crisis, both the president and his administration will be caught flat-footed.
When this happened in Trump’s first term with the Covid-19 pandemic, the United States still had a functional bureaucracy with experts willing and able to provide leadership in the absence of any from the White House. Should we see a similar disaster, we very likely won’t even have that.
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