![]() ![]() Everyone should ignore the provocations and concentrate on the policy. The new phase has Trump passing from a resemblance to Ralph Kramden to a closely related figure, the Rodney Dangerfield character in “Caddyshack.” Though loud, uncouth, and insulting to all, the thinking goes, he’s doing little more than upsetting the house rules and norms that were put in place long ago for a stuffier age. “You’re goin’ to the moon, Alice,” he is still tweeting, in effect, while America once again just stands there. The underplaying of the seriousness of Trump’s talk and tweets, emanating from both the left and the right, is a variant of what I’ve previously called the Ralph Kramden view of the Trump Presidency: he’s just a blowhard from the outer boroughs, who keeps making threats without any real intention or ability to follow through on them. Absent the reaction, Trump might follow through”-he feels, on the whole, that we should recognize the recurrent cycle and not fall into the widening abyss of hysteria that it creates. ![]() #Fumy trump tweets trial#Though Goldsmith allows that a certain amount of panic is probably healthy-“The provocation at stage one might be a trial balloon that gets shot down every time by the panicked reaction. On the Lawfare blog, Jack Goldsmith, of Harvard Law, argues that Trump’s provocations are intended more to cause panic than to presage actual acts, partly because Trump enjoys panicking people and partly because panic creates the atmosphere of chaos in which Trump flourishes. One sees this attempt to separate Trump from his habitual language and manners in highbrow places as well as in the tabloids: not long ago, the historian Niall Ferguson announced, in the Boston Globe, that, if you simply forget all the things Trump says, he actually has done much good and little bad, and has a record for prudent conduct superior to that of J.F.K. If you’re a Democrat, you think that he’s giving Republicans judges and tax cuts and military parades, so don’t get distracted by all the demagogic and anti-democratic ugliness that conservatives have stopped pretending to care about. If you’re a Republican, you say that he gives you judges and tax cuts and military parades, so don’t get distracted by all the mad and demagogic ugliness that the liberals pretend to care about. In this new model, if you ignore the Twitter and the talk, what you are getting is what any other Republican would give you: the small feints at genuine populism, not to mention the old-fashioned isolationist suspicion of “foreign entanglements,” have long ago been lost in a conventional tide of tax cuts and sword-shaking-and you either like it or you don’t. The first is that, if you ignore the tweets and the talking, what you’re seeing in Trump is a completely conventional Republican-which is good! The second is that, if you ignore the tweets and the talking, what you are seeing is a completely conventional Republican-which is bad! Whichever way you look at the situation, from right or left, Trump sits not on one edge of American history but more or less at the center point of things as they are. For those seeking consolation in a crazy time, two views about Donald Trump have emerged, which intersect even as they oppose. ![]()
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