Don’t overthink Trump
It’s tempting to project strategy where none exists
To paraphrase Marco Rubio, let’s dispel once and for all with this fiction that Donald Trump has any idea what he’s doing. He has no idea what he’s doing.
Trump’s reckless decision to withdraw the United States from the Iran nuclear deal is a reminder that there’s little more to this president than meets the eye. There’s no strategic plan. There’s no “Trump doctrine.” There are no long-term goals, policy-wise or otherwise, other than undoing his predecessor’s legacy. There aren’t really even short-term goals, unless you count the impulsive decisions driven by what the president sees on television.
This description of Trump is neither new nor much in dispute. Even some of his most fervent supporters describe him and try to communicate with him in ways that acknowledge this basic understanding. Yet the narrative of the Trump presidency continues to feature complex, even sophisticated, explanations for why the president does what he does — as if the clearest, most logical explanation were just too simple to be true.
On the day Trump announced his decision on the Iran deal, for example, the New York Times’ David Sanger and David Kirkpatrick wrote that Trump, along with the governments of Saudi Arabia and Israel, ultimately opposed the nuclear agreement because it “legitimized and normalized Iran’s clerical government” and didn’t address other aspects of the Iranian regime’s behavior, from its human rights abuses to its ballistic missile tests.
The same day, the Washington Post reported that Trump’s decision “had effectively been made last October, when he declared that Iran was not in compliance with the deal and called on European allies to negotiate better terms.” Later that week, the AP wrote that “the Trump administration had been actively preparing for a pullout since January” because “it was as clear then as now that the president would not be swayed to accept even a toughened-up version of the accord.”
While the rhetoric of Trump’s announcement and the comments of his advisers suggest there’s some truth to these analyses, neither captures the whole truth of how, or when, the one person ultimately responsible for making this decision actually made it.
Given his affection for strongmen and autocrats from Egypt to the Philippines to Turkey to Russia, does anyone really imagine that Trump cares deeply about the Iranian government’s human rights record? Does anyone really think that Trump — who called the nuclear agreement the “the worst deal ever negotiated” during the campaign — actually waited until last October, or even this past January, to decide to pull the plug? Does any aspect of Trump’s behavior as a candidate or a president really suggest this decision was made as part of a careful strategy — that he would ever truly consider keeping in place something the Post rightly called “one of President Barack Obama’s signature foreign policy achievements?”
As The New Yorker’s Susan Glasser tweeted, “Trump pulling out of the Iran deal he called ‘the worst deal ever’ is not a surprise. The surprise is that so many smart people thought they could convince him otherwise.” That Trump thinks the agreement is “the worst deal ever” is not surprise either, nor is it even remotely difficult to explain. He doesn’t like Barack Obama. The Iran deal is part of Obama’s legacy. Therefore, it’s the worst deal ever. Despite the coverage of Trump’s decision, there’s little evidence his analysis went much beyond that.
All politicians — all people — have egos and insecurities and personal quirks that affect their decisions and worldview. Good leaders recognize these tendencies and seek to offset them; great leaders hire teams of rivals and build systems to counteract their biases and blind spots. Trump, on the other hand, thrives in a world of bias and willful blindness. Among modern presidents, he’s unique in making decisions not in spite of but because of his human shortcomings.
Deliberating? Compiling facts? Assessing evidence? Seeking opposing views? Considering second- and third-degree consequences? The hallmarks of good decision-making differ from person to person and situation to situation, but an effective process usually channels at least some of these tactics into reaching a desired outcome. With Trump, the process is reversed. The outcome is predetermined by his vanities or impulses, and the deliberation is projected after the fact as part of a well-crafted, but largely fictional, narrative.
Trump and his team have applied the same backwards formula to plenty of other policy issues, from U.S. participation in the Paris climate agreement to the litany of Obama-era rules the Trump administration has repealed or walked back. It’s true that Trump’s worldview has left him relatively consistent on a few issues, like trade. It’s also true that many of the people in his orbit have more complex motives, and a more nuanced worldview, than their boss. But the man himself is pretty transparent. So why do we continue to cloak his decisions in rationality?
In a much-discussed column published shortly after the FBI raided the offices of Michael Cohen, The New Yorker’s Adam Davidson makes a compelling case for the “end stage of the Trump presidency.” Reflecting on his experience reporting on the Iraq war and the financial crisis, Davidson sees parallels in an impending collapse of Trump’s corrupt house of crimes. “This doesn’t feel like a prophecy,” Davidson writes. “It feels like a simple statement of the apparent truth.”
That same perspective readily applies not just to Trump’s presidency but to Trump himself. The reality of who Trump is as a politician and policymaker has been staring us in the face for years. Describing Trump’s rhetoric and decisions as driven by personal resentments and television-generated impulses is, as Davidson put it, a simple statement of the apparent truth.
Overthinking his decision-making and overcomplicating his worldview creates a false veneer of legitimacy that makes it easier to accept the unacceptable. Projecting thoughtful, policy-driven explanations onto Trump’s decisions helps rationalize what he’s doing. These explanations might offer some comfort (It’s not that bad — he’s practically a regular GOP president!), but they also provide an excuse not to confront the more obvious, and terrifying, reality. They’re a dangerous crutch, lulling us into thinking someone, somewhere — maybe even Trump — has a plan.
In a recent piece in Vanity Fair, journalist Peter Hamby offers some advice to American political journalists covering the scandal-laden chaos of the White House. “The simplest explanations are usually the best ones,” Hamby suggests. “Trump is the embodiment of Occam’s razor. If it’s rumored to have happened… it probably did.” The burden is on Trump to convince us that it didn’t.
There’s a broader lesson there. As with any elected official, the burden is on Trump to convince us that he has a strategy, that he’s acting in good faith, and that he’s making decisions for any reason other than perceived slights or personal resentments.
The Trump era is challenging enough as is. Let’s not assign complexities where none exist. Let’s not project rationality or strategy onto what’s more easily and more accurately explained by vanity and impulse. Let’s not assume there’s anything below the surface when overwhelming evidence on the surface suggests there isn’t much water there at all.
Trump’s operating rationale, if you can call it that, is simple and predictable. The longer he’s in office, the more urgent it becomes to recognize it for what it is — and what it isn’t.