Trump's Twitter attacks on Sadiq Khan reveal how pitiful the president is | Moustafa Bayoumi
We shouldn’t be passive onlookers to Trump’s pantomime presidency any longer. It’s time to look through the theatrics to understand what he is doing
How long can we keep watching this endless car crash that is Donald Trump’s presidency? The world has pressing problems to solve, from climate change to global terrorism, but instead of contributing resources and wisdom from the United States, Trump relentlessly gets in the way of solutions and exacerbates problems, all the while turning our shared tragedies into his own spectacles.
We shouldn’t be passive onlookers to Trump’s pantomime presidency any longer. It’s time we learn how to read Trump more judiciously, if only to learn how to deal with him better.
Take Trump’s obtuse reaction to the heinous terrorist attacks on the London Bridge. Only this American president would hear the words of capitulation in London mayor Sadiq Khan’s reasonable advice, made during an interview, that Londoners should not be alarmed by an increased and armed police presence on the streets following this terrorist attack.
Misconstruing Khan’s statement, Trump attacked Khan in a tweet posted hours after Saturday night’s attack. “At least 7 dead and 48 wounded in terror attack and Mayor of London says there is “no reason to be alarmed!” Trump wrote. Once it became clear his attempt to slander the mayor was obviously failing, Trump then doubled down again on Monday morning, tweeting: “Pathetic excuse by London Mayor Sadiq Khan who had to think fast on his ‘no reason to be alarmed’ statement. MSM [Mainstream media] is working hard to sell it!”
Trump’s outsize animosity to Khan may stem from rank bigotry – Khan is Muslim, after all – or be due to Khan’s criticism of Trump’s then proposed Muslim ban last year. Either way, who really cares anymore? Reasonable people should not. Instead, reasonable people should see through Trump’s Twitter theatrics to discover a rather pitiful method of leadership.
By focusing less on Trump’s personal reasons for his behavior and more on the political motivations for his actions, we can easily discern something crucial. The mounting evidence since 20 January shows that Trump’s notion of leadership revolves around creating a politics of unreasonably low expectations so that any measure of near adult behavior by the man will be seen as remarkable, or even presidential, while his hopes abound that the normal methods of judging legislators will fade from view.
His churlish use of Twitter is a case in point. The public consumes Trump’s Twitter timeline as if it offers access straight through the weird hair and directly into Trump’s brain. But Trump’s tweets are not merely 140-character missives of questionable spelling and intelligence. Whether we like it or not, they are also official pronouncements of the president of the United States. And as such Trump’s tweets – in form and content – effectively lower our expectations of what presidential communication should both look like and contain.
There’s more. Trump’s own statements so often contradict his own stated policy goals that his administration’s motto might as well be “Yes, we can’t!” Following the London Bridge attack, Trump also posted a series of nakedly opportunistic tweets relaying his desire to implement his proposed travel ban from several Muslim-majority countries, a policy which has been put on hold by the courts because of the blatant religious animus behind the proposal. “People, the lawyers and the courts can call it whatever they want, but I am calling it what we need and what it is, a TRAVEL BAN!” he wrote in one tweet. “The Justice Dept. should ask for an expedited hearing of the watered down Travel Ban before the Supreme Court - & seek much tougher version!” read another.
Lawyers are already feasting on Trump’s words as evidence to challenge the administration’s legal arguments regarding the travel ban, and Trump’s tweets could very likely undermine his own case in front of the courts. Some pundits will see the posts as indications of Trump’s shortsighted political impulses, but another possibility exists. Trump deliberately seeks to torpedo his own political proposals so that his failures will appear as evidence of how much he is an outsider to very system which he is now supposed to lead. The world be damned. He’s all that counts.
Trump’s style is turning out to be less postmodern fascism and more old-school narcissism. He will clearly sacrifice the rest of us, starting with the Muslims, in his tireless campaign to put himself always at the crumbling center of things. They say you’ll never cure a narcissistic, all you can do is ignore him. If only we could.
