President-elect Donald Trump demonstrated a disturbing pattern that did not doom his presidential candidacy but surely will make for a rocky presidency.
First, Trump’s whirling-dervish approach to foreign policy — say anything and everything with no preparation or knowledge — leads to blunders with consequences that he did not expect. (Does anyone really think he understood the intricacies of our “One China” policy before speaking to the president of Taiwan?) The most alarming was his declaration that “the United States must greatly strengthen and expand its nuclear capability until such time as the world comes to its senses regarding nukes.” Other countries very well may react to rash words with rash actions. In some instances, they will escalate a war of words (or worse); in other cases, our enemies may take comfort and misread our positions on such issues.
Second, Trump’s feeble aides — who also don’t understand the substantive issue — try to clean up the mess. Kellyanne Conway had her clock cleaned by Rachel Maddow as Conway lamely tried to play down Trump’s nuclear arms race tweet and justify his abuse of members of the press. The more Conway dissembled, the worse it got:
MADDOW: Honestly, though, the American position on nuclear weapons worldwide for a very long time now, not just as a partisan matter but over multiple presidents, has been that we are trying to lead the way in reducing the number of nuclear weapons in the world. He’s saying we’re going to expand our nuclear capability.
CONWAY: He’s not necessarily saying that.
MADDOW: He did. He did literally say we need to expand our nuclear capability. . . .
MADDOW: This sounds like really new policy. On nuclear weapons, it’s really a sensitive matter.
CONWAY: Well, of course, I would agree.
MADDOW: Who has the most nuclear weapons after us and Russia?
CONWAY: I don’t know. But I’m sure he does.
MADDOW: It’s France. India and Pakistan. One of the most important things about — to know about India and Pakistan having nuclear weapons is the number of nuclear weapons that they’ve got on launch status. Do you guys talk about that? Like is that like —
CONWAY: Well, I don’t. He’s surrounded by national security team.
MADDOW: If the United States announces a U-turn on nuclear policy, India and Pakistan don’t have any nuclear weapons on launch status. They could move them to that status because a new nuclear arms race is about to start.
CONWAY: So, we’re getting ahead of ourselves, Rachel.
MADDOW: But that’s what happens in the past when presidents have made even joking remarks about nuclear weapons. So, I think what I’m trying to get at is a lot of people are hiding under the bed right now because he doesn’t — it doesn’t seem like he knows what he’s talking about on this issue.
CONWAY: That’s not fair. It’s not fair.
MADDOW: Well, then, how can you make policy on Twitter and then say he’s making policy?
CONWAY: He’s not making policy on Twitter.
MADDOW: Expanding our nuclear arsenal and announces it on Twitter is a big deal.
Sean Spicer got the same treatment when he tried to reinterpret his boss’s words — from Matt Lauer. (Yes, consider how embarrassing that is given Lauer’s weak grasp of foreign policy and limp interviewing skills, which earned him ridicule from all sides during a campaign forum.)
Third, following the initial Trump blunder and inept attempts to paper over his ignorance, Trump invariably doubles down. After the Taiwan episode, he went on a tear, promising to impose tariffs against China. On Friday, he apparently told Mika Brzezinski of “Morning Joe”: “Let it be an arms race. We will outmatch them at every pass and outlast them all.”
In the context of a campaign, Trump could divert media attention and excoriate the media for reporting his exact words. In the real world, a president creates international uncertainty, undercuts his aides and boxes himself into positions that are not in America’s interests when he behaves in this fashion. Usually, a strong national security adviser grabs control of the process, does not allow aides to freelance with cover stories and prevents the president from embarrassing himself. Unfortunately, Trump picked Mike Flynn, who has been revealed to have a multiplicity of conflicts, a penchant for conspiracy theories, a lack of management skill and, worst of all, his own hair-trigger tendency on Twitter to launch, for example, denunciations of all Muslims. Heaven help us over the next four years.