"Omnidirectional hesitation'

Yesterday, I posted the following on Twitter:

Barney Quick

@Penandguitar

Strive to settle for nothing but the exact truth regarding anything you argue for or against.

It sums up what I'd been trying to convey in my last two Precipice pieces, as well as some recent LITD posts.  At a moment like this, when various terms are being bandied about in very loose fashion and the narrative quickly expands from the George Floyd murder to civil unrest to test another round of discussion about Confederacy leader monuments to whether Black Lives Matter is on the whole playing a productive role in all this, accuracy is at a premium.

In no aspect of it all is this more true than the question of how to perceive Donald Trump. It's basically magnified the positions various camps had staked out over the last four years. To the rabid left, he's Orange Hitler and a racist. To his cult followers, he the last hope to stave off the leftist destruction of the country.

Calm down, everybody. He's nowhere near capable of being either of those things.

I call your attention to a great piece currently up at The Week. It's by Matthew Walther, and the main point is that the Very Stable Genius would have to be capable of a far greater degree of consistency to live up to either of those portrayals.

He is all posture with no ability to deliver:

The most important takeaway from this real-time television commercial [The St. John's Church stunt] is the conclusion it should force from observers: Donald Trump is not a dictator. He is not an authoritarian. He is not a fascist or a Caesarist or a Peronist or an -ist of any other known variety. He is emphatically not a Nixonian proponent of law and order. Any of these things would require the president to have convictions and prejudices distinct from his own political fortunes, real or perceived. To pretend otherwise encourages the delusions of Trump's most blinkered enemies in journalism and his most delusional supporters. Both of these groups would like to believe that the president is a man of action, a politician with a coherent ideology, a strategist with defined goals — above all, a swift unwavering maker of decisions. They differ only in their moral assessment of this fantastical personage, who bears no meaningful resemblance to the senescent ditherer in the White House.

What the past week has shown is that Trump is incapable of wielding power, for good or evil. He is happy to tweet “When the looting begins, the shooting begins,” to browbeat the nation's governors during telephone calls, to lash out at journalists, just as he is wont to muse about the salutary effects of running over protesters. To the disappointment of goodness knows how many people who would have been happy to see tanks rolling down the streets of Minneapolis and bottle-tossing demonstrators lying shot in the streets a week ago, the festival of bloodshed never begins. This is not the forbearance of a Louis XVI. It is the lunatic middle course of a man unwilling to commit himself either to the conciliatory measures allegedly being urged by his son-in-law Jared Kushner or to the reactionary violence that appeals to his aesthetic instincts.

Walther then reviews past examples of this big-talk-and-no-followup pattern:

This pattern is not new. For Trump the Affordable Care Act was the doom of the republic until the moment it became clear that the GOP did not have enough votes in the Senate to repeal it. Our random interventions in the Middle East, which Trump spent so much of his 2016 presidential campaign decrying, were disastrous until various advisers convinced him of the necessity of staying the course in Afghanistan, bombing Syria, and assassinating an Iranian general. Our trade relations with China were dangerously one-sided and in need of sweeping reform until it became clear that Wall Street did not agree. Immigration was holding down American wages, but it must be allowed to do so in order to ensure that the agriculture lobby has access to poorly remunerated guest workers. The special counsel investigation led by Robert Mueller was nothing short of treasonous, but not worth actually shutting down unilaterally after Jeff Sessions, the former attorney general who was once his loyal courtier, refused to do it on his behalf. More recently, coronavirus was dangerous enough to shut down travel to and from China, but not without making so many exceptions as to render the relevant order useless; the cure, we were told, must not be allowed to become worse than the disease, but the severity of the latter was something about which Trump was unwilling to make up his mind, while the scope of the former was left almost entirely to the nation's governors; a few weeks ago the imminent reopening of Georgia was synonymous with the cause of liberty itself until the moment it became the occasion for a bizarre public scolding. Such examples could be multiplied indefinitely. Inconstancy is the only constant in this administration.

What of the moves that did result in policy changes that conservatives enthusiastically support (judicial appointments, tax cuts, deregulation, pulling out of the Paris climate accord and the JCPOA, moving the US embassy in Israel to Jerusalem)? I am no fly on the wall, but I think we can see from the way this era has unfolded to date that in each case someone he respected - at the time, anyway - convinced him the particular move in question would make him look like a winner.

Alas, the look-like-a-winner advice he's been receiving lately has not served him nearly so well.