Trump is consistent: There’s no issue he won’t take
both sides on
From covid to immigration, the president says
whatever will stop tough questions.
By Jill Filipovic
Jill Filipovic is a journalist, lawyer and the author of "OK Boomer, Let's Talk: How My Generation Got Left
Behind."
Oct. 29, 2020 at 10:14 a.m. CDT
Last
weekend, White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows delivered an alarming — and confusing —
message in a CNN interview. “We are not going to control the pandemic,” he
said, telegraphing American surrender. But he also claimed, “We’re going to defeat it.” He hadn’t
gone rogue, either. President Trump himself embraces the contradiction. Trump
frequently says that his administration has the virus “under control,” and that the virus is “not
under control for any place in the world.” In the final presidential debate,
Trump told Americans, “I take full responsibility”
and, in the same breath, abdicated it, saying, “It’s not my fault that it came
here.” He wants to inhabit both sides of the argument at the same time.
This
inconsistency is perhaps the most consistent thing about Trump’s presidency.
From the coronavirus to border enforcement to health care, he refuses to commit
to a coherent position. Often this has the feel of ignorance (as when he
professed, and then did nothing about, an intention to withdraw American troops
from Okinawa unless Japan paid more) or dishonesty (as when he takes credit for an economy he insists
is booming even now). Both are among his signature attributes.
But
there’s something else going on as well: The president is a chicken. He’s too
afraid to stake out an actual view on most issues, because he craves the kind
of mass approval that could be compromised by asserting — and sticking with —
strong convictions. Above all else, he seeks veneration and the power it
brings. And, well, he has few real convictions anyway.
In a
simpler political time, candidates who were ideologically inconsistent (or who
simply changed their minds after being presented with additional information)
were branded “flip-floppers,” a designation that may have cost Sen. John
Kerry (D-Mass.) the presidency in 2004. Ditto former Massachusetts governor Mitt
Romney in 2012. The public and the press seemed to value predictability, even
over nuance and evolution. The penalties for perceived flip-flopping still
attach to some politicians, including former vice president Joe Biden, who is
dinged for making “confusing remarks” about issues like fracking,
for example, which don’t lend themselves to five-second sound bites.
For
Trump, though, adaptability is the only constant, and it responds only to the
president’s perception of his approval ratings. Lack of political conviction
and commitment is such a hallmark of his leadership style that it doesn’t stick
as a critique, because the president’s motives are so transparent and his base
so willing to follow along with anything he says. He will do whatever he has to
in order to get the praise he believes he deserves. He’ll lie. He’ll deflect.
He’ll bully. And he will adopt nearly every possible position, believing that
voters will take him at his contradictory word.
Take
Trump’s brutal immigration policies. He brags about his “big, beautiful wall”
and, even after his administration’s family separation policy was the subject
of global outrage, said it successfully discouraged would-be
migrants because “if they feel there will be separation, they don’t come.” But
he also appears to grasp that the program horrified people, including
undecided voters, which is why he accuses Democrats of being too tough on
immigration. Trump frequently blames the Obama administration for policies of
his own making, saying in the last debate that “they
built the cages” that his administration used to detain children. Are child
detention and family separation good or bad, effective deterrents or shocking
cruelties? The answer is whatever is most politically expedient in the moment.
Then
there’s abortion. Before running for president, Trump claimed to be “very pro-choice.” In 2016, it was clear that
he didn’t care about abortion rights one way or the other but was trying to
find his footing on the religious right — unfamiliar terrain for a Manhattan
Republican. That year, he said that “there has to be some form of
punishment” for women who terminate their pregnancies. But by saying that
women, not doctors, should face prosecution, he made a misstep: A huge majority of Americans oppose criminalizing women
who get abortions. After a swift backlash, Trump realized that the
politics of his punish-women comment would hurt him, so he quickly abandoned that stance and
lined up with the punish-doctors view held by many antiabortion groups.
Or take
the Affordable Care Act. Trump ran in 2016 and runs today on gutting it; he
describes it as a top-to-bottom disaster, and his Justice Department is
attempting to do away with it in court even now. “I’d like to terminate
Obamacare, come up with a brand-new, beautiful health care,” he said at the
last debate. But support for the law has only grown stronger as Trump has
threatened its demise, and registered voters are particularly enthusiastic
about its guarantee of coverage for people with preexisting conditions. The
president is at least sophisticated enough to realize that his anti-Obamacare
stance is a liability. So he vows, again and again, to devise a law that will
lower premiums and preserve the protection for people with preexisting
conditions. These are, incidentally, the two main goals of the Affordable Care
Act.
Trump
has offered similarly wild swings when it comes to crime. He hammers Biden for
supporting the 1994 crime bill and crows about his own criminal justice reform
efforts. (“Nobody has done more for the Black community than Donald Trump,” he
says, with the possible “exception of Abraham Lincoln.”) At the same time, he’s
running a “law and order” campaign rife with thinly veiled racism. As Black
Lives Matter protests cohered across the nation this summer, the president
called demonstrators “thugs” and threatened them, tweeting, “When the looting starts, the
shooting starts.” He’s described the very phrase “Black Lives Matter” as a “symbol of hate,” accuses protesters of
destroying American cities and has defended the young White man who shot
three people at one demonstration, killing two of them. Trump knows he’s not
supposed to appear racist but doesn’t quite grasp which policies will earn him,
or insure him against, this designation. So he casually asserts his
egalitarianism even while espousing unequal views: At the debate, he called
himself “the least racist person in the room” while sharing the room with Black
journalist Kristen Welker.
His
statements on climate change are more of the same. He calls it a hoax, and early in his presidency, as
blizzards pummeled the Midwest, he begged global warming to “please come back fast, we need you!” He pulled
the United States out of the Paris climate accords, balking at any commitment
to lower carbon emissions in line with international standards. More recently,
as wildfires raged across California, the president told officials in that state that “it’ll
start getting cooler. You just watch.” When they responded that the science
doesn’t support that promise, Trump replied, “Well, I don’t think science
knows, actually.” Yet in front of an American public that believes climate change is real and
increasingly wants the government to step up to reduce its effects and protect
our air and water, he sings a different tune, telling viewers of the first presidential debate that he does believe
human behavior causes a changing climate “to an extent.” By the final debate,
he was practically claiming to be an environmentalist: “I do love the
environment, but what I want is that cleanest crystal-clear water, the cleanest
air.” He said — falsely — that “we have the best lowest
number in carbon emissions.”
This
phobia of commitment is even visible in his personal life. He has married three
women and doesn’t seem to take his wedding vows seriously: In addition to his
plural marital dissolutions, he is widely reported to have carried on
extramarital affairs and allegedly paid women for their silence. Fidelity to
ideas or people — staying true even when it’s tough, living up to his promises,
being honest — is just not in his repertoire.
Trump
doesn’t even have the courage of his vanishingly few convictions, if you can
call them that. It’s perhaps more accurate to say that the president has a
handful of deeply held grievances. He dislikes immigrants (not just
immigration), regulatory bodies that tell businesses what they can and cannot
do, and African Americans, whom he seems to regard alternately as criminals or
indigents. Those grievances, he realized four years ago, are widely shared
among conservatives. But after four years in power, complaints about what’s
going wrong in America don’t have quite the same salience. Still, his thirst
for popularity prevents him from committing to any affirmative position that
might invite a backlash from the public (or, as he sees them, fans) he
perpetually courts.
Luckily
for Trump, enough of them — along with the party he heads — excuse his
incoherent impulses. The Republican Party didn’t even publish an original
platform this year; instead, it reprinted the one from 2016 and resolved to
“continue to enthusiastically support the President’s America-first agenda.”
The GOP and many Republican candidates claim to be
running on “conservative values”; they’ve all but given up on campaigns of
ideas. Now, it’s the party of Trump — who has fully ceded the idea that
consistency and principles are of any value at all.
