A fading president obsesses over leaving a mark
By Frank Bruni
No matter what you think about the wisdom of the operation to snatch Nicolás Maduro, it was logistically audacious and technically impressive, an emphatic demonstration of American military prowess. It was President Trump flexing more than he has ever flexed before.
But when, later that morning, he stood before television cameras at Mar-a-Lago to take his victory lap, it was more a victory wobble. He looked spent. He spoke in a mumbling, meandering fashion. He wasn’t President George W. Bush landing on an aircraft carrier in a flight suit in 2003 to deliver a speech prematurely declaring America’s interventions in Iraq a success; he was the same old Trump in the same old duds droning on in the same old way, only he sounded older.
Granted, the 79-year-old president had been up all night or almost all night, a fact evident in part because he took a 4:30 a.m. call on his mobile phone from my Times colleague Tyler Pager. Anyone in Trump’s dress shoes would be exhausted. But his bearing and his cadence suggested something more than a mere sleep deficit, as did his inability to sound triumphant as he claimed another triumph, to flash much color as he peacocked. At a moment like that, you’d expect there to be enough adrenaline pumping through him for a pumped-up performance. Instead he delivered a wound-down one.
It illustrated a potentially dangerous collision of dynamics that’s one of my great concerns about the span of time between now and the November midterms — which, as Trump well knows, could bring a comeuppance and then restraints that he doesn’t currently face. Will diminished vigor and a ticking clock yield expanded ambitions and compensatory displays of strength? Will his hunger — for more ostensible victories, for more recognition, for just plain more — intensify along with the prospect of political enfeeblement?
I watch and listen to him and get the sense of a man stuffing himself at the buffet before it’s taken away. A man bellowing, or trying to bellow, about his superiority as his voice weakens. “Dominance,” “dominance,” “dominance” — he returned repeatedly to that word during his Mar-a-Lago news conference, a tic that was just as much a tell.
Also telling was the show he staged for Pager and three other Times reporters — Zolan Kanno-Youngs, Katie Rogers and David E. Sanger — on Wednesday evening, when he welcomed them into the Oval Office for a two-hour interview whose duration was part of its point, as Trump himself made clear.
“Two hours,” he said to the reporters as the interview concluded. “I could go nine hours.”
With the reporters present, he took a phone call from Gustavo Petro, the president of Colombia. The call’s contents were off the record, but its length — “the better part of an hour,” as the reporters described it — was something Trump seemed to want noted. He asked them, “Do you think Biden could do that?”
Rogers wrote that Trump sought to “present himself as indefatigable, projecting stamina and energy for a news organization he has accused of seditious behavior for reporting about his health and age.”
And Trump said unabashedly that the only limits to his power were his “own morality.” Which, to my ears, means no limits at all. I’ve never observed in Trump anything approaching a conventional moral code, a set of ethical bearings that circumscribe his conduct. I’ve beheld gripes, grudges, whims and wants — so very, very many wants.
For months now, he has been acting with a rapacity remarkable even for someone so famously given to greed. He’s creating an ostentatious White House ballroom in a new East Wing as tall as the main White House building. He’s attempting to stamp his visage on both sides of a $1 coin to commemorate the country’s 250th birthday. He’s constructing a whole new monument — a gaudy arch — for the occasion, too.
He announced the building of a “golden fleet” of “Trump class” warships. He put his name on the Kennedy Center and on the U.S. Institute of Peace. “You’ve got to put your name on stuff, or no one remembers you,” he reportedly said during his first term in the presidency. In this second term, he’s in “don’t you dare forget me” mode, and the infinity of directions in which that impulse could sprawl is terrifying.
Could it spread to Greenland? That’s a buffet item he’s eyeing. To Canada? He has salivated over it. He’s lavish with threats. He’s brimming with need. He wants more affirmation. He bristles when it’s not immediately forthcoming.
“I wish you could explain to me what the hell’s going on with the mind of the public,” Trump told Republican members of the House at a party gathering last week, alluding to polls that portray an unhappy, restive electorate. “Because we have — we have the right policy.” Those pesky voters! So unappreciative.
Trump warned the lawmakers that they’ve “got to win the midterms” because if they don’t, “I’ll get impeached.”
That’s the statement of a man who is keenly aware of his power’s mortality — and who seems to be combating and quelling his anxiety by taking an ever more extravagant power trip.
