A DANGEROUSLY
ISOLATED PRESIDENT
By Benjamin
Wallace-Wells January 29, 2017
The Presidential
order that Donald Trump signed on Friday barring all refugees and
citizens from seven Muslim countries from travel to the United States
was reviewed by virtually no one. The State Department did not help
craft it, nor the Defense Department, nor Justice. Trump’s
Secretary of Homeland Security, John Kelly, “saw the final details
shortly before the order was finalized,” CNN reported. Early
Saturday morning, there were reports that two Iraqi refugees had been
detained upon their arrival at John F. Kennedy Airport. When a lawyer
for the men asked an official to whom he needed to speak to fix the
situation, the official said, “Ask Mr. Trump.” This sounded like
a sign of straight goonery and incipient authoritarianism; maybe it
was. But it also may have been the only reasonable answer. Few people
understood what was going on.
The order claims to
protect Americans from “foreign terrorist entry,” but that was no
reason for it. A wealth of data shows that immigrants from those
countries have not been responsible for fatal terrorist attacks in
the United States. At first, the acting spokesperson of the
Department of Homeland Security said that the order would not apply
to permanent residents of the United States. This seemed to be a
sensible assumption; as fevered as the talk over immigration has been
on the right, few have threatened a mass revocation of the rights of
green-card holders. But a senior White House official later said that
green-card holders would have to undergo screenings. Morally
outrageous scenes followed. Homeland Security officials said that at
least a hundred people had been prevented from entering the country,
and many more had been stopped from boarding planes to the U.S. Those
detained at Dulles International Airport, before federal judges
issued stays of the order, included an Iranian couple in their
eighties, both with green cards. One was legally blind, and the other
had recently had a stroke; their granddaughter said that officials at
the airport “weren’t treating them very well.” At O’Hare, a
couple with an eighteen-month-old was reportedly detained, after a
trip abroad to introduce the baby to relatives.
On Saturday, the
President announced three more executive actions, one of which
changed the composition of his National Security Council. Trump
reserved one seat on the Council for his chief strategist, Steve
Bannon, the former chairman of the right-wing Web site Breitbart
News, who has no experience in foreign relations. Trump also limited
the roles of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the
director of National Intelligence, with a memo that said they will
only attend meetings when “issues pertaining to their
responsibilities and expertise are to be discussed.” The erasure of
the line between national security and Bannon’s politics, which
have included an embrace of white nationalism, was deeply troubling.
But the exclusion of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and
the director of National Intelligence was more surprising. The
President can pick anyone he wants for those positions. Trump has
nominated the former Indiana senator Dan Coats to be the director of
National Intelligence; the term of the current chairman of the Joint
Chiefs of Staff, General Joseph Dunford, will expire this year. The
President seems to be deliberately tightening the circle around him.
In the first week of
the Trump Presidency, influence has run through a very select group
of advisers—maybe as many as half a dozen, maybe as few as two. The
President’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and Bannon have consolidated
their influence. Kushner, who has spent his brief career running his
father’s real-estate empire, reportedly has been told to lead
negotiations with Mexico. Kushner was also involved in a discussion
with British officials, and denounced the United Kingdom’s support
of a United Nations resolution opposing Israeli settlements.
According to the Washington Post, some former campaign aides “have
been alarmed by Kushner’s efforts to elbow aside anyone he
perceives as a possible threat to his role as Trump’s chief
consigliere.” But Bannon’s portfolio may be even broader. His
hand was apparent in the President’s dark Inauguration speech, in
his economic nationalism, and in his early, aggressive stances
against Mexico and refugees.
The President’s
isolation runs deeper than that. As the confusion around the
immigration ban made clear, the vast government he oversees has
little input on his actions. In an interview this week, Trump said
that he reads the Times, the New York Post, and the Washington Post
each day, but he seems to scan them as an actor does, for reviews of
his own performance. His campaign made clear that he was not
interested in the findings of scientists, social scientists, or the
American government. Trump’s transition has alienated him from the
American public. Gallup found on Friday that fifty per cent of
Americans disapproved of Trump’s performance, the highest
disapproval rating on record for any American President this early in
his term.
close dialog
In normal times, an
Administration this isolated and divorced from public opinion would
seem to be fatally weak. The argument made by the President’s first
week is that these conditions, combined with the general assent of a
Republican-controlled Congress, might in fact create the opposite
situation, freeing him to do whatever he wants.
At times this past
week, the theatre of the Administration has seemed to be as large as
the Oval Office; at others, it has seemed smaller still, about the
size of the President’s own head. “If Chicago doesn’t fix the
horrible ‘carnage’ going on . . . I will send in the Feds!”
Trump tweeted on Tuesday evening. In fact, a large team from the
Department of Justice had recently been in Chicago, where it
delivered an indictment of the excesses of the Chicago Police
Department, connecting them to the collapse of trust between
residents and officers, which in turn enabled a rise in crime.
But that report
hadn’t prompted the President’s tweet. What had? It turned out
that Bill O’Reilly’s Fox News show had just aired a segment on
crime in Chicago. The President had seen something that moved him on
a news program, and then he had reacted. The tweet was one of the
least significant Presidential gestures of the past week. But it
served as prelude for some of the darker ones. At times, the only
figure in the room may be Trump himself, with the blue glow of his
television screen.
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