A man said the other morning at the coffee house that he went to bed every night wondering if he might be incinerated by dawn over a presidential tweet.
That was overwrought, by a little.
Donald Trump’s severe ego affliction clearly weakens his judgment and restraint in the short term. He lacks an internal filter for his hypersensitive impulses and for his insecurity-driven need to boast or strike back.
Nowadays, a phone and Twitter account are entirely too handy, tempting those of us addicted to both to reveal unwittingly entirely too much of ourselves psychologically.
All of that is problematic for a world in which one too-huffy tweet from the president of the world’s most powerful nation could cause missile defenses to rise.
But I think I’m seeing an emerging pattern to our presidential man-child’s behavior. Awareness of it might help the man in the coffee shop sleep better. It might persuade the world’s superpowers to keep their powder dry until morning.
It’s that Trump’s tweets are merely momentary and meaningless — childish tantrums, really — and that he is beginning to show longer-term instincts for pragmatism and conventionality, even normalcy, when his sane gene kicks back in.
Give him enough time and his foreign policy might be indistinguishable from Barack Obama’s.
Trump’s boastful tweet about a congratulatory call from the leader of Taiwan was momentary and meaningless. He is now, after a passage of time, on board with the longstanding policy of recognizing “one China” under Beijing.
Trump’s tweet that Israel should stay strong in the face of the Obama administration’s criticism because Jan. 20 was bringing relief none too soon … it was momentary and meaningless. He is now telling an Israeli newspaper that Israel’s aggressive settlement behavior on disputed land is a detriment to peace.
It’s the kind of thing John Kerry would have said.
Trump’s taunting tweet about North Korea’s claim to be developing a nuclear weapon capable of reaching the United States — that “it won’t happen” — was momentary and meaningless. On Saturday night, after North Korea tested a missile, Trump interrupted a dinner party with the Japanese prime minister at his resort to say, with the Japanese prime minister beside him: “I just want everybody to understand and fully know that the United States of America stands behind Japan, its great ally, 100 percent.”
There were press accounts that Trump had a lengthier written statement in front of him at the podium, something staff-prepared and more specifically condemning of North Korea, and chose not to read it.
Thus we have the first reported incident ever of Trump understatement.
After that, Trump dropped in on a wedding reception taking place at the resort.
The great peril of this man-child’s pattern of tweeting loudly in the short term and carrying a mild stick in the long term is not what Trump may say in the short term. That’s the constant in the equation.
The variable is whether the rest of us can come to understand and accept and deal with the pointlessness of his moments and the wisdom of waiting for that presidential sane gene to return from wherever it goes in the short term.
We’re going to have to be the adults in the presidential relationship.
John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, was inducted into the Arkansas Writers’ Hall of Fame in 2014. Email him at [email protected]. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.