Commentary

JOHN BRUMMETT: What do we want?

President-elect Donald Trump put on Twitter last week that new economic indicators are uncommonly good. Then he wrote, "Thanks, Donald."

The question that arises is which of those is the bigger story:

• The utter outrage of a president-elect of such transparent insecurity and audacity to refer to himself in the third person and thank himself personally in public, or ...

• That the new economic indicators are good?

What do we want from a presidency anyway--a good man or a better feeling about spending money at Christmas?

Put another way: Could we have an affront to decency as president and a good economy at the same time?

Amid almost daily confirmation of the frightfulness of Trump's megalomania, narcissism and general lack of fitness by temperament for the presidency, there has been another story from this transition period.

It is that it has been a smashing success.

Consumer confidence just reached a 15-year high. The stock market is on fire. The Cabinet looks arch-conservative but, excepting Rick Perry, competent.

American businesses, investors and consumers are excited by the prospects of lower taxes, reduced regulation and mass investment in infrastructure rebuilding.

Nobody is worrying about the deficit and debt anymore, unless it's liberals, and then only as a byproduct of their philosophical opposition to the block grants and privatization of entitlements that probably will provide Trump's only deficit-reduction emphasis.

Generally, American businesses and consumers seem to think that maybe Trump's pro-jobs, trade-reform and America-first agenda, whatever specific policy form it takes, will be good for the economy.

Never mind that it was Barack Obama who saved the tanked deregulation-based economy he inherited from George W. Bush, and who now bequeaths Trump something sound and growing. As the Republicans will tell you happily, the Obama recovery was one of the weakest in history. In other words, he should have saved them from themselves more emphatically.

Meantime, it also seems possible that Trump's risky and cowboy-styled America-first bellicosity in international relations will scare people and work.

The world's recent experience with mad-men leaders has been with secondary or lesser nations, not the biggest and richest and strongest. The closest we've come lately in the United States was the simplistic actor, Ronald Reagan, but he was too pleasant and mild to loom as the menacing figure that the blowhard Trump portends.

Reagan was satisfied to rout Grenada. Trump may require a bigger conquest. His role models are Vladimir Putin and Saddam Hussein.

Do you remember when Trump stressed during the campaign that his medical work-up showed he had a healthy supply of testosterone for a man of 70?

Overflowing testosterone is usually destructive. Someone is going to end up fighting, and hurt. Someone is going to try a no-hands trick and break his neck. Daredevilry is not a standard or accepted foreign-policy strategy.

But there also is the theory that it's better to be feared than loved--or more productive to seek to be feared than to seek to be loved. That's because you cannot possibly make anyone love you, but you can sure enough scare the holy hell out of people who can't be sure what you'll do.

Obama and Bill Clinton wanted to be loved. They wanted to be sensitive to others and work things out. A megalomaniac needs more than affection and respect. He needs to be filled with assuredness of his awesome wonder and unparalleled magnificence.

Trump may be about to show us what kind of world it would have been if Tommy Robinson had become president. What is the international equivalent of chaining prisoners to a fence? Perhaps we'll find out.

Trump's campaign refrain about making America great again seemed generally to hearken to the spirit of the 1950s, when people felt pride, contentment, happiness, safety and upward mobility, along with a nagging itch that had them setting fires and running around naked in the '60s.

I often think that Trump offers the modern-day Dwight D. Eisenhower, by which I mean an atypical politician and hero.

Trump seems the natural product of our devolved time during which our heroes emerge not from the world-saving European theater of operations to defeat Nazi Germany, but from our best excuses for modern imitation--the building of garish edifices and the bellowing of "you're fired" on a reality television show.

Never mind that Ike surely would have recoiled in disdain for Trump, which I shouldn't say because Ike is no longer available for confirmation.

This is today's tentative conclusion: One concern for the Trump presidency has been whether we will survive. But lately it's arisen that we might not only survive, but thrive.

The still-alarming thing is that both are legitimate questions.

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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.

Editorial on 01/03/2017

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