OPINION

JOHN BRUMMETT: The rule for Trump

Today I instruct on how to cope with this very different kind of American president.

It comes down to a simple rule: Understand why Donald Trump says what he says and then pay scant attention.

Always know that what he says is based on three factors--his ego, his obsession with his momentary media treatment and his spiteful addiction to sniping back at people who snipe at him, or at perceived slights.

Always know that what he says usually will be contradicted or abandoned, or at least heavily modulated--within hours for sure and minutes in some cases--by the generals who correct or ignore him, or daughter Ivanka who softens him, or Cabinet and congressional members who take measured positions to counterbalance his reckless ones.


Trump is ideologically vacant and wholly transactional.

He is a real estate mogul from Manhattan who has done business globally. His professional life has been from deal to deal. In that world, you do what is necessary to make one deal, then the world starts afresh and you pivot to another presenting its own necessities.

It's a little like being an emergency room doctor at rush hour--first you do triage, then you clear for the defibrillator, then you go to the next patient--except that Trump isn't really making anybody better.

It's also a little like what Jimmy Johnson once said of coaching the Dallas Cowboys. He said the world ended Sunday after the next game. He didn't allow himself to ponder anything that might come after.

What Trump is doing and saying at 11 o'clock is 11 o'clock's transaction. There could well be another transaction by 2 p.m. Times change.

He said transgender persons should be purged forthwith from the military. The generals said we'll get around to that, Mr. President.

He said he'd let Obamacare fail by discontinuing the monthly subsidies that assist poor people's out-of-pocket costs on the health insurance policies they buy on the exchange. That hasn't happened--knock wood.

A more steady-as-you-go, policy-driven Republican senator, Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, is leading a bipartisan effort to get the subsidies put into law and thus protected from the president's spasms of ego, media obsession and spite.

Trump said he might fire Robert Mueller. The Senate kept itself technically in session during the August recess to deal with any stunt Trump might pull.

Yet people persist in asking whether Trump's flirtation with Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi represents a newly bipartisan theme for an independent presidency.

It means--forgive the belaboring--those three things: It feeds his ego, wins momentary media plaudits and allows him to spite the Republicans who assured him they'd repeal and replace Obamacare, but couldn't, and have begun to chasten him publicly.

Ego-nourished by good media from his initial dealing with Nancy and Chuck, he invited them--and only them, to spite Republicans--for dinner Wednesday evening.

Schumer and Pelosi came away saying they had reached an agreement with Trump to enact legal status for the "Dreamers" brought here as children by undocumented parents, and to pair that with certain unspecified new border-securing measures--except that Trump's vaunted wall would not be part of the deal.

Trump loves polls. Only 12 percent of Americans, and only 20 percent of Trump's usually mean base, favor the draconian atrocity of punishing children for the deeds of their parents.

There were two glaring vulnerabilities in the supposed deal Schumer and Pelosi touted.

One was that it means nothing to agree to unspecified new border-security laws. That's like agreeing to come up with a North Korean solution.

The other: To say that Trump was exempting insistence for his wall from the deal was certain to inflame his base and thus infect the presidential ego and momentary media-treatment obsession.

By morning, Trump was tweeting to declare that he most certainly did not make any deal to abandon his wall.

In a few hours, speaking to White House pool reporters as he prepared to get on the helicopter, he said the deal with Schumer and Pelosi was on and that the wall was very much alive, but would be addressed separately from the deal.

Quite simply, Trump would set free the "Dreamers" without ransoming them for his wall. So, he kind of got rolled. Thank goodness.

At great risk of infuriating Bill Clinton's fans, I must say that he is the former president whom Trump most evokes.

In Arkansas, we often said Clinton tended to agree with, and vanishingly commit to, the last person to talk with him.

Clinton's affliction was a desire to please others, and he pretty much overcame it.

Trump's is a desire to please himself, and probably harder, at age 71, to correct.

Meanwhile, remember to wait for whatever this president says to evaporate into a void to be filled by generals, Ivanka, the Cabinet and Congress, fashioning a kind of pragmatism by default. Thank goodness, so far.

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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 09/17/2017

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