We all know that Donald Trump is routinely "sanewashed" by the media. He'll interrupt a speech with a rambling and inappropriate digression, or respond to a reporter's question with a vicious personal attack, and most news reports will ignore or downplay Trump's weirdest and nastiest words.
But in
The New York Times this week I've seen three examples of a different kind of sanewashing:
Times reporters have attempted to portray Trump's actions as the result of some grand theory or other, when they're really the product of the much more primitive workings of Trump's brain.
On Monday, the
Times published a
piece by Edward Wong with this headline:
Trump’s Vision: One World, Three Powers?
Yes -- according to Wong, Trump might actually have a geopolitical
vision.
For President Trump, anytime is a good time for deal-making, but never more so than now with the leaders of China and Russia.
Last week, Mr. Trump said he wanted to normalize commerce with Russia, appearing to lessen the pressure on Moscow to settle its war with Ukraine. And he is trying to limit the fallout from his own global trade war by urging China’s leader to call him....
Mr. Trump may have something even bigger in mind involving Russia and China, and it would be the ultimate deal.
His actions and statements suggest he might be envisioning a world in which each of the three so-called great powers — the United States, China and Russia — dominates its part of the globe, some foreign policy analysts say.
It would be a throwback to a 19th-century style of imperial rule.
Wong knows how great powers once divided up control of the globe. Does he really believe Trump knows that history? Or
any history?
Wong concedes that he might be off base on this:
Some close observers of Mr. Trump, including officials from his first administration, caution against thinking his actions and statements are strategic. While Mr. Trump might have strong, long-held attitudes about a handful of issues, notably immigration and trade, he does not have a vision of a world order, they argue.
Donald Trump, geostrategist? Nahhh.
Wong writes:
Mr. Trump often praises President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia and Xi Jinping, China’s leader, as strong and smart men who are his close friends.
I think it's all psychologically weirder than that. To Trump, Putin is the hot supermodel who flirts with him but won't give him a tumble, to his great frustration. Putin seems to haunt Trump's dreams. Xi is just a global big
macher who makes Trump feel insecure -- Trump wants the world to see him as on Xi's level, but more powerful, and Xi frustrates him by never quite finalizing deals with him that make him feel like a winner.
The idea that Trump is Xi's great pal would seem to be contradicted by a
story Wong published yesterday, under the headline "Trump Makes a New Push to ‘Decouple’ U.S. From China":
The Trump administration has threatened to revoke the visas of many of the 277,000 or so Chinese students in the United States and to subject future applicants from China, including Hong Kong, to extra scrutiny.
Cargo ships laden with goods from China stopped coming into American ports earlier this spring as President Trump escalated his trade war against Beijing.
And the Trump administration is suspending sales of some critical U.S. technologies to China, including those related to jet engines, semiconductors and certain chemicals and machinery.
Taken together, the actions by the Trump administration amount to an aggressive campaign to “decouple” the United States from China, as it seeks to break the close commercial ties between the world’s two largest economies and toss away what had been the anchor of the relations between the nations for decades.
Um ... I
guess Trump could see himself as being best buds with Xi Jinping
and want to screw him on trade and other issues. He could want to damage China's economy while generously ceding a third of the planet to China. But it doesn't make much sense.
I think Trump believes he needs an enemy, and he's picked up from Fox News and his better-informed subordinates that China is the right-wing enemy of the moment. But I think he'd also be happy to make a big, beautiful deal with China, as long as the deal made him look like the alpha male. Xi, alas for Trump, is too smart and powerful to let that happen, although you don't have to be particularly smart to be smarter than Trump. In any case, while Trump is trying to punish China, I don't think he has a "decoupling" vision. He's just doing what he always does: he's hurting the counterparty in the expection that the counterparty will give up and yield to him. It's not working, so he's trying to bully China even harder. But if he got what he perceived as a win, I think he'd be just as happy coupling as decoupling.
On a different subject, he's a
story by Glenn Thrush headlined "Trump’s Flurry of Pardons Signals a Wholesale Effort to Redefine Crime." Thrush seems to understand what Trump is doing here -- using the criminal justice to help people he and his allies like -- but he uses language suggesting that Trump has highly developed
ideas about crime:
President Trump is employing the vast power of his office to redefine criminality to suit his needs — using pardons to inoculate criminals he happens to like, downplaying corruption and fraud as crimes, and seeking to stigmatize political opponents by labeling them criminals....
An offshoot of this strategy is relegating white-collar offenses to a rank of secondary importance behind violent and property crimes....
These actions follow a systematic effort inside the Justice Department to dismantle units that investigate public corruption, fraud and foreign interference in U.S. businesses and elections.
Does Trump think white-collar offenses are "of secondary importance"? Not all white-collar offenses. He'd certainly be happy to pin some white-collar offenses on Hunter Biden, and if, as I suspect, he someday declares Hunter Biden's pardon null and void because it was allegedly signed with an
autopen, I think he will order the Justice Department to prosecute the hell out of him.
I believe that Trump wants to go easy on white-collar criminals, but only because they're disproportionately right-leaning. His Justice Department would happily prosecute the Soros family if a real or imagined crime could be found.
Also:
Another Trump objective: Rewriting the history of the Capitol riot to minimize the actions of his supporters and emphasize the hardship they endured by being prosecuted. He has gone so far as to call some of those who were imprisoned “hostages.”
Hours after declaring at his inauguration that “the scales of justice will be rebalanced,” Mr. Trump granted blanket clemency to around 1,600 rioters, some of them violent, who ransacked the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021....
At the time, Matthew M. Graves, the U.S. attorney in Washington who oversaw many of the trials, said the move undermined the rule of law and set a dangerous precedent by removing the main deterrence against future acts of insurrection and violence by would-be rioters.
But it wasn't intended to remove the main deterrence against future acts of insurrection and violence by would-be rioters. It was intended to apply to
pro-Trump insurrectionists only. This administration will have a separate system of justice for its enemies.
(To be fair, this may no longer apply now that Trump and Elon Musk are squabbling.)
For the most part, the Thrush story makes clear that Trump wants to prosecute (or persecute) his enemies and give his friends clemency. But this isn't an effort to "redefine criminality" in any abstract way. Trump's only
idea here is "You're criminals. We're not."
I understand why
Times journalists write this way: they're encouraged to find meaning in the actions of presidents, and they're used to presidents who actually
have ideas, and even philosophies of governing.
But we're in the second Trump term. By now we should be used to the fact that he has few if any ideas, only (as
Lionel Trilling put it when discussing an earlier crop of right-wingers) "irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas."