T Is For Toddler, T Is For Trump

"It has never existed," the New York Times' Maggie Haberman wrote in June about the hope being expressed in Washington for an imaginary person who could keep Trump in line. "... [P]eople keep cycling through, looking for ways, in the campaign and now." Some hoped the kindergarten-teacher-in-chief would be the First Lady; this month the talk was of retired Marine general John F. Kelly, Trump's new chief of staff. John Kelly Quickly Moves to Impose Military Discipline on White House, the New York Times proclaimed on August 3, only to be answered barely two week later by the Washington Post headline Trump's lack of discipline leaves new chief of staff frustrated and dismayed.

One difference between Trump and a toddler is that a toddler's television viewing is typically limited. For Trump, on the other hand, as reported by the Washington Post in April, "television is often the guiding force of his day."

Trump turns on the television almost as soon as he wakes, then checks in periodically throughout the day in the small dining room off the Oval Office, and continues late into the evening when he’s back in his private residence. “Once he goes upstairs, there’s no managing him,” said one adviser.  

Trump's obsession with cable TV has created an indirect communication channel to the president, as lawmakers and pundits have used television appearances to present their issues, in the knowledge that Trump is watching. According to the Post, a running joke in television green rooms is that the best use to which a trade association or special interest group can put their money is to purchase advertising on a morning cable new program, or book a representative. Politico reported that the decision to fire missiles at Syria was made in response to "gruesome images of dead Syrian children" Trump saw on TV

Regarding policy or strategy decisions, aides report having learned that "it’s best not to present Trump with too many competing options." Instead, they present Trump with a "single preferred course of action," and focus on how it will play in the press. “You go in and tell him the pros and cons, and what the media coverage is going to be like,” an unidentified "senior administration official" told Politico. "There is no Trump doctrine," Mike Dubke, one of the former Trump communications directors told White House staff earlier this year. Advisers also reportedly try to keep Trump busy, so as to constrain his time watching cable TV or tweeting. This strategy is limited to the workday, however, as Trump apparently stops functioning as president at night and on weekends.

May 1 was a particularly incoherent day for Trump. He questioned why the Civil War was necessary, said he'd be "honored" to meet North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, said he was open to raising taxes on gasoline (later downplayed by his press secretary), said he was considering breaking up big banks (sending stocks lower), praised the approval ratings of Philippine president Duterte (whose narcotics crackdown has led to as many as 7,000 extrajudicial killings), and promised changes to the Republican health care bill while making it clear he didn't know it contained.

"It was all just surreal disarray and a confused mental state from the president," presidential historian Douglas Brinkley told Politico. ""It seems to be among the most bizarre recent 24 hours in American presidential history." "He just seemed to go crazy today," a Republican staffer added.

Eager to turn Washington media focus back on himself after Democrats negotiated an interim funding bill that retained funding for Planned Parenthood and did not include money for a southern border wall, on Tuesday, May 2, Trump tweeted that the Senate should eliminate the rule requiring 60 votes to pass legislation, and that a government shutdown was needed to "fix this mess." Senate Majority Leader McConnell responded bluntly that the rules change "will not happen."

"The American people like that he’s thinking out loud and talking about things out loud," Republican Senator Mike Rounds told the Wall Street Journal. An unidentified White House aide complained to the Journal's Eli Stokols, however, that Trump's extemporaneous statements "create an unnecessary amount of drama...." "Most people kind of expect him to be unpredictable so you just operate with what you can control," the aide said.

Former White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus was among the Trump associates who sought unsuccessfully to structure Trump's interactions. According to a New York Times report, Priebus initial strategy was to "[keep] the president busy with ceremonial events like executive order signings and meetings with business leaders." Trump rebelled, however, demanding "the unstructured time he had so valued as an executive at Trump Tower." Priebus' response, which the Times compared to that of a "Montessori teacher" was to try to balance structured and unstructured time. Yet Priebus also apparently egged Trump on, researching ways to sue media organizations, and supporting Trump's quixotic hunt for an Obama administration authorization to conduct surveillance on members of the Trump campaign.

Lazaro Gamio of Axios compiled a list of examples of Trump aides acting like babysitters. Tactics included limiting his TV time; providing maps and other pictures in policy presentations; filtering polls shown to Trump to be sure the most favorable are emphasized; compiling clippings from local news, which tends to be more pro-Trump than the national press; trying to limit his use of Twitter; "Talk him out of doing crazy things."

To combat Trump's short attention span and irascible nature, staff considered having several aides share press briefing responsibilities, to try to prevent Trump "from growing bored or angry with any one staff member." 

According to Politico, Trump receives a daily binder of news clippings prepared by his staff, although it's not clear if he actually reads it. Nonetheless, aides "have tried to make sure Trump’s media diet includes regular doses of praise and positive stories to keep his mood up."

The investigation of Trump's connections to Russia seems a particular trigger of infantile behavior. In the period leading up to the Comey firing, Trump "repeatedly asked aides why the Russia investigation wouldn’t disappear and demanded they speak out for him," according to Politico, sometimes screaming at television reports.

Trump's special handling extends to food service, as well, according to Time. At a dinner attended by a Time reporter, when everyone else was served water, Trump received Diet Coke; when everyone was served creamy vinaigrette dressing with their salad, Trump received Thousand Island; when the main course was served, Trump alone received an extra dish of sauce with his chicken; and for dessert Trump received two scoops of ice cream with his chocolate cake while everyone else received one. During his trip to Saudi Arabia, his hosts made sure that overcooked steak and ketchup, a Trump favorite, were available on the menu along with regional specialties.

The image of a bloated child toddling around the White House has given rise to its share of Internet memes; but the national security implications of having someone with no sense of boundaries, whose only understanding or interest in the office of the presidency is his own role in it, in possession of national secrets is disturbing. The prime example is probably Trump's revealing "highly classified information" to the Russian foreign minister and ambassador in a White House meeting in May, jeopardizing a "critical source of intelligence on the Islamic State," according to the Washington Post. Trump associates characterized this as part of a recurring pattern in which he makes unconsidered remarks and then blames others for the consequences.  He "doesn't realize what a clean-up job it's going to be" a Trump adviser told Politico.

White House officials told the New York Times that they couldn't publicly express their most honest defense of Trump's national security gaffe, namely that Trump lacked sufficient grasp of the details of the matter to be able to disclose anything seriously damaging. "The president wasn’t even aware where this information came from,” National Security Adviser McMaster said in his public briefing after the incident. “He wasn’t briefed on the source or method of the information either."

During an April meeting with NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg in anticipation of the May conference, Trump brought up the topic of North Korea, a former official told Politico, "apparently unaware that NATO is not a part of the ongoing North Korea saga." Stoltenberg described Trump as having a "12-second attention span."

As staff struggled to prepare Trump for his first international trip in May, one tactic they used was to include his name in "as many paragraphs as we can because he keeps reading if he’s mentioned," a White House official told Reuters."

NATO conference organizers prepared for Trump as if they were dealing with a child. Breaking with tradition, they chose not to issue a formal meeting declaration out of fear that "Trump wouldn't like it." "“People are scared of his unpredictability," an official told Foreign Policy magazine, acknowledging that in Trump they had "someone with a short attention span and mood who has no knowledge of NATO, no interest in in-depth policy issues, nothing."

At the meeting, officials prepared what they referred to as a "Twitter deliverable" for Trump, declaring that NATO would officially join the U.S.-led coalition fighting the Islamic state in Syria. Individual NATO member states are already members of that coalition. "Had to apologize to a European defense attache just now" for Trump's NATO speech, a Republican national security official told the Wall Street Journal's Eli Stokols. "'I'm sorry. He's an idiot.'"

Taking to the op-ed pages of the Wall Street Journal, George W. Bush adviser Karl Rove suggested that Trump's lack of self control had jeopardized the legal case for his Muslim travel ban. Justice department lawyers had sought to distinguish between Trump's campaign rhetoric and his actions as president. Trump destroyed that with the tweet: "The lawyers and the courts can call it whatever they want, but I am calling it what we need and what it is, a TRAVEL BAN!" Rove went on to point out that Trump seemed to think new standards for vetting would-be immigrants had been written, although the justice department said the government "had not started working on them." Concluding that Trump's "chronic impulsiveness" was "apparently unstoppable and clearly self defeating," Rove declared "Mr. Trump lacks the focus or self-discipline to do the basic work required of a president." 

No issues have made Rove's point more clearly than the war of rhetoric (so far, only) with North Korea, or the white supremacist provocations in Charlottesville, VA.

On August 8, at an event nominally concerned with the opioid crisis, Trump apparently ad-libbed "North Korea best not make any more threats to the United States. They will be met with fire and fury like the world has never seen." According to Reuters, Trumps remarks had not been discussed beforehand with any senior aides. "There had not been any discussions about escalating the rhetoric," an administration official identified only as someone who deals with the Korea issue told Reuters. After similar accounts emerged in various media, the White House issued statements claiming that General John Kelly, Trump’s chief of staff, and other national security officials were aware of the "tone of the statement prior to delivery." Two other officials expressed to Reuters that the "fire and fury" comments were not helpful, "threatened to evoke an undesirable response" from North Korea, and risked alienating Japan, South Korea, China, and Russia. Secretary of State Tillerson, speaking to reporters on a previously planned trip the next day, told reporters that Trump was just trying to send a strong message to North Korean lead Kim Jong Un, saying that Kim "doesn’t seem to understand diplomatic language."

As is now well known, on August 11 white nationalists marched through the campus of the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, chanting "one people, one nation, end immigration." On Saturday, August 12, the demonstration continued in Charlottesville's Emancipation Park. Violence broke out, the governor declared a state of emergency, and a vehicle drove into a crowd of counter protesters, killing a woman and injuring at least 19 others.

At a hastily arranged new conference from his resort in Bedminster, NJ, Trump said, "We condemn in the strongest possible terms this egregious display of hatred, bigotry and violence on many sides. On many sides." The neo-Nazi web site The Daily Stormer quickly praised Trump's equivocation. "Trump's comments were good. He didn't attack us ... Nothing specific against us," declaring that the statement constituted an endorsement of their cause.

Trump's failure to explicitly distance himself from the white nationalists drew widespread criticism, including from Republican Senators Hatch, Rubio, and Gardner. On Monday,  August 14, the CEOs of Merck, Under Armour, and Intel resigned from Trump's American Manufacturing Council as a protest of Trump's response to Charlottesville.  Chief of Staff John Kelly urged Trump to make another more conciliatory statement, as did daughter Ivanka and son-in-law Jared Kushner, who were on vacation in Vermont.

Grudgingly, according to the New York Times, Trump agreed, and at 1pm Monday, made another statement, this time specifically denouncing  the KKK, neo-Nazis, and white supremacists. But the moderate tone would not last.

No sooner had he delivered the Monday statement than he began railing privately to his staff about the news media. He fumed to aides about how unfairly he was being treated, and expressed sympathy with nonviolent protesters who he said were defending their “heritage,” according to a West Wing official.

— the Times reported.

On Tuesday, speaking from Trump Tower in New York, Trump characterized "alt-left" groups, who protested in opposition to the white nationalists, as "very, very violent," and reverted to assigning "blame on both sides." A Times photo that was circulated widely showed a stoic John Kelly raising his eyebrows and staring at the floor as Trump railed.

Psychologists report that children begin to be able to connect their observations of the experiences of others to their own experience beginning at about age 2. By the time the child is four he/she begins to associate others' feelings with his own. Harvard Medial School's Lawrence Kutner writes:

"While one child says he has a stomachache, some 4-year-olds may come over and comfort him. Others, much to the bewilderment and horror of parents and teachers, will walk over the to child and punch him in the stomach.... [T]he healthy child is demonstrating his empathy for the one who is ill. The aggressive child does not know what to do with the skill he’s been developing. The other child’s pain makes him feel uncomfortable. Instead of running away or rubbing his own stomach, as he might have done a year earlier, he feels frustrated and lashes out.

 In Kutner's "aggressive child," a precursor of Trump's psyche is clearly visible. Writing recently in The Baffler, David Roth put it this way:

Trump doesn't know anything or really believe anything about any topic beyond himself, because he has no
interested in any topic beyond himself.... Actual hate and actual love, as other people feel them, are too
complicated to fit into this world.... Instead of hate, there is simple resentment -- abject and valueless and
recursively self-pitying; instead of love, there is the blank sucking nullity of vanity and appetite.

^{See also this review of Daniel Drezner's The Toddler in Chief}