Trump Talks Big But Is Actually A Very Weak President

(The caricature of "Super-Trump" at left is by DonkeyHotey.)

No president has talked tougher or bragged more than Donald Trump. If you just listened to him, and didn't know that none of his promises have actually been accomplished, you might think he was a strong president. But that is simply not true. He may be the weakest president in modern times.

Here is just a part of an excellent article in New Republic by Elizabeth Drew:

At his rallies, presidential candidate Donald Trump excited his most avid supporters through displays of toughness: his calls when a demonstrator acted up to “get him out of here”; his incantations of his reality show signature “You’re fired”; his promises of robust actions on “Day One.” He promised his ecstatic followers that he’d tear up trade treaties and the Iran nuclear deal. He’d force other countries to renegotiate and he’d be tough in his dealings with them, just as he’d been in business. And he’d show those so-called NATO allies that the U.S. wasn’t committed to defending them—no more of the wishy-washy deference to other nations that Barack Obama had displayed for eight years. Also, on that busy Day One, he’d have a replacement for Obamacare ready for Congress to enact immediately. He’d pick the very best people but wouldn’t hesitate to get rid of someone who wasn’t up to the job. Above all, he’d be decisive, no vacillating figurehead. He’d be a man of action, tough and strong.

And then. . .

Trump not only didn’t have an alternative to Obamacare ready on his first day in office, he never offered one. Moreover, when House Republicans presented to him their own ideas about what should be in the health care bill, they found him to be an easy mark. This was in part because the president didn’t much care what was in the health care bill, he just wanted to sign one; he told aides that would make him look presidential. He’d said in the campaign that he’d produce a health care bill that was better and cheaper than Obamacare, but it turned out that Trump was unfamiliar with the substance of what was in the Affordable Care Act and didn’t grasp the import of proposed alternatives—and this crippled his ability to be a force on the subject. Or, as it’s turning out, most any subject. He keeps telling us what a fine mind he has, but if so he seems loath to exercise it much. His advisers on national security have been encouraged to put as much of their daily intelligence briefings in pictures and charts as they can. A president who doesn’t know what he doesn’t know isn’t in a very strong position to negotiate with others, or to lead. . . .

This depiction of Donald Trump as a weak president would no doubt shock his ardent followers, especially since Trump usually covers his retreats with bluster. It might also be a surprise to those who have worried that he’s a would-be autocrat. It turns out that Trump has neither the wit nor the grit to seize power, and he may be too lazy and too uninterested in governing to make much of it if he did. (He can, however, empower by default cabinet officials who do know what to do with the power at their disposal—for example, Sessions.) But, except for his use of executive orders (often to countermand ones by Obama) and his cyber-bullying, Trump is essentially a passive participant in his own government. His campaign against the press is of concern, but thus far he’s not taken action to curb its independence, nor have his threats to do so had any discernible impact on the rigorous job the press is doing of holding his presidency to account. In fact, all things taken together, it begins to seem as if the strongman of the rallies was a convenient deception, a figure that Trump invented but couldn’t maintain when it came to making actual decisions in the Oval Office.

If this approach to governing keeps up, Trump may find himself once again on a newsweekly cover—the kind of prominence he craves—but this time with a sobriquet that once ordained one of his predecessors: “WIMP.”