The Guardian: Dont treat Donald Trump as if hes a normal president. Hes not
Here is a very insightful and realistic analysis from across the pond.
Don’t treat Donald Trump as if he’s a normal president. He’s not.
There is one week to go and all is confusion. Next Friday Donald Trump will take the oath of office and be sworn in as president of the United States. But still no one has the first clue how to handle what’s coming. Politicians, journalists and diplomats, in the US and around the world, are searching for guidance, desperately flicking through the pages of the rulebook, a manual full of past precedents and norms that they have spent their careers mastering – but that Trump burned and shredded months ago.
The mistake is to project on to Trump the standards that would normally apply. Take this week’s parallel drama, as several of his nominees came before the senate to have their appointments confirmed. They all offered sweet words of reassurance: the would-be attorney general insisting he was no racist; the prospective secretary of state avowing that he was no patsy to Putin. Official Washington seized on these morsels of comfort, especially when Trump tweeted an apparent admission that his senior team were at odds with him on several core issues: “I want them to be themselves and express their own thoughts, not mine!”
For critics, this poses a conundrum. Too often they deal with Trump as if he is a normal politician, constrained by the usual conventions, including embarrassment at being caught in a lie. But Trump is not a normal politician. He has no shame. While most politicians blush if exposed as inconsistent, let alone dishonest, Trump is unembarrassable. Even Nixon tried to squirm and wriggle his way into a sentence that could be parsed as truth. Trump, hailed as the God Emperor by his supporters, simply attacks whichever little boy dares say he’s wearing no clothes – before going on to accuse the child of being a “failing pile of garbage”.
Instead, May is repeating the same mistake so fatefully made by Tony Blair in 2001. He thought he should be as close to George W Bush as he’d been to Bill Clinton, failing to appreciate that the two men were entirely different, that Bush was surrounded by ideological obsessives who were bent on war with Iraq from the very start. May is being similarly undiscriminating. In her post-Brexit longing for friends and trading partners, she is getting ready to cosy up to a man who makes Bush look like Abraham Lincoln. It may prove to be her costliest error.
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