It’s become a huge source of power for Trump and trouble for the rest of us.
Opinion Columnist
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If your puppy makes a mess on your carpet and you shout “Bad dog,” there is a good chance that that puppy’s ears will droop, his head will bow and he may even whimper. In other words, even a puppy acts ashamed when caught misbehaving. That is not true of Donald Trump. Day in and day out, he proves to us that he has no shame. We’ve never had a president with no shame — and it’s become a huge source of power for him and trouble for us.
And what makes Trump even more powerful and problematic is that this president with no shame is combined with a party with no spine and a major network with no integrity — save for a few real journalists at Fox News like the outstanding Chris Wallace.
When a president with no shame is backed by a party with no spine and a network with no integrity, you have two big problems.
First, there is no one inside his party or base who is going to sustainably stop Trump from being himself and doing whatever he bloody pleases. The Republican Party has completely lost its way.
Don’t be fooled by the last-second tut-tutting of G.O.P. senators about Trump’s kowtowing to Vladimir Putin in Helsinki and spurning of our intelligence agencies.
Until and unless the G.O.P.-led Congress passes legislation that protects special counsel Robert Mueller from being fired by Trump or enacts into law specific, deeper sanctions on Russia if it is ever again caught trying to tilt our elections — or secures Trump’s tax returns or the transcript of his two hours and 10 minutes of private conversation with Putin — it’s all just talk to cover the G.O.P.’s behind.
Let the Republicans in Congress do something hard and concrete that shows they love our country more than they fear Trump’s base and I will believe their words.
I can’t say it better than Michael Gerson, the former George W. Bush speechwriter, did in The Washington Post Monday: “Much of the G.O.P. is playing down Russian aggression. And it is actively undermining the investigation of that aggression. Trump’s political tools have become Putin’s useful idiots. The party of national strength has become an obstacle to the effective protection of the country.”
The G.O.P. has lost its way because it has been selling itself for years to whoever could keep it in power, and that is now Trump and his base. And Trump’s base actually hates the people who hate Trump — i.e., liberals who they think look down on members of the base — more than it cares about Trump. This is about culture, not politics, and culture doesn’t change with the news cycle. And neither do business models — and Fox News’s business model is to feed, and feed off of, that culture war by allowing many of its commentators to be Trump’s parrots and bullhorns.
The fact that Trump’s party and his network always look for ways to excuse him has been hugely liberating for Trump. He can actually deny he said things that were recorded — like his trashing of the British prime minister. He can take one side of any issue (like trashing key NATO allies to satisfy his base) and, when he gets blowback, take the other side (claim to love the Atlantic alliance). And he can declare that he really meant to ask why “wouldn’t” Russia be the one hacking us instead of why “would” it, as he did say. If you believe that last one, I have a bridge near the Kremlin I’d love to sell you.
“Hey, give him a break,” say Trump’s supporters, “there is a method to his madness.” And that is true. What they don’t admit, though, is that there is tremendous madness to Trump’s method. And then, there is just his sheer madness — ideas he holds that are ignorant gut impulses that bear no relation to science, math or history.
For instance, Trump is right: We do need to confront China on its trade restrictions, forced technology transfers and nonreciprocal trade arrangements. But then, look at the madness to his methods. How would you try to influence China on trade if you were thinking strategically?
For starters, you’d sign the Trans-Pacific Partnership, creating a free-trade alliance around American values, standards and interests, with 11 other Pacific economies, creating a trade agreement covering 40 percent of global G.D.P. Then you’d forgo ridiculous steel and aluminum tariffs on our European Union allies and sign them all up instead to join us in our efforts to curb China’s trade abuses, which the E.U. suffers from just as much as we do.
Then you’d go to the Chinese and say: “Let’s have secret negotiations — no one will lose face, we will present it publicly as win-win — but, just so you know, we will be coming at you with a Euro-Pacific coalition of all your major trading partners and we will be focused on eliminating all your cheating on W.T.O. rules and nonreciprocal trade shenanigans once and for all.”
Now that would get the attention of China — not a foolish trade war based on bilateral trade deficits.
But what did Trump do with his method? Blow up TPP, blow up relations with the E.U. and confront China alone — an utterly mad method that I do not believe will produce the meaningful, sustainable trade realignment with China that we need.
And then there is the sheer madness. Threatening the U.K. that if it doesn’t do a full Brexit it will not get preferential trade treatment from Trump, calling the bloc a “foe” on trade, and sneering at the number of refugees it has admitted.
Where do you start? The E.U. is the United States of Europe — the other great center in the world of free markets, free people, liberty and democracy. It has kept the peace in Europe after a century of strife there — that dragged us into two world wars — and its economic growth as a trading partner has made both America and the E.U. steadily richer and more stable. It is sheer madness to believe that it is in U.S. interests to see the European Union fracture!
Ask any senior U.S. military officer and you’ll be told that our greatest strategic competitive advantage is that we have a network of allies, like the E.U., and the Russians and Chinese do not.
They only have customers and vassals. Why would we give that up for closer ties to Putin?
Also, speaking of sheer madness, so much of the immigration that has swamped Europe of late has come from migrants from Syria and sub-Saharan Africa. Both migrations are the product of political turmoil fed by climate change, the collapse of small-scale agriculture and rapid population growth in the Middle East and Africa. (Ditto Central America.) And what is Trump’s policy? Trash all global efforts to mitigate climate change, ban all U.S. government support for family planning overseas — and get out of Syria, rather than use our leverage there to try to stabilize its refugee flow.
The only way to change this situation is not by hoping that the president develops some shame or that this version of the G.O.P. develops some spine. It is by Democrats winning the House, the Senate or both in the midterm elections.
Only by dealing an electoral defeat to this version of the G.O.P. in the midterms will we possibly get a healthy conservative party again (which we need) and curb Trump’s power.
Everything else is just words — and words without power change nothing.
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Thomas L. Friedman is the foreign affairs Op-Ed columnist. He joined the paper in 1981, and has won three Pulitzer Prizes. He is the author of seven books, including “From Beirut to Jerusalem,” which won the National Book Award.
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A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A23 of the New York edition with the headline: The Power of a President With No Shame. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe
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