One can’t impose, I suppose, New Year’s resolutions on others, only yourself, which has struck me at times as a pity. Because if I could I would have folks dial back their Donald J. Trump vitriol and chill a bit as he begins the second year of his presidency. Yes, I know, he’s repeatedly called out most of the mainstream media as “Fake News,” which can’t be easy to stomach, especially coming from a serial tweeter whose own “facts” as often as not don’t comport fully, or sometimes even marginally, with the truth.
Tough. Raise the bar and take a higher road.
Two very different but interesting pieces – one a news story, the other an op-ed column – appeared over the last couple of days, reminding how much a reset is needed.
In the case of Darlene Superville’s news story for The Associated Press on Trump being the first president not to host a state dinner his first year in office since “Silent Cal” Calvin Coolidge, who became president on Aug. 3, 1923, but didn’t hold his first state dinner until Oct. 21, 1926 for Queen Marie of Romania, the problem perhaps is one of overemphasis on that interesting but, at least in my view, hardly earth shattering reality, combined with a snarky two-graf lede”: “President Donald Trump couldn’t stop talking about the red carpets, military parades and fancy dinners that were lavished upon him during state visits on his recent tour of Asia,” Superville writes. “‘Magnificent,’ he declared at one point on the trip. But Trump has yet to reciprocate, making him the first president in almost a century to close his first year in office without welcoming a visiting counterpart to the U.S. with similar trappings.”
But then Superville goes on in the very next paragraph and the one after to write: “Trump spoke dismissively of state dinners as a candidate, when he panned President Barack Obama’s decision to welcome Chinese President Xi Jinping with a 2015 state visit. Such visits are an important diplomatic tool that includes a showy arrival ceremony and an elaborate dinner at the White House. ‘I would not be throwing (Xi) a dinner,’ Trump said at the time. ‘I would get him a McDonald’s hamburger and say we’ve got to get down to work.’”
So Trump has been on the record for a time now as not being a fan of state dinners. So we should be surprised, shocked or worried that he didn’t hold one in 2017?
Superville, who has covered the White House since 2009, came to Washington after covering the New Jersey Statehouse and the 1993 Whitman-Florio gubernatorial race, and got her start with the AP back in June 1988 in New Jersey.
Her point here is that state dinners are an important diplomatic tool, a point reinforced through sources Anita McBride, “a veteran of three Republican administrations who last served as chief of staff to first lady Laura Bush” and Peter Selfridge, “who served as a liaison between the White House and visiting foreign dignitaries as U.S. chief of protocol from 2014 to January 2017.”
So, OK, state dinners may be important diplomatic tools, but it seems an oddly pressed point at the moment when the most dangerous diplomatic crisis in the world is the one that exists between North Korea and the United States, with Kim Jong-un and Donald J. Trump both cut from a bit of a different cloth from the recent historical norm when it comes to their ideas about what constitutes diplomacy.
State dinner? How about a dish of Realpolitik? Someone send out for some Mickey D’s.
New York Times op-ed columnist Frank Bruni wrote a well-argued column on overreach and hyperbole by Democrats and other liberals, headlined “The End of Trump and the End of Days, “which ran yesterday. Bruni starts out: “To travel the liberal byways of social media over recent weeks was to learn that Donald Trump was on the precipice of axing Robert Mueller and was likely to use the days just before Christmas, when we were distracted by eggnog and mistletoe, to lower the blade.
“Christmas has come. Christmas has gone. Mueller has not.
“To listen to Nancy Pelosi and other Democratic leaders, the tax overhaul that Trump just signed into law is no mere plutocratic folly. It’s “Armageddon” (Pelosi’s actual word). Their opposition is righteous, but how will millions of voters who notice smaller withholdings from their paychecks and more money in their pockets square that seemingly good fortune with such prophecies of doom on a biblical scale?
“Some of these Americans may decide that the prophets aren’t to be trusted – and that the president isn’t quite the pestilence they make him out to be.”
The entire Bruni column is worth a read and can be found at https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/26/opinion/trump-liberals-armageddon.html
I wrote a post for soundingsjohnbarker in July 2016, headlined “Demagoguery and demonization pass for discourse and civility vanishes from the public stage” (https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2016/07/17/demagoguery-and-demonization-pass-for-discourse-and-civility-vanishes-from-the-public-stage/) in which I argued that “right-wing populism is not centralized authoritarian Fascism.
“If Donald Trump wins the presidency in November, the world won’t end. I may not much like a Trump presidency, but the Supreme Court and Congress will not be dissolved [although Trump will probably make several nominations for upcoming vacancies on the bench that will make me wish the court had been dissolved. But that’s OK; Republican life appointments to the highest court in the United States often prove over time to be stubbornly independent, demonstrating you couldn’t have asked more from a Democratic appointee. It’s kinda complicated.]
“Trump’s also unlikely to push the hot-war nuclear button, should he find himself ensconced in the Oval Office next January. Want to know what was really dangerous? The dance Democratic President John F. Kennedy, the living Legend of King Arthur and Camelot, had with Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev during the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962. That was the almost the end of the world as you knew it. Right then and there. Not Donald Trump hyperbole.
“There are plenty of examples in recent American history before where the crème de la crème cluck their tongues in displeasure at the electoral wisdom of the hoi polloi [think Brexit for the current British equivalent.] So what? Minnesota didn’t wind up seceding to Northwestern Ontario and amalgamating Duluth with Kenora when pro wrestler Jesse Ventura was elected and served as governor of Minnesota from January 1999 to January 2003.
“California survived when Arnold Schwarzenegger, the Austrian-born American professional bodybuilder and movie actor wound up getting himself elected to serve two terms as governor of California from November 2003 until January 2011.
“And speaking of California, an earlier Republican governor, Ronald Reagan, also a movie actor, went on from the statehouse to the White House, elected to terms who served two terms as president between January 1981 and January 1988. Each time – when Reagan, Ventura and Schwarzenegger were elected – Henny Penny cried out the sky was going to fall. It didn’t.”
A year after Trump’s election, I still think this is largely true. Even his appointment of Neil Gorsuch, as an associate justice of the United States Supreme Court, to fill the vacancy caused by the death of Antonin Scalia, has not made me, at least as yet, wish the court had been dissolved.
As for other issues in international diplomacy, such as Trump reiterating the moving of the United States embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, The Jerusalem Embassy Act of 1995, which became law on Nov. 8, 1995, called for the relocation of the Embassy of the United States in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, no later than May 31, 1999. For that matter, I seem to recall former Progressive Conservative prime minister Joe Clark committing to moving the Canadian embassy in Israel 20 years before 1999 from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem – way back on June 6, 1979, although the Tories were backpedalling on the promise four months later in October 1979.
While the United Nations General Assembly resolution earlier this month to condemn Trump’s decision to move the Embassy of the United States in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, by a vote of 128 countries in favour, nine against, 35 abstentions, including Canada, and 21 countries not participating in the vote, shows the move is far from popular internationally, it is also far from the end of the world as we know it, as the modulated outrage in the Arab world suggests.
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