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| Kaiser Wilhelm II, via Encyclopedia Brittanica. |
Well, well, who could have imagined something like this?
WASHINGTON — When President Trump’s national security adviser, Robert C. O’Brien, convenes meetings with top National Security Council officials at the White House, he sometimes opens by distributing printouts of Mr. Trump’s latest tweets on the subject at hand.
The gesture amounts to an implicit challenge for those present. Their job is to find ways of justifying, enacting or explaining Mr. Trump’s policy, not to advise the president on what it should be. (Michael Crowley and David Sanger)Oh, me, for instance, in April 2018:
Trump doesn't have any idea how to mobilize power except by screaming at people. He issues a tweet and thinks it's an imperial rescript, but it doesn't make anything happen. He doesn't understand the forms for that, and he's losing everybody who has a clue, or they're learning how to ignore him.
The national security apparatus has to do without him, essentially, not in the first place because they want to, but because he's basically AWOL. He won't pay attention and he won't speak coherently. They have to figure out what to do themselves and convince him it's what he asked for. Of course they also don't literally want to blow up the world or the US economy except for the random stupid hires like Miller or Bolton or that ass Navarro...
And when he really fucks up publicly and demands something they can't pretend to be doing at all, this [the 2018 kerfuffle about pulling US troops out of Syria] happens. Or they try to do half of it. It's getting to be a bigger problem, with the Kim invitation and the Putin invitation and the trade war.
This is how emperors roll too:
Growing evidence of what the French would describe as a “l’etat c’est moi” approach to governing here in the United States as traditionally independent institutions are being stripped of their independence https://t.co/03elJnqP1I— Richard N. Haass (@RichardHaass) February 22, 2020
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