Category: Strategy

FUELING FIRE & FURY: HOW TRUMP SPENT HIS SUMMER VACATION

It’s too early to tell for sure, but a former Ku Klux Klan Imperial Wizard might have seriously messed with Donald Trump’s concept of what it means to win. More on that later, after a recap of the president’s winning ways of threatening nuclear annihilation.

A few days ago, I suggested in this space that President Trump, as a result of his inability to grasp the difference between a strategy and a tactic, had become the embodiment of what losing looks like. So, why doesn’t he do a course correction, or, in the parlance of organizational change, order a reset? The answer is simple: he is absolutely convinced that he is winning. A win to the Donald is any day that he can see himself as the most important and powerful man in the universe, the only person capable of solving the world’s problems through the sheer force of his strength and will. That, and the adulation of his base through constant public attention, is what winning is all about to this president.

Take nuclear war, for example, which Trump has latched onto like an obsessed teen with a new video game. Military expert Herman Kahn introduced us to the treacherous and dystopian world of nuclear bombast with a 1962 book called “Thinking about the Unthinkable”. Every U.S. president since then has spoken of nuclear devastation in measured and carefully chosen words. Not Trump. Nothing unthinkable to him about the prospect of obliterating millions of people.

With almost manic glee, he warned that North Korea will be “met with fire and fury like the world has never seen.” Two days later, he became the first world leader to threaten war on Twitter, warning North Korea that the U.S. is now “locked and loaded”. Predictably, most sober-thinking adults in Congress were stunned and chagrined by the presidential war mongering. So were most heads of state, including our allies. North Korea responded with a threat to fire missiles at the U.S. territory of Guam, saying, “Sound dialogue is not possible with such a guy bereft of reason (Trump) and only absolute force can work on him.”

As Armageddon anxiety set in, Trump basked in his own glory. He was, after all, winning. At least in his own head, the only venue that matters to him. He argued that millions of Americans are cheering him for his tough North Korea talk. “It’s about time that somebody stuck up for the people of this country,” he told reporters last week.

While North Korea readies its rockets for Guam’s shoreline, the island’s governor, Eddie Baza Calvo, used the right passwords to secure a soulful telephone exchange with Trump. “Mr. President, . . .” Calvo said in opening Saturday’s phone chat, “I have never felt more safe or so confident, with you at the helm.” It was another winning moment for the commander in chief, who quickly agreed with the governor. “You seem like a hell of a guy,” Trump said. “They should have had me (as president) eight years ago.” Despite the fact that that Guam’s existential fate rests in the hands of two would-be nuclear bombers, who together lack anything resembling a full deck, Trump had good news for the governor: “Eddie,” he said, “I have to tell you, you’ve become extremely famous. All over the world, they’re talking about Guam . . . your tourism, you’re going to go up like tenfold with the expenditure of no money. I congratulate you.”

That pretty much captures Donald J. Trump’s life story: get the name out there any way you can, build the brand, then monetize it. To our president, nuclear war is just another profit center. His tough talk is drawing attention, and that keeps his juices flowing. Trump reportedly spends hours a day glued to television news. For an attention addict, cable news is the fix that never ends. According to the Washington Post, the three top cable news networks rarely cover any subject other than Trump during prime-time hours. For this president, Trump-All-The-Time is winning.

But wait, David Duke and his fellow neo-Nazis may have inadvertently punctured the contours of the Donald’s delusional winning loop. Duke, the former KKK wizard, and hundreds of angry white supremacists violently took to the streets in Charlottesville, VA on Saturday. Remember those poor forgotten white guys Trump championed on the way to the White House? The Charlottesville disaster was all about them. One person was killed and 19 others were injured. While political leaders of every stripe immediately decried the protest’s bigotry and racism, Trump, the Twitter insult king, was at a loss for words to describe the repugnant evil of white power nuts, many wearing Trump’s Make-America-Great-Again caps, staging a violent rampage on Virginia streets.

For the first time in his life, Trump tweeted with delicately selected words. He condemned violence generally, but avoided specific criticism of his own supporters, that shrinking base that keeps him “winning” by cheering his tough rhetoric. Even his stilted messaging drew this Twitter response from former Imperial Wizard Duke: “I would recommend you take a good look in the mirror & remember it was White Americans who put you in the presidency. . .” One neo-Nazi web site praised the president for his reaction to the Charlottesville riot: “Trump comments were good. He didn’t attack us. . .No condemnation at all. When asked to condemn, he just walked out of the room. Really, really good.”

This must leave the president highly confused. He rains down insults on his own party’s congressional leaders. He uses graphic imagery to threaten a nuclear holocaust. And he believes he is winning because his base cheers his toughness. But now, part of that base – sheet-wearing bigots and red-caped goons – have slithered out from behind their rocks in answering Trump’s clarion call to make America white again. A stunned and saddened nation looks at pictures of Charlottesville’s death and destruction, waiting for their president to renounce these domestic terrorists. But how does a man renounce part of himself, part of what he created? If he does, who will cheer for his madness? And without their cheers, what becomes of his winning? Forget nuclear war. For Donald Trump, this is the new “Thinking about the Unthinkable”.

TRUMP’S GUIDE TO LEADERSHIP: THE ART OF THE HEEL

Donald The Swamp Drainer is now fully enmeshed in the morass of governance, but none of the ensuing noise and chaos has led to a single dollop of drainage. If this guy has anything even remotely resembling a strategy, on any issue, it has to be the best kept secret in Washington. All we’ve seen in the first 200 days of this presidency is a bizarre jumble of impulsive, sophomoric tactics that have done absolutely nothing to advance his agenda.

A theory emerged during the 2016 campaign that, instead of being loony, Trump was a brilliant four-dimensional chess player, always strategizing multiple moves ahead of his opponents. The concept has the same level of evidentiary support as the flat earth and faked moon landing propositions. Take a quick look at the Donald’s recent chessboard navigation.

Trump:

• Publicly threatened a number of Republican senators with various forms of retaliation if they didn’t vote to repeal Obamacare. Not surprisingly, Trump didn’t win their votes and the bill went down in flames. Senators’ job security rests with voters in their home state. Caving in to a public threat is not an image that curries favor with the electorate.

• Said the Senate healthcare vote made Republican leaders “look like fools” and promised to stop funding the lawmakers’ own medical insurance if they didn’t cancel their August recess and try again to repeal Obamacare. The Senate recessed and left town within 48 hours of the president’s threat and name-calling.

• Announced suddenly via Twitter that transgender people will no longer be allowed to serve in the armed forces. This was supposedly a Trump “strategy” to end a squabble over whether the military should pay for trans-related medical costs. That disagreement, which reportedly was well on its way to resolution, is holding up a spending bill that includes funds for Trump’s Mexican wall. Paralysis quickly ensued from the president’s transgender ban tweet, and nothing has moved since – on either the ban or the wall.

• Attacked, loudly and repeatedly, the Russian sanctions imposed by the Obama administration for Moscow’s interference in last year’s election. Congress, controlled by Trump’s own party, responded by passing veto-proof legislation enhancing the sanctions and specifically prohibiting the president from altering them.

• Ridiculed and demeaned his own attorney general, Jeff Sessions, in an attempt to get him to resign so he could replace him with someone who would either control or fire Robert Mueller III, the special counsel investigating possible connections between the Trump campaign and Russia’s election tampering. Sessions refused to resign. The Senate initiated a parliamentary maneuver that prevents Trump from making a recess appointment during the current congressional break. There is also a bipartisan push for legislation that would allow Mueller’s removal only on approval of a federal judge.

Every day – every tweet – brings more examples. There isn’t a single strategy to be found in Trump’s arsenal, only a limited repertoire of tired, angry, bullying tactics, the same kind of shtick he used to throw at Rosie O’Donnell and Cher. A very prophetic 5th century BC military strategist, Sun Tzu, wrote, “Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat.” Trump likes to announce phony victories – initial passage of healthcare in the House, release of his own budget that has gone nowhere, etc. – with the phrase, “This is what winning looks like.” Well, Mr. President, right now, this is what losing looks like: all tactics and no strategy; the noise before defeat.

I came across Sun Tzu’s wisdom early in my career as a union negotiator. I had just verbally pulverized an opponent at the bargaining table. I had done my research and really had the goods on this guy. I let everything fly, humiliating and embarrassing him in front of his peers. Before I could take a bow, my mentor whispered into my ear, “Now what? You just destroyed him, but how is that going to help us reach a contract settlement?” That’s when I first read Sun Tzu’s “The Art of War”. My insults were an empty tactic, totally lacking any strategic connection to the goal of negotiating a decent agreement. That painful memory came rushing back yesterday, after it was reported that the president warned his unhinged North Korean counterpart that “threats will be met with fire and fury like the world has never seen.” So, now what? What’s the next move on the road to world peace?

And so it goes with Trump. He knows no art of the deal when it comes to leading our country. Other than the late Don Rickles, nobody has ever achieved success by lobbing insults at people. Yes, the president’s hard core base loves it. They adore Trump for his anger, and his total disregard for civility and respect in dealing with the swamp dwellers. They cheer him for it at his rallies, and then chant, “lock her up,” and other golden oldies. Some of them will stay with their angry guy all the way to the end, even if the swamp is never drained. To them, Trump is like a country-western crooner, singing the same old sad songs that somehow make them feel better, even though their lives are no less wretched when the concert ends.

Yet, polls show that Trump’s ineffectiveness in enacting his promised swamp drain is bringing his numbers down in every category, including his treasured demographic of white men without a college education. The New York Times reported Sunday that many key Republicans are already maneuvering for the 2020 presidential election with the belief that Trump will not be the party’s candidate. Regardless of what happens three years from now, it’s hard to see how this president can hope to successfully govern with no strategy beyond a string of angry tweets. A devoted and enraged base, in the low 20% range, screaming “fake news” at an occasional rally, is neither a strategy nor a mandate to govern.