Coded for Failure

The first thing I do when I get up in the morning is check if there are new signs of damage. Agencies dismantled. Treaties suspended. Colleges brought to their knees by defunding. Just today the Administration announced that it was taking another look at Biden-era offenses. It wants to know about that bag of cocaine that someone once planted in the Biden White House. The hope, I imagine, is that Hunter is the culprit, and it will lead, retroactively, to the impeachment of his father. If you’re anything like me, you’re enraged all the time.

The problem with rage is that it’s not good for the soul. Many good people have said just as much as they navigate the horrors of Trump 2.0. I try to pay attention to those articles, too, about finding the joy in simple pleasures, and regimens of self-care or moral restoration. The wisdom is obvious, but so is the challenge. When Rome has been invaded by the barbarians, it’s difficult to hear the music of the spheres.

But the real problem for me is that my rage is blinding. It makes it impossible to see to the bottom of our problems and stay alert to the dangers ahead. Take the matter of Trump and Putin. No one would say that Donald Trump is astute, or that he has an intellectual framework for the tasks of his presidency. There is nothing resembling strategic thinking, or a systematic way of making sense of his world. Instead, he reacts with pleasure or offense based solely on the strength of personal feeling.

This made for the astonishment of his pronouncements this week on the grotesque brutality of Russia’s assault on Kyiv. His condemnation was justified: it is wrong to kill civilians in the middle of the night by aerial bombardment. It’s wrong to say one thing and do another. All that is true and expresses a flicker of understanding.

But what held me was the part about emotional hurt. Trump’s complaints about Putin are about personal betrayal. He’s had “nice” conversations with Vladimir Putin! They have a “good relationship”; they might actually be friends! They’re talking regularly about frameworks for peace! Why would he now “go crazy” and kill Ukrainian civilians?

What Trump fails to understand is that everyone is now playing him, that they’ve cracked the code on his fatal narcissism. His peers in other countries will remember to call him, to offer tributes and compliments, to make him feel respected. And then they will do precisely what they want, pursuing the unwavering agenda of national self-interest. They understand that Trump will move on to something else, that painstaking follow-up is simply not in his wheelhouse.

And what is as certain as death is that Donald Trump won’t get it. The heart of the matter is that he is coded for failure. He will go down unaware that “nice” conversations are not the stuff of diplomatic leadership. What leadership takes is analysis and a sense of history, and that it is not the same as a deal for an apartment building.

Where are the experts who could share that truth? Sitting at coffee shops in the suburbs of Washington, waiting for another, saner president. But the rest of us need to see all of this clearly and seek out a leader who is not the creature of his arrogance, his irrational belief in what he, alone, can accomplish. Everything we care about hangs in the balance.

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