Presidential Fidgit Toys

Some days—most days?—it’s all too much. There’s a financial issue that needs to be resolved and I don’t seem to be making any progress. A friend has been waiting for a call-back for a month. I’m paying a fortune for offsite storage because I can’t bring myself to part with my childhood train set. The train set is already six decades old. You’d think I could pull together a solution.

I remind myself that all of these are “post-professional” challenges. The pressures behind me were much more significant, with back-to-back project work of substantial consequence. A dying woman trumps a toy locomotive. It feels more than vaguely transgressive to mention them together, as if they were pressure points on the same moral spectrum.

But that doesn’t make them all less onerous. The result is that I have developed routines for self-soothing. I always start the day with e-mail. I sort. I delete. I read the pieces that matter, all in a pleasing rhythm of accomplishment. There is (almost always) nothing to disturb my equilibrium or remind me of the things that I haven’t done. I have the pleasant feeling that I am knocking out my task work, even if I’m doing nothing at all. It’s a way of delaying the complicated stuff and holding the world at a tolerable distance.

It must be the same for Donald Drumpf. Nothing’s worked out the way he imagined. A toddler could have told him that his obsession with tarrifs would lead to worldwide financial disruption and bring the anvil of unaffordability down on his head. Is there anyone who thinks that we gained from the war against Iran? As of Monday, Oman has piled on, insisting on its cut from the Hormuz Toll Booth. No tanker will ever go through again without being extorted at the point of a gun. And as of this morning, the Supreme Court protected birthright citizenship. Miracles happen every day, even if Alito, Gorsuch, and Thomas betrayed us. But then again, they always betray us.

For Trump, this is all confusing and intolerable. The world has always bent to his will. And so he, too, has developed self-soothing routines. How comforting it must be to summon a bulldozer and smash the East Wing into a pile of barbarian wreckage. Or to choose the precise shade of gee-gaw gold to paint the new plaster work in the Oval Office. It always works and you get what you pay for, even if the result is North Korean glam. Better that than the patina of heritage.

Whatever the particulars, it’s always the same: an addled, heedless American president building or destroying in a spasm of effort to keep himself from addressing consequential issues that might change the abysmal state of healthcare or keep children from dying in the villages of Ukraine. Trump can’t be bothered because he is already distracted by a self-invented program of pointless fidgit toys. For all it’s worth, it might as well be my e-mails. The problem is that I am a no-account citizen. He, on the other hand, is the American president.