Change the Story, Change the Understanding

Small man; big suit

The biggest problem with coverage of Trump is the disconnect between what Trump says, and what actually happens.  For one example, take the question of foreign aid to El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras:

Last week, the president announced plans to end assistance to the Northern Triangle countries of Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador. “No money goes there anymore,” Trump said Friday. “We’re giving them tremendous aid. We stopped payment.” The move affects about $450 million, according to The New York Times, including money to support law-enforcement efforts against gangs. The actual cash is a minimal amount—a little less than 8 percent of the $5.7 billion Trump demanded for his border wall when he shut down the government in December, and less than 2 percent of the $25 billion the administration estimates the wall would cost overall.

But does it "not go there anymore"?

A group of House Democrats visiting El Salvador denounced the administration’s decision to cut aid to the region.

“As we visit El Salvador evaluating the importance of U.S. assistance to Central America to address the root causes of family and child migration, we are extremely disappointed to learn that President Trump intends to cut off aid to the region,” said the statement from five lawmakers, including Rep. Eliot Engel of New York, who chairs the House Foreign Affairs Committee. “The President’s approach is entirely counterproductive.”

The Trump administration has threatened before to scale back or cut off U.S. assistance to Central America. Congress has not approved most of those proposed cuts, however, and a report this year by the Congressional Research Service said any change in that funding would depend on what Congress does.

Notice the language of the statement.  It's from the same time frame as Trump's declaration, which is taken in the first quote as a perfomative statement (saying it made it so), but the five lawmakers take it as a declaration of intent in future budget requests.  Here, in fact, is what the same article also includes:

The State Department notified Congress that it would look to suspend 2017 and 2018 payments to the trio of nations, which have been home to some of the migrant caravans that have marched through Mexico to the U.S. border.

Now we can't ignore the final sentence of the third paragraph in the middle quote:  "...any change in funding would depend on what Congress does."  This raises a legitimate question:  does the POTUS have the power to suspend foreign aid on a whim?

Trump brags that he has rolled back regulations; yet his Administration has lost more than 90% of the court battles over changing regulations that it has been forced into by its ineptness in making such changes.(Most of his executive orders are equally useless.)  He says it, the press reports it, but only later does someone in the press look into it and point out that the emperor is a naked, blithering idiot.  So is it possible for Trump to have suspended foreign aid to 3 countries as of last week?  Apparently not, if the State Department is notifying Congress that it wants to suspend those payments.  And further, this may prompt yet another court battle.  As Dahlia Lithwick points out, that may be a strategy, too:  announce a promise kept, let the courts block it, blame the courts and disavow any responsibility for your complete failure to govern.  But it's hardly an expression of power to run the Presidency that way, and it's not much of an argument to take Trump's baseless and fact-less pronouncements at face value and draw conclusions from what are effectively the mutterings of a demented old man.

After all, nobody is taking him seriously when he tells a rally that he knows "a lot about wind," or tells the NRCC that wind turbines cause cancer and make too much noise (why Trump hates renewable energy is another puzzle not worth solving).

Trump is creating chaos, but he's doing so because he's making reporters work so hard to keep up with him.  Gone are the days when the Press Secretary came to the briefing room and hand-fed the waiting reporters whatever the White House wanted in the news that evening.  Gone also are the days when whatever the President said could at least be taken as rational and based in reality.  The argument that Trump is sowing dragon's teeth by cutting regulations here and foreign aid there is based on the idea these statements reflect reality, rather than his own feeble wishes.  The Presidency is the most powerful position on the planet, but Trump is completely powerless within it.  If you'll allow an analogy, think of Bruce Banner trying to go into battle in a gigantic suit of Iron Man armor.  Just as he declares he's "getting the hang of it" as he tries to move toward the front lines, he trips.  Tony Stark may have been able to make that giant suit formidable;  Bruce just proves he's out of his depth.  The suit is indeed powerful, if you know how to use it.

Trump has no idea how to use his presidency.  It's past time we took that as the narrative, since it is far more reflective of reality than the tweets and rantings Trump delivers as proof of his effectiveness.

There is something worse here, something Trump's incompetence reveals, which is that we are all essentially naked and fooling ourselves about how well attired we are with knowledge.

The truth is, the entire discussion of the countries of Central America and the flood of immigrants to our border is an abstraction.  We can talk to individuals, to Border Patrol agents and immigrants hopeful of getting asylum (many won't, if the interviews I've heard are any indication.  Asylum is not granted to people who just show up with children in tow, looking for better economic opportunities or a greater chance in life).  We can talk even more abstractly about the forces at work in those countries:  corrupt governments and pervasive violence and society-wide criminal enterprises, and at a further abstraction about foreign aid and what good it does or doesn't do.  Correlation does not equal causation, we tell ourselves in our wisdom, but what else do we have but correlation to judge the causes of our crises as we identify them?  Trump's xenophobic racism is hideous; but he's playing with essentially the same set of facts as the rest of us.  Read this paragraph from the Atlantic article and try to find one hard, actual fact in it sustaining the conclusion it draws:

But Trump’s decision to cut aid to countries that are major sources of immigrants to the United States seems likely to only increase the push factors, driving more people to attempt the journey as conditions in their home countries stagnate or worsen. As my colleague Peter Beinart writes, push factors have been badly overlooked in the U.S. political debate over immigration. There’s not much to suggest that Trump disagrees about the likely effects of cutting aid. Maybe he doesn’t care, or maybe he’s neglected to learn, which would fit with his general approach to policy.

"Push factors" is a marvelously convenient term, but what does it mean except what we say it means?  How far are we, really, from Humpty Dumpty's assertion to Alice that the word means what we want it to mean, neither more nor less?  No doubt Trump doesn't care about people, and no doubt "we" do?  But how does our caring manifest in ways significantly different from Trump's ways?  We may talk about "push factors," but what are we accomplishing, and how would we accomplish it?

Worse is when we simply deny reality:

Along similar lines, it’s more politically useful for Trump to be in a lengthy fight about building a border wall than it is to have actually built it. If and when the wall is built, it will become clear that it isn’t a panacea for immigration, but in the meantime, it’s a useful political wedge. The more migrants are coming toward the United States, the more Trump can warn of an “invasion” and inflame nativist fears that he thinks will help him win reelection. Trump isn’t really interested in solving immigration. A permanent crisis is more useful to him.

I'm old enough to remember Trump playing that hand last October.  How did that work out for him in November?  Is it really politically useful?  Or is it just a sign of his complete political impotency and incompetence?  If the latter, what does it say about this entire line of analysis of what Trump is doing and how effectively he is doing it?  If the worse things are, the better they are for Trump (the final declaration of the Atlantic essay), then why are his approval ratings essentially flatlined for the past 14 months?

These things that pass for knowledge I don't understand.  Except that abstractions are so much neater and cleaner and easier to deal with than the messy complexity of reality.