The inestimable Maggie Haberman does it again, writing with her usual incisive wit about how Donald Trump’s brain really works. I never tire of something she posted during Trump’s criminal trial in Manhattan:
Mr. Trump has treated his own words as disposable commodities, intended for single use, and not necessarily indicative of any deeply held beliefs.
Now, this story about Trump’s frustration at being criticized for taking a $400 million bribe luxury jet from Qatar includes another of the divine Ms. Haberman’s mike-dropping insights into how Donald Trump thinks.
You should be embarrassed asking that question,” Mr. Trump told an ABC News reporter who pressed him on the issue. “They’re giving us a free jet. I could say, ‘No, no, no, don’t give us. I want to pay you a billion or $400 million, or whatever it is.’ Or I could say, ‘Thank you very much.’”
He then invoked a golf analogy involving the golfing great Sam Snead about accepting a free putt during a round, suggesting that following rules when one doesn’t have to is foolish.
“Remember that Sam said, ‘When they give you a putt, you pick it up and you walk to the next hole, and you say, Thank you very much,’” Mr. Trump said.
I had to look up what a “free putt” means but I got the part about “following rules when one doesn’t have to is foolish” right away. That explains so much about Donald Trump, from his feeling about paying taxes to storing secrets to running the federal government.
Trump rejects rules, and also expertise. His freestyle approach to being president is made worse by his ability to say whatever outrageous or patently stupid thing that comes to his mind, have the world’s media take it seriously, and then move on to his next explosion.
To quote myself again, Trump agrees with those who believe “smart people don’t have all the answers.” As the AP reports, in a dispatch about his real estate pal and Special Envoy for Everything Steve Witkoff’s role in the release of the hostage Edan Alexander, Trump said Witkoff knew “very little about the subject matter” but learned quickly.
Following rules and knowing the subject is essential, not tangential, to governance in a democracy. In an autocracy, that’s fine—and clearly, what Trump wants.
My beloved print edition of the Times includes some more fine writing on this subject, this time from Adam Liptak.
In a column about "an impassioned response from the late Supreme Court Justice David Souter, who was “the opposite of excitable” to a “seemingly bland question” about producing more civically engaged students, Liptak writes:
“I’ll start with the bottom line,” he said. “I don’t believe there is any problem of American politics and American public life which is more significant today than the pervasive civic ignorance of the Constitution of the United States and the structure of government.”
“That is how the Roman Republic fell,” he said, with Augustus becoming an autocratic emperor by promising to restore old values.
The rise of such a strongman was hastened, Justice Souter said, by public ignorance. Americans’ lack of knowledge means, he said, that “the day will come when somebody will come forward, and we, and the government will, in effect, say: ‘Take the ball and run with it. Do what you have to do.’”
Oh dear.
