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Being far from the United States for a couple weeks, scanning news from home for just minutes daily over morning coffee, gave me a new appreciation for the metaphors about the clarifying view from 38,000 feet or seeing the forest and not just trees.
President Trump is perhaps best viewed at such distance. If anything, the big picture is less flattering still, ugly even.
At home, with the 24/7 daily drubbing of news alerts on phone, laptops and TV, each Trump outrage, controversy or scandal is soon forgotten amid attention to the next. We’re inured to our reality-show president, who sees each day as a new episode for him to be both showrunner and star. But seen from afar, all at once, somehow the threads come together in the patterns that show just how dangerously flawed, flailing and, yes, failing this unprecedented presidency is.
Over the first half of this month, as early voters began passing judgment in midterm elections, the broader patterns of the crazy quilt that is Trump 2.0 were clear. More in chronological order than of outrageousness and national or global consequence, those patterns included:
- His embarrassing and willfully provocative obsession with branding things, buildings (even adding his name to a memorial of a slain president!), bodies of water and now states.
“Hello, New America, formerly known as New Mexico,” Trump greeted residents on Oct. 3 in his video endorsement of a Republican candidate there. (He spoke from the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office, once more ignoring historical norms against using the trappings of office to partisan ends.) Days later, he proposed to rename either the Pacific or Atlantic as “Trump Ocean” and declared that anyone who referred to “Artificial Intelligence” instead of his preferred “Super Intelligence” is “THE ENEMY!” (Of course, Elon Musk and other ever-capitulating tech titans fell in line, again. No command is too dumb, as Trump knows: At a rally in Kentucky last week, he boasted that tech moguls “kiss my ass.”)
- His antidemocratic refusal, despite his oath, to be president of all Americans.
He regularly attacks, penalizes and now, it seems, wishes the worst on states and cities that didn’t vote for him. At MAGA rallies in Nebraska on Oct. 5 and Texas on Oct. 7, the president of the United States defended the costs of his war against Iran, adding to the crowd’s cheers: “Let ’em take out Los Angeles, let ’em take out San Diego. This is a very small price to pay.” Yet again excuse-makers said he was just joking. That’s no defense. Sick joke, sick mind.
- His pathological narcissism and companion sense of monarchical entitlement.
Trump’s Louis XIV-like attitude of “L’État, c’est moi” (“The state, it is me”) was rarely as plain as on Oct. 6 and for days afterward when the government ran taxpayer-financed ads extolling Trump, one with the song “Love Me” as the backdrop. A federal judge finally ordered them to cease airing. Trump justified the ads as “patriotic” but reluctantly said he’d bankroll them from the hundreds of millions in political funds he sits on. Over the same period, the Nobel Committee’s series of announcements of its annual awards triggered days of Trump tirades at being passed over again, but those rants kept him in contention as a global joke.
- His anti-constitutional undermining of a free press.
On Oct. 10 came reports that Trump’s ever-compliant “Justice” Department had opened an antitrust investigation of five broadcast outlets – ABC, CBS, CNN, Fox and NBC — for jointly ceasing pooled coverage of the White House last month in protest of Trump’s banning CNN, MS NOW and Politico because he didn’t like their reporting on him. A federal judge has twice ruled for the banned outlets, though Trump has continued to ban CNN from Air Force One.
- The top-down model of incompetence and corruption in Trump’s administration.
Trump’s long-ago promise — that he’d hire “only the best” — continues as a punch line. He named a new press secretary while I was gone and, as I suspected after seeing video of Katie Zacharia’s hapless inaugural White House briefing, she was fired before I’d returned. Last week, Kimberly Guilfoyle was sacked as ambassador to Greece, where the former fiance of Donald Trump Jr. had been exiled after they split, amid evidence that she’d asked a Republican donor to pay off $100,000 of credit card debt. (What’s the big deal? Don Jr. and his new wife got several times that amount from a Russian oligarch for their recent multiday wedding celebration.) Next, Axios had a juicy scoop that former Trump lawyer Alina Habba Mildon recently went to Trump in the Oval Office to complain that Trump envoy Ric Grenell misallocated money that she and her billionaire husband — who sought Grenell’s help in getting some of the spoils in U.S.-controlled Venezuela — had intended for Trump’s Kennedy Center makeover. (Grenell denied her claims.)
- Trump’s traitorous bear-hug of Russia and betrayal of Ukraine, U.S. allies and the 80-year-old world order that is among the proudest legacies of the United States.
After years of ambiguous signals, Trump this month unequivocally took sides between invader Russia and ally Ukraine: Vladimir Putin’s. On Oct. 9 he announced purchases of diesel fuel from Russia, thus helping it to finance its war. On Friday he waived sanctions against Russia that he’d signed into law just weeks ago. And in between, Reuters reported that an order hindering Ukraine’s defensive access to the Starshield satellite system came from “inside the White House.”
Trump does all this even as Russia aids Iran against the United States, sabotages other European allies and commits war crimes in Ukraine. On Monday, he grotesquely claimed that Russia “has been fine on Ukraine,” as the world saw photos of a year-old baby in a stroller and her mother among the dead in a Ukrainian park hit by Russia.
Returning to Washington on Sunday, I read a Wall Street Journal editorial that called for “a bipartisan reckoning for Mr. Trump’s budding alliance with the Kremlin against Ukraine, Europe and American interests.”
I will be here for that.
Bluesky: @jackiecalmes
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Ideas expressed in the piece
- The column argues that distance reveals a cumulative pattern in Trump’s presidency that daily news cycles obscure: personal branding, attacks on political opponents, self-promotion, pressure on the press, personnel controversies and decisions it sees as weakening U.S. support for Ukraine.
- It portrays Trump’s approach to public office as self-centered and undemocratic, pointing to the taxpayer-funded ads featuring the president. A federal judge ordered the remaining ads canceled after a watchdog coalition challenged their use of public funds; the White House had described them as public-service announcements.[6]
- On the press, the column sees the Justice Department’s antitrust investigation of broadcasters as part of a broader effort to punish outlets over coverage. The department, however, said it was examining whether the broadcasters’ joint suspension of pool coverage violated antitrust law.[7]
- The column’s strongest foreign-policy criticism is that Trump’s decisions on Russia—including easing sanctions and arranging Russian diesel sales—favor Moscow at Ukraine’s expense and undermine U.S. alliances. Reporting has described the diesel plan and sanctions decisions as drawing opposition from some Republicans and European allies.[2][3]
Different views on the topic
- The administration presents its Iran policy as a necessary security choice, not simply a failure of judgment. Energy Secretary Chris Wright said Trump understood that the conflict could raise energy prices in the short term, but argued that preventing a nuclear-armed Iran justified the cost and predicted prices would fall.[5]
- Trump and administration officials defend the Russia measures as pragmatic steps to pursue negotiations and ease fuel pressures. Trump said he did not want to push Moscow away from peace talks, while Wright characterized the diesel arrangement as an incentive to reduce conflict rather than an economic lifeline for Russia.[1][4]
- The White House has argued that the ads promoted national policies and were comparable to public-service announcements used by past administrations; Trump also said he would shift their funding to political fundraising. A judge nevertheless ordered the remaining taxpayer-funded placements stopped while the legal challenge proceeded.[6]
- The Justice Department’s stated rationale for investigating the broadcasters is that coordinated action by commercial competitors can violate antitrust law. That explanation offers a legal basis for the inquiry, though it does not resolve the separate dispute over the administration’s exclusion of particular news outlets.[7]
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