It’s sitting right there in front of us. But it’s still worth noting. The political stories of the moment are heavily geared to the long-tail effects of Donald Trump’s antic and ego-driven escapades: the decision to make the Reflecting Pool “American flag blue”; the eagerness to get a plane as a present (which he could take home with him after his presidency) from the royal family of Qatar. There are countless examples. In each case, the initial driver is the president’s personal cupidity and grandiosity, things which have no relation to any aspect of public policy or really any public support. They begin unknown and pretty quickly end up unpopular. He does them because he can, with the Supreme Court having removed basically all of the immediate brakes on a president’s power. But those initials gambits — the hunger for gifts and cash prizes — lead to bad news stories, legal impediments, or often technological snafus. Those in turn lead to embarrassment, anger, outbursts which repeat the process of bad news stories, legal impediments or technological snafus.
So you want to want to make the Reflecting Pool blue, and you only have a few weeks to do it. You do it rushed and on the cheap. It disintegrates. Bad press story. Embarrassment. Lashing out. False arrests and indictments. Case implodes. More embarrassment. More Truth Social outbursts, which toadies then rush to reify with new arrests or cherry-picked intelligence.
It’s more or less the same thing with QatarForce One. Trump wanted the plane super bad. He wanted it retrofitted in a few months. Because he’s like a seven year old who wants the Christmas present up and running now — not once everyone’s had breakfast. It doesn’t have the right defense tech. Suddenly Trump is escaping Turkey in a catering truck.
We know all these things. But these storylines become such a part of the firmament that it’s easy to lose track of how the story of perpetual rake-stomps began. And it’s always some cupidity/grandiosity moment — a ballroom, an arch, some shiny object some foreigners put in front of him, maybe a cookie or a Big Mac.
This is different from the first term. There was some of this. But “guardrails” and halfway normal appointees not only provided some cushioning for the Constitution; they also protected Trump from many of these shiny object, yummy cookie episodes.