When the history of Donald Trump’s remarkable political career is written, we should all hope, if only for the sake of American literature, that the task falls to someone like the historian G.M. Trevelyan, who believed that the “dignity” of his chosen profession need not be “afraid of contact with the comic spirit.”
I am praying for the appearance of this masterpiece in my lifetime, but my guess is that before too long, grave chroniclers will be neglecting all the absurdist Trumpian set pieces — his firing of his secretary of state Rex Tillerson via Twitter; his dogged insistence, despite official forecasts, that Hurricane Dorian might hit Alabama, prompting the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to issue a statement supporting his view; Rudy Giuliani’s accusations of voter fraud in the 2020 election, delivered in the parking lot of Four Seasons Total Landscaping — in favor of earnest analysis of the economic impact of withdrawing the United States from the Paris climate agreement.
We have been advised to take Mr. Trump, if not literally, then at least seriously. I do not think we should extend him even that courtesy. We should see him not as a Caesarean figure set upon remaking the United States in his own image or an ideologue who has attempted to impose a coherent philosophical vision on our unruly public life, but as a somewhat hapless, distracted character, equally beholden to vast structural forces and to the limitations of his own personality.
The only thing more remarkable than the rhetorical élan with which Mr. Trump has laid out a revolutionary new agenda for the Republican Party — realist in foreign policy, populist and protectionist in economics, moderate on social issues — is his gross unsuitability for any task more consequential than the lowering of marginal tax rates. On issues ranging from military intervention to health care to the stock market, Mr. Trump is simply the continuation of the G.O.P. establishment by other means. If Barry Goldwater was the book and Ronald Reagan the movie, Mr. Trump is the glitzy jukebox musical.
This understanding of Mr. Trump’s political career is, among other things, the best way to make sense of his recent decision to bomb Iranian nuclear facilities. His dovish admirers reacted with shock, interpreting the move as a betrayal of noninterventionist principles. Republican hawks told themselves that like George W. Bush, with his abandoned vow to avoid nation-building, Mr. Trump had simply evolved.
Both sides assumed far too much ideological intent. His decision is best understood not as a betrayal of principle or the result of a deliberative process of coming around to his opponents’ view, but rather as an expression of his desire to accomplish something — anything.
Having campaigned on promises of more or less instantaneous peace in Ukraine and Israel, Mr. Trump found himself staring down the hard fact that peace is difficult and slow. So he bombed a few things. At the same time, he pleaded for oil prices not to increase and complained, with trademark bathos, about violations of a cease-fire between Israel and Iran that he himself announced before either party seems to have agreed to it. The result was the old Republican foreign policy status quo, just slightly worse.
This pattern of inertia giving way to careless impulse, and vice versa, is by now well established. Consider Mr. Trump’s approach to entitlement programs. Over the past decade he has often declared that Social Security and Medicare are sacrosanct and, almost in the same breath, has muttered darkly about the necessity of spending cuts. That these positions are incompatible is not the point. His “big, beautiful bill,” which is essentially establishment G.O.P. tax legislation, includes significant cuts to Medicaid, food benefits and other programs. But one imagines that the precise policy details matter less to him than the nickname — ample-sounding, grandiose, alliterative — and the fact that Democrats hate it.
Then there is immigration, an issue with which Mr. Trump has been virtually synonymous since he came down the escalator in 2015. He has, at various times, vowed to deport untold millions of illegal immigrants, and he has brought grotesque security theater to airports and schools and Home Depots. But when it comes to actual removal of illegal immigrants, statistics suggest that he has a ways to go before he catches up with the number of people repatriated in, say, President George W. Bush’s second term.
The numbers don’t matter, though, because Mr. Trump’s goal is not fundamentally changing our immigration system — see his recent vow to “take care of our farmers and hotel workers” — but making headlines. His followers are meant to cheer at the sight of Dr. Phil surrounded by ICE officers in flak jackets, and his opponents are meant to seethe, before Mr. Trump, satisfied by the noise, moves on.
Or consider the so-called Department of Government Efficiency. For critics and admirers alike this was supposedly an enormously ambitious undertaking: the means by which the entire federal bureaucracy could be brought to heel, allowing Mr. Trump to govern more or less unilaterally. In practice it meant canceling departmental subscriptions to Politico Pro, announcing hiring freezes at federally funded research corporations, sending annoying make-work emails to government employees and laying off some very surprised doctors.
All told, it is claimed, with the help of creative accounting and unverified projections, that DOGE saved some $170 billion. That figure is far short of the $1 trillion goal loudly announced earlier this year by Elon Musk, then Mr. Trump’s right-hand man, and light years away from a Project 2025-style overhaul of cabinet departments and other federal entities. Today the DOGE project looks more like a ritual pinprick inflicted upon that ancient trio of G.O.P. fetish-gods: waste, fraud and abuse.
Even Mr. Trump’s tariffs, which represent his most genuine break with the old G.O.P., have been anticlimactic. He once threatened to impose huge tariffs on Mexico, only to retreat after extracting a promise from the Mexican government to station troops along the southern U.S. border — troops that, as it happened, joined a substantial force already stationed there. The sky-high tariffs he imposed on China in April were reduced, subject to a 90-day delay to negotiate a trade deal.
Mr. Trump’s backtracking is unsurprising to anyone familiar with his crude reverence for the stock market, which is more in the spirit of Paul Ryan than William Jennings Bryan. Who will be shocked if, after the waiting period expires, Mr. Trump insists without justification, following a farrago of social media posts and angry interviews, that he has secured the most favorable trade terms in the history of the American Republic?
Overpromise, underdeliver, change the subject. Mr. Trump is forever setting himself challenges and then becoming bored with them. He does not evolve. He flinches, recants, forgets, redirects. He discovers each time — freshly, dumbly — that this is not how power works.
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Matthew Walther is a contributing Opinion writer for The New York Times. He is the editor of The Lamp, a Catholic literary journal, and a media fellow at the Institute for Human Ecology at the Catholic University of America.
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