Trump’s Perversion of Leadership

No president in my lifetime has made me think as much about leadership as Donald Trump has. That’s because no president in my lifetime has embodied the ideal of leadership as completely as he embodies its antonym.

A leader articulates a clear vision and set of principles, which become a well-lighted path that well-intentioned people can tread. Trump bellows, babbles and contradicts himself, achieving an incoherence that no level-headed person can follow.

His expectorations this week about the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program are a baffling case in point. He blamed and shamed Democrats for the absence of any deal to preserve DACA while renouncing the program as a misbegotten magnet for swarms of undocumented immigrants.

Hello? If DACA is a travesty, its assassins are heroes. But then, little about Trump’s DACA gyrations makes sense or respects facts. Democrats have indeed tried, imperfectly, for progress on DACA. Trump and other Republicans have thwarted them.

What’s more, the immigrant swarms that Trump evokes — and that he’s now apparently prepared to deploy the military to stop — don’t really exist, not in comparison with periods past. If they did, DACA wouldn’t be the reason. It protects newcomers who arrived as children before 2007. Trump is being intentionally disingenuous or unintentionally daft.

Is his America a country with a heart or only a spleen? Depends on the hour and audience. Let us not forget how, a short while back, he went from calling for an immigration “bill of love” when the television cameras were rolling to ranting about “shithole countries” when they weren’t. This was the opposite of leadership. It was the quintessence of Trump.

A leader takes some share of responsibility. Trump can’t cycle through scapegoats fast enough. The country is going to hell because of Amazon, the “Justice” department (his quote marks, not mine), the “fake news” media in general, CNN and NBC in particular, Mitch McConnell and Mexico. All of these have been directly or indirectly assailed over the past few days by a president who swerves from epic self-pity to operatic self-aggrandizement, sometimes within one tweet. A leader steers clear of both. (Continues at NYT)

By Frank Bruni

Opinion Columnist, NYT