The following article by James Hohmann with Breanne Deppisch and Joanie Greve was posted on the Washington Post website October 2, 2017:
THE BIG IDEA: If Donald Trump doesn’t have anything presidential to say, maybe he shouldn’t say anything at all.
An instinct to counterpunch often leads Trump to try putting out fires with gasoline. That does not always best serve his, or the country’s, interests. This weekend brought two fresh illustrations that the president may say it best when he says nothing at all.
Puerto Ricans were outraged that Trump spent last weekend at war with the National Football League over the national anthem and said nothing about their suffering in the wake of Hurricane Maria.
Be careful what you wish for: Trump tweeted 24 times about Puerto Rico on Saturday and Sunday. But most of the messages attacked local leaders, ripped media coverage of the humanitarian disaster as “fake news” and praised the “GREAT JOB” his team is doing.
Carmen Yulín Cruz, the mayor of San Juan, drew Trump’s ire after she spoke at a news conference Friday about the “horror” she saw in her city’s flooded streets. “I am asking the president of the United States to make sure somebody is in charge that is up to the task of saving lives,” she said.
Around 8 a.m. Saturday morning, apparently reacting to cable news coverage of this comment, Trump tweeted from his luxury golf club in New Jersey that Cruz had been “told by the Democrats that you must be nasty to Trump.”
“Such poor leadership ability by the Mayor of San Juan, and others in Puerto Rico, who are not able to get their workers to help,” he added later. “They want everything to be done for them… Outside of the Fake News or politically motivated ingrates, people are now starting to recognize the amazing work that has been done by FEMA and our great Military.”
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— Then, on Sunday, Trump publicly contradicted Rex Tillerson. A day after the secretary of state, on a visit to Beijing, said that the administration has direct lines of communication with North Korea, the president tweeted that his chief diplomat is “wasting his time trying to negotiate with Little Rocket Man.” “Save your energy, Rex, we’ll do what has to be done,” Trump wrote.
This is just the latest in a string of presidential put-downs. “Perhaps the sharpest dissonance occurred in June, when Tillerson publicly called on a Saudi Arabia-led bloc of Arab nations to immediately cease their blockade of neighboring Qatar, which they had accused of terrorism financing,” Karen DeYoung notes. “He urged ‘calm and thoughtful dialogue.’ Barely an hour later, Trump called the blockade ‘hard but necessary’ and said he agreed with the Saudi accusations.”
— It’s not just Tillerson: Trump has repeatedly made comments that undercut his underlings when they are trying to help him. After national security adviser H.R. McMaster denied that Trump shared secret information with the Russians, the president acknowledged that he had and defended his right to do so. After James Comey got fired, White House aides said it was because of the FBI director’s handling of the Hillary Clinton investigation. Then Trump sat down with Lester Holt and told the NBC anchor that he had the Russia investigation on his mind. The president spent weeks attacking his own attorney general, Jeff Sessions, as weak. In each case, Trump might be in a better position today if he had kept his thoughts to himself.
Trump has also problematized relations with his should-be allies on the Hill by assailing Mitch McConnell out of the blue. During the debate over health care, Republicans would push for Trump to take a more hands-on role in pushing the legislation. But they’d often come to regret when he did, most memorably when he described the bill that passed the House as “mean.”
— In the Bible, reticence is a virtue. “Even fools are thought wise when they keep silent,” we are told in Proverbs 17:28. “With their mouths shut, they seem intelligent.”
An Americanized version of this saying, often misattributed to Abraham Lincoln or Mark Twain, is that it is better to remain silent and appear foolish than to speak and remove all doubt.
Or as Winston Churchill purportedly said, “We are masters of the unsaid words, but slaves of those we let slip out.”
— Some current and former administration aides say privately that their jobs would be easier, at times like this, if Trump just stayed out of the way. Trump probably would have been better off if he deferred to his national security team on North Korea and allowed his surrogates – from the FEMA administrator to the OMB director and Treasury secretary – to defend his response to Maria.
Instead, all three of those guys were forced to explain on the Sunday shows what the president meant with the tweets. On “Fox News Sunday,” FEMA director Brock Long – using Trumpian hyperbole – said Puerto Rico is “the most logistically challenging event that the United States has ever seen.” Asked about the president’s tweetstorm, he replied: “You know, we can choose to look at what the mayor spouts off or what other people spout off, but we can also choose to see what’s actually being done, and that’s what I would ask.”
Allies of the administration distanced themselves. “Every minute we spend in the political realm bickering with one another over who’s doing what, or who’s wrong, or who didn’t do right is a minute of energy and time that we’re not spending trying to get the response right,” Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) said on CBS’s “Face the Nation.”
Mayor Cruz tried to take the high road. Instead of responding forcefully to Trump’s attacks, she tried Sunday to refocus the discussion to getting tangible assistance for her constituents. “All I did last week, or even this week, was ask for help,” she said on ABC’s “This Week.”
Democrats cited the tweets to argue that race might be a factor in Trump’s apparent indifference to the misery of Puerto Ricans. “Given the president’s history on race,” Bernie Sanders said on CNN, “I think we have a right to be suspect that he is treating the people of Puerto Rico in a different way than he has treated the people of Texas or Florida.”
For his part, Trump was defiant. He presided over the Presidents Cup golf tournament in New Jersey on Sunday. During an awards presentation at the end of the day, he acknowledged the victims of hurricanes in Puerto Rico, Texas and Florida. He dedicated the trophy to “all those people who went through so much.” Then he added, “But we have it under really great control.” “A man in the crowd shouted: ‘You don’t give a [expletive] about Puerto Rico.’ But Trump fans cheered,” David Nakamura reports. (He is scheduled to fly to Puerto Rico tomorrow.)
— As he closes the door to a diplomatic solution, Trump continues to ratchet up his rhetoric vis-à-vis Pyongyang. He’s now repeatedly threatened to destroy North Korea. Every time the regime has responded with another provocation. Trump comes back with a new nickname or harsher rhetoric, further boxing himself in.
Kori Schake, a research fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institutionwho served in key policy roles at the White House, Pentagon and Foggy Bottom during George W. Bush’s presidency, explained why Trump’s “fire and fury” threat was so dangerous back in August. Her piece for the Atlantic is as relevant today as it was seven weeks ago. This is the key paragraph:
“In 1949, the United States withdrew its military forces from the Korean Peninsula. Secretary of State Dean Acheson then gave an important speech defining American national-security interests—which notably excluded Korea. … It’s not the drawing down of U.S. forces but rather Acheson’s speech that is commonly cited as the signal of American abandonment of South Korea. Words matter: Acheson didn’t cause the Korean war, but his words are remembered as the provocation. Words especially matter between societies that poorly understand each other’s motivations and intentions, as do North Korea and the U.S. We can afford to be sloppy in our formulations among friends, where cultural similarity or exposure give context, but neither of those circumstances pertain with North Korea.”
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