Two epic narcissists who see themselves as singularly
suited to redeem America.
By BRET STEPHENS
Donald Trump is Barack
Obama squared.
Not as a matter of rhetorical style, where the president is glib and
grammatical, while the developer is rambling and coarse. Not as a matter of
economic instincts, where Mr. Obama is a social democrat while Mr. Trump is a
mercantilist.
And not as a matter of temperament. Mr. Obama is aloof
and calculated. Mr. Trump loves to get in your face.
But leave smaller differences
aside. The president and The Donald are two epic narcissists who see themselves
as singularly suited to redeem an America that is not only imperfect but
fundamentally broken. Both men revel in their disdain for the political system
and the rules governing it. Both men see themselves not as politicians but as
movement leaders. Both are prone to telling fairy tales about their lives and
careers.
And both believe they are better
than everyone else.
“I think I’m a better speech
writer than my speech writers,” Mr. Obama told an aide in 2008. “I know more
about policies on any particular issue than my policy directors. And I’ll tell
you right now that I’m . . . a better political director than my director.”
Compare that to Mr. Trump earlier this month, when asked on MSNBC who he turns
to for foreign policy advice. “My primary consultant is myself.”
Historians may mark the early
21st century as the moment when Americans stopped seeking probity or at least
predictability in their leaders and started shopping for ecstasy and
transformation; a politics beyond words. Republicans mocked the grandiosity of
Mr. Obama’s first run for the presidency—the Doric columns; the pledge to make
the seas recede—but is that so different from the pompous iconography of the
Trump jet or his manifestly absurd promises to get foreign countries to pay for
his political boondoggles?
More to the point, Mr. Obama was a cult-of-personality
candidate. His admirers projected on him whatever they wanted to see:
passionate liberal; post-ideological pragmatist; philosopher king; cool cat.
Politically, he was the equivalent of a non-falsifiable hypothesis. No evidence
could disprove his rightness.
Mr. Trump inspires similar fancies among his supporters.
Either he’s the Great Negotiator who will know how to bargain with Congress and
cut better trade and security deals with the Saudis, Chinese, Europeans and so
on. Or he’s the immovable man of principle who will remain unbowed when, for
instance, troubles mount with his mass deportation of los ilegales.
Both interpretations can’t be true. But it’s in the
nature of cult personalities that followers rarely ask hard questions because
they are seeking leaders who square circles.
Non-American readers might also note the ways in which,
on foreign policy, Mr. Trump is a magnification of Mr. Obama, rather than his
opposite number. The president caused some consternation overseas when he
complained, in a recent lengthy interview with the Atlantic’s Jeffrey
Goldberg, that
too many U.S. allies are “free riders” mooching off American security
guarantees. “We don’t always have to be the ones who are up front,” the
president explained. Leading from behind “was part of the anti-free rider
campaign.”
Now take Mr. Trump. NATO, he told the New York Times last
week, is “unfair” to the U.S., which pays “a disproportionate share” of the
defense burden. The U.S.-Japan defense treaty is “not a fair deal.” Across the
world, the U.S. is being “systematically ripped off.” On Ukraine, “I would
agree with” the president that the country belongs in Russia’s sphere of
influence. If Europeans won’t take the lead, Mr. Trump wonders, why should the
U.S.?
Both men also share the conviction that the U.S. can’t afford
much of a foreign policy anymore. Mr. Obama often faults the high cost of the
war in Iraq for “constraining our ability to nation-build here at home.” Mr.
Trump complains that “we’re defending the world” despite a national debt
nearing $21 trillion.
One man wants to shrink America’s role in the world for
the sake of a bigger state; the other man for the sake of shrinking the debt.
In either case, the prescription is to put America in retreat. In neither case
do they want to address the real driver of the U.S.’s long-term fiscal
problems, which are entitlements and welfare (59% of the federal budget), not
defense and international security (16%).
Which brings us to the most important way in which Mr.
Trump is another version of the president: They both bend reality to suit their
conveniences, and their conceits.
In Mr. Obama’s universe, terrorism is a nuisance, climate
change is an apocalypse, and economic growth is an inequality problem. In Mr.
Trump’s, immigrants are invaders, trade is theft and allies are millstones. For
each species of rubbish there’s a sizable political constituency. Maybe it will
be large enough to launch Mr. Trump to the White House.
There’s a tendency among pundits to offer high-toned
explanations for why Mr. Trump has risen this far, despite political
expectations and ordinary good sense. Many of those pundits performed similarly
opportunistic services when Mr. Obama’s star was rising. We repeat our mistakes
when we think we’re doing the opposite.
