NEW YORK – Happy Thanksgiving from a city aswarm with misgivings about Donald Trump. I’m spending time here trying to help people decipher the details. I find it fascinating almost beyond measure — the careful work of a drama queen trying to calm the turbulent waters of the left and keep faith with his supporters on the right.
Follow the steps Trump’s taken. They largely rely on appointing Steve Bannon as a White House advisor. That’s the “optics” signal to the “basket of deplorables” that played such an outsized role in getting him elected. Bannon’s appointment was early and visible. It also provided psychic cover for the backpedaling on campaign promises that followed — open minded view on climate change, no waterboarding, a leaky fence instead of a wall, pre-existing conditions in health insurance, no “lock her up” investigation on Hillary, friendlier relations with the NYT. Look at the appointments, especially Nikki Haley, Republican governor of South Carolina who was a vocal critic and who also removed the Confederate flag from the Statehouse grounds following the murder of nine African Americans in a Charleston AME church.
Trump stirred the worst of America’s cultural instincts to get himself elected. Now he has set in place another plan — to meet with detractors — think Mitt Romney as candidate for Secretary of State — and convince them to come aboard. It defies what we learned during the campaign about Trump’s immature determination to bury his critics. This is the friendlier, more sensible president-elect that appeared this week. Are we convinced? Are you? Or is this more of Trump’s mercurial nature, his passion to deceive?
Like all of my family and friends I live in two worlds that converge in a thickening fog of anxiety. Donald Trump’s election has darkened our lives. He’s thrown a new and dangerous veil of cultural animosity over progressive America. He may have brought to an end half a century of progress in delivering equity and justice to women, minoroities, immigrants, and gay men and women.
People are nervous. They are agitated. They look for ways to grip certainty where there is none.
As a journalist I’m prepared to gather the facts and draw them together to form a credible narrative. It’s early in the era of the DTs. During the campaign we saw a calculating man determined to do what was necessary to win regardless of how many lies, and how much derision, anger, and hate he sowed. As a study in targeted marketing, celebrity, and made-for-reality tv showmanship Trump’s performance was frightfully effective.
In the early days of the transition we see a another version of Trumpian calculation – conciliatory, friendly, extending warm hugs and handshakes to detractors.
In every phase Trump writes new rules of engagement. His capacity to control the agenda is uncanny. He never gives up the whole story. It unfolds in daily drama. The audience is transfixed by what the next day’s events will bring. Never have I been witness to a single individual’s capacity to command a nation’s attention for as long as Trump has. The great newsrooms of our day — the Times, the Post, the New Yorker, the Atlantic — tell us of the chaos, the clamor, the unpredictability of Trump’s transition.
From what I glean from the details, shorn of Times and Post reportorial proclivities, is that Trump and his aides have clear command of the narrative and the characters. At this early stage, though, where the story is taking us is not at all plain. Trump is breaking every convention and writing new rules of the game.
— Keith Schneider
