It’s still a surprise to encounter a president who mostly shuns the potent rhetorical power of the office in favor of throwing little grenades of text out to small screens.
Since the early 1950s presidents have always made effective use of television. As my colleague David Blake points out in his new book, Liking Ike (Oxford, 2016), even the rhetorically awkward Dwight Eisenhower warmed to the demands of ‘putting on a good show’ for Americans anxious to be reassured. With its obvious interest in pictures, television is anything but a natural home for political discussion. But the presidency obviously has the advantage of singularity. This is what the “bully pulpit means in the 21st Century. Video in various forms sustains our need to understand that one person is mostly in charge. We use this reductionist idea to make the presidency a vessel into which we place a lot of hope for our well-being and security.
So it’s all the more surprising to encounter a president who still shuns the magisterial power of the Presidency in favor of throwing out little grenades of text to small screens late at night. To be sure, our Donald Trump remains true to his reality television roots. He has mastered a kind of bumper sticker rhetoric, even though these missives betray him as a shallow and surprisingly mean-spirited leader. In more normal times presidents usually try to offer to the nation the best versions of themselves.
The screen of a smartphone is too small for this task, especially since presidents have an IMax of possibilities they can use to press their views to the American public: availabilities for journalists, junkets, and visits to Americans to offer support and reassurance. By tradition the best and most transcendent causes are at his disposal. The job requires the celebration of all things quintessentially American.
We usually come to terms with the President largely as a dominating presence in video set pieces: press conferences, the State of the Union Address and carefully choreographed interviews, especially when they are carried by one of the big three cable news channels. It’s a puzzle no one has clued him in on how to master these venues. He survived the State of the Union Speech. Many thought it was one of his best moments. Surely he must have some additional American values to celebrate, features of the national character that he could endorse. They would at least make a play at reframing himself as a leader with a heart. Events like a walk-through at a veteran’s hospital or simply throwing out a baseball as the National’s start of their season could humanize him. Moments like these could only leave his doubters silent. Even Richard Nixon could be charming when reminiscing about his four brothers, or the hard-scrabble life of his Quaker family in small-town Whittier California.
What kind of president reverts to a divisive campaign speech in the first three months of office?
To understand how much an outlier Trump is one need only look at his strange “campaign” appearance in Harrisburg Pennsylvania on April 27. The Leader of the Free World looked small and defiant in that speech, which was mostly an attack on all sorts of Americans: the press, the Senate Majority Leader, migrants and minorities. He found time to criticize the architecture and new location of the “fake news” The New York Times. There were also predictable scuffles outside. And a few hecklers gave him a chance to use his beloved mafia line, throw them “outta here!” As the Washington Post’s Michael Gerson noted, “It was a speech with all the logic, elevation and public purpose of a stink bomb.” Another Republican presidential adviser David Gergen, told CNN it was the most divisive presidential speech he had ever heard.
What kind of president reverts to a divisive campaign speech in the first three months of office? Why is his eye always on the rear view mirror rather than the tortuous road ahead? And why is he still issuing jeremiads against his foes rather than sharing national aspirations? Time will tell. But at least for now, and from a rhetorical perspective, Trump has managed to make the Presidency small and diminished, and too many of us nervous.
If older Americans are uneasy about the man who will occupy of the White House, it may be because the recent election has parallels to the dark aftermath of The Battle of Chicago.
Just a few days ago President Obama closed out his eight years with a heartfelt appeal to preserve our freedoms. It was delivered to Chicagoans just a few blocks south of Grant Park, marking yet another quadrennial transfer of power. As it was in 1960s, so it is now: the transition has left millions of Americans with a sense of unease about what comes next.
Though it can be risky to look for historical parallels, the coming transition offers the same stark questions of character that surfaced after The Battle of Chicago in Grant Park: a national trauma that contributed to the election of Richard Nixon.
That nadir was the summer in the election year of 1968. Americans were shaken by the impression that the superstructure of our nation-state was beginning to fall away. The stains of the assassination of President Kennedy five years earlier were still sealed into the fabric of the culture and only a preamble for what followed. Martin Luther King was gunned down in April while organizing a poor people’s campaign in Memphis. Two months later Robert Kennedy was fatally wounded while campaigning in Los Angeles. By August, and against an enveloping sense of doom, there was at least the modest hope of some sort of political redemption as Democrats gathered in the Windy City to stage-manage a presidential nomination. It was supposed to be a celebration of the orderly transfer of national leadership that would finally acknowledge increasing public opposition against the Vietnam War. The conflict had already taken almost 17,000 lives. The nation was not only at war with the North Vietnamese, it was increasingly apparent that it was at war with itself, especially younger Americans who could be conscripted into what many saw as a meaningless conflict. Inside the International Amphitheater near the stockyards the party trudged toward the nomination of Hubert Humphrey. He was to replace a mortally wounded Lyndon Johnson who had dithered his administration into a freefall trying to find an exit from its war policy. Johnson’s attempts at leadership had divided the Democratic Party so badly that it was in the process of incinerating itself.
That would become all too clear on the night of August 28, when hundreds of anti-war activists and many young Democrats were on hand to inadvertently seal the fate of the party. Their goal was to march in front of the Hilton and Blackstone hotels across the street from Grant Park and within earshot of the convention delegates. But they would witness the fury of what an official commission later described as a “police riot.” Some of the activists were troublemakers. Most simply wanted to register their frustration with the inertia that had overtaken the nation.
The city and the nation had seen police violence many times before. But this bloody battle in the park and surrounding streets settled into the national consciousness as a symptom of a deep and unbridgeable political rupture. It virtually guaranteed that the government would be handed over to the G.O.P. candidate, the secretive and suspicious Richard Nixon. Nixon was a living paradox who could barely conceal his instincts to vilify his supposed opponents–Jews and the press in particular–and ignore the formal limits of presidential power.
Both Nixon and Trump struggled to overcome the common impression that they were not only tortured personalities, but placeholders for someone better.
Fast forward to today and the epilogue for another chaotic election. President Obama’s farewell address in the same city brings us full circle. As steady and centered leader prepared to depart, an untested victor with another long enemies list and a Nixonian yearning for legitimacy prepared to take over.
Even in 1968 we knew that Nixon’s demons included an ongoing resentment toward the Kennedys, first because of his loss to JFK in 1960, and more generally because the Bostonians were effortlessly likeable. Trump labors under a more complex but similar burden of insecurity, on display in his nonstop insistence on his greatness, but also heightened by our awareness of the natural grace of his predecessor.
And so the victor feeds our collective discomfort. Even with the formal powers granted by the office, both Nixon and Trump struggled to overcome the common impression that they were not only tortured personalities, but placeholders for someone better.
