Wrong Way

I really hate to admit it, but Donald Trump is a leader. He has millions of followers who support his every move or utterance. The character traits that make so many of us sick to our stomachs, are the things for which he is most admired in many quarters.

He decides he wants to wreck the government, and those followers not only applaud, but they also relish what they see and hear. Isn’t it great that thousands upon thousands of federal workers are being let go? Don’t they deserve it, after all?

Think about it. Trump has total control of two of the three branches of government. He rules the executive and the legislative wings. And with the judiciary, the Supreme Court specifically, he has a working majority and some unashamed partisan justices in his pocket. Much of this situation is his doing.

Look at how he dominates the conversation, how he elbows most stories off the evening newscasts and leaves himself at center stage for night after night. Media moguls are bending the knee to him, actually settling frivolous lawsuits to keep the leader from roughing them up.

On foreign policy, he has installed a formerly staunch supporter of Ukraine who turned on a dime once he became Secretary of State. Today, Marco Rubio mouths the lies of Vladimir Putin. And so do a lot of Rubio’s erstwhile colleagues in the Senate. Trump says jump, Rubio asks “How high?”

But here’s the thing. Trump is leading alright, but in the wrong direction.

He is not leading by persuasion, but by intimidation. His ideas are not great. They are bad, even evil.

The Republican congressional supplicants line up to praise him not because he is praiseworthy, but because if they don’t do so, he threatens to run rival candidates against them in the primaries or talk smack about them on social media. And maybe there’s a whiff of more violent opposition coming from his bully boy insurrectionist pals who are clearly okay threatening incumbents who do not heel.

Tariffs? I’m losing patience. All the Republicans who know better, plus economists in the private sector, will tell you privately that tariffs lead to a trade war which is not good for anybody. Again, Trump is at the forefront of the debate, but he’s heading the wrong way. And can anybody explain his animus toward Canada?

Ukraine? He has turned decades of U.S. foreign policy on its head. Do you hear any complaints from Sens. Tom Cotton, (R-AR.), or Lindsey Graham, (R-S.C.). For sheer hypocrisy it’s hard to top Graham. A longtime supporter of Ukraine, he now thinks Volodymyr Zelenskyy, that nation’s embattled president, should resign or offer a fulsome apology for what Graham thinks was an insulting session in the Oval Office last week.

Zelenskyy should be the one to resign. Think about that.

Graham and the other trained seals know the infamous meeting was a fiasco because Trump and JD Vance got all huffy about the factual history lesson Zelenskyy was teaching. It was Trump who raised his voice. It was Vance who was rude. “Have you ever been to Ukraine?” Zelenskyy asked Vance. No, said our vice president, but I’ve seen news reports. Terrific. And yet Trump and Vance got the applause from the congressional claque of invertebrates.

Now Trump is denying the Ukrainians real time battlefield intelligence, trying to force them to negotiate away about a fifth of their country. At the Kremlin, Putin reacted punctually to this mindless, cruel decision by applauding it and then bombing the hell out of defenseless Ukrainian cities two nights ago. Again, not so much as a peep from Trump’s congressional “allies.” They don’t want him to be mean to them.

So intimidating is Trump that he can insult our allies and embrace our enemies and nobody on his side of the street cares a whit.

But here’s the thing: if Trump had a bright idea, then I could understand his party falling in line behind him. But he’s full of dumb ideas, the core of which seems to be vengeance on top of retribution on top of rage. And yet with no one in his party speaking up, he looks like a colossus astride the globe. That’s just what he wants. And because he leads by fear, that’s what he gets.

But what if the tide turns? What if the economy tanks? What if that outbreak of measles starts to spread exponentially? What if Putin decides now would be a swell time to send his tanks into Estonia or Moldova? Will Trump’s devout supporters get the feeling that something is wrong, that maybe the Emperor’s New Clothes don’t exactly cover all his tantrums, felonies, and malignant narcissism?

What will his saluting supporters do when Elon Musk’s policies start to pinch? Will they blame Musk or will they bail out on their champion? If the polls head south for the Orange god king, will the congressional quislings get some spine?

Maybe.

I hope so.

Because right now, this leader is leading all of us right off a cliff.