This is apparent in Secretary of State Rex Tillerson’s description of the president, following this meeting, as a “moron”—suggesting that Trump is simply not cognitively or emotionally up to the job. And this week has seen several other examples. There is of course Senator Bob Corker’s remark that the White House functions as “an adult day care” and his follow-up to The New York Times: “He doesn’t realize that, you know, that we could be heading towards World War III with the kinds of comments that he’s making.” Corker also complained, like a weary parent, “I don’t know why the president tweets out things that are not true. You know he does it, everyone knows he does it, but he does.” Corker, who chairs the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, indicated he does not trust Trump to keep America safe, saying that Tillerson, Defense Secretary James Mattis, and Chief of Staff John Kelly “are those people that help separate our country from chaos.” [...]
Bargaining is another technique, as recent news about Iran shows. While many of Trump’s aides had their gripes about the 2015 deal with Tehran to prevent nuclear proliferation, most of them seem to agree that keeping the deal in place is far preferable to eliminating it. But now the administration seems likely to punt the issue, decertifying the deal but leaving it to Congress to either let it stand or fall. (So much for Harry S. Truman’s “the buck stops here.”) Why take this halfway step? Part of it is that, just as on DACA, Trump wants to keep a campaign promise to end the deal without suffering the consequences, but another part is childish petulance: Olivier Knox reports Trump simply hates being confronted with the need to recertify the deal every 90 days.
And then, as every parent knows, sometimes you just have to give in—let the kid have a victory on something less significant. Aides can try to prevent war with North Korea, and they can seek compromise on the Iran deal, and they can quietly kill the demand for more nukes, but they’ve got to let the president have his way on occasion. When Trump demands “goddamned steam” to power catapults on aircraft carriers, aides shrug and let it go.
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