August 28, 2026

IT’S A GOOD START, BUT THERE’S A LONG WAY TO GO:

And on the flip side:

Last month, Christopher Caldwell painted Trump as something like Blofeld leading an army of SPECTRE operatives in a Free Press article titled: Inside Donald Trump’s Ruthless Return.

Nuance has lately been in short supply. The president has suffered a humiliating defeat in a Middle Eastern war he launched against the wiser counsel of most of his advisers. The middle class is discontented, and the clamor for economic redistribution is louder than it has been since the 1930s. Many of Trump’s detractors claim to have told us so. Elect a barbarian and you’ll get a barbarian. Simple as that. W

But this is wrong. The more closely one observed Trump’s first term, the more surprised one would have been by his second. Trump Phase I was a joke. The 2020 press conference that his team called at “the Four Seasons” in Philadelphia—thinking they were booking a five-star hotel and winding up instead at a landscaping company next to a pornography emporium—is the perfect symbol of it. Trump was incurious. He knew as little about the workings of Washington on the day he left office as he did on the day he arrived. No one around him ever figured out how to recruit even a handful of people who could master the basics of the executive branch. A lot of what he did worked—there was bold diplomacy in the Middle East, an outstanding economy for lower earners until Covid came, and thereafter an impressive emergency program to develop a vaccine. But even the triumphs were shambolic. In the end Trump, like Gatsby and Père Goriot, left town abandoned by everyone. As Haberman and Swan point out, “no elected Republican of any stature” was present at Joint Base Andrews to see him off.

If Trump I was an error, Trump II is a terror. The hapless, almost slapstick first Trump administration, more embarrassing than threatening, was replaced after the four-year Biden interregnum by the most skilled and ruthless team of political operatives since the first term of Franklin Roosevelt.

To be fair, both Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. and Donald J. Trump assure me that FDR was one of the “Great” Presidents (if not the “Greatest”):

 

Posted at 8:22 am by Ed Driscoll