A Warning from the Book of Proverbs

If the worst fears are realized, it might not be because Donald Trump is a strongman, but because he is a weak one.

It’s clear after yesterday’s disgraceful meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky that Donald Trump is acting in Russia’s interest, not upon the principles that are the sometimes shaky foundation of American democracy and diplomacy. That, however, is not because Trump is a strongman like Vladimir Putin. It is because he is a weak one. He and his ambitious understudy J.D. Vance did not humiliate Zelensky in the Oval Office; the Ukrainian leader revealed them for what they are. This, recycled with apologies from last year:

The greatest danger that Donald Trump’s cabinet choices and threats of revenge and retribution might present isn’t the obvious one.

It’s not just the questionable or non-existent qualifications of a Fox News host to lead the world’s most powerful military. It’s not just naming as attorney general a man who needs the House of Representatives to ensure that the public never sees a House Ethics Committee report on him. It’s not just choosing a vaccine denier and Ivermectin fan to take charge of Health and Human Services or naming someone who otherwise might not be able to obtain a security clearance to be the director of national intelligence.

It’s a weak and insecure president-elect who’s surrounding himself with sycophants and suckups who are too ignorant, too intimidated, too timid or too ambitious to speak truth to power. It’s legislators, judges, journalists and others who fear his retribution if they have the temerity to challenge his choices, ignore his and his allies’ propaganda machines, ask tough questions and demand straight answers..

History hasn’t been kind to political, business and other leaders who’ve been too proud, too insecure or too deaf to hear, much less solicit, dissenting opinions. Pride, after all, “goeth before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall”. For those who aren’t reading, buying or selling Christian Bibles, or for those who are but voted for a haughty spirit anyway, that’s Proverbs 16:18. https://biblehub.com/kjv/proverbs/16-18.htm

History is littered with lessons about the dangers of governance without guardrails. Commodus eclipsed Nero and Caligula as Rome’s most depraved and destructive ruler, one whose biography is worth revisiting today. https://www.history.com/news/commodus-worst-roman-emperor-gladiator

The list of those haughty spirits who discouraged or ignored dissent is endless. Napoleon invaded Russia and ended up on St. Helena. Hitler invaded Poland, then doubled down by turning west and then invading the Soviet Union. Mao Zedong’s Great Leap Forward produced the greatest or second-greatest famine in history.

Today, shirtless Vladimir Putin’s sycophants either kept their mouths shut or assured him that Russian troops would be dancing in the streets of Kyiv in a week or less. If anyone on the Chinese Communist Party’s Central Committee or elsewhere in Beijing’s vast bureaucracy had doubts about President Xi Jinping’s decision to take greater control of the Chinese economy and reverse some of Deng Xiaoping’s economic reforms, either they kept them to themselves or he ignored them. Let’s not even mention the dangers posed by North Korea’s nuclear-armed Respected Comrade Kim Jong Un.

Granted, dissent can be dangerous. In the U.S., at least for now, it just means getting booted off X or out of the White House Briefing Room/echo chamber. In harsher climates, even accomplished ballet stars who dance en pointe can fall off buildings, and walking across bridges and drinking tea are risky business.

Democratic nations aren’t immune to the dangers of government by ego: Political ambitions and hierarchies also can drown out dissent. British Prime Ministers Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak ignored warnings and jumped aboard the Brexit bandwagon. Closer to home (full disclosure — especially for me https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shock_and_Awe_(film) — intelligence and military officers and others who challenged the Bush administration’s case for invading Iraq were ignored, and some found themselves under pressure to get in step.

Good leaders, on the other hand, don’t merely tolerate dissent; they invite it. George Washington’s cabinet included Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson, who by all accounts were his intellectual betters and rarely sang in harmony. Abraham Lincoln’s Team of Rivals included members who’d opposed his run for the Republican presidential nomination.

Trump, on the other hand, quickly erased half-baked rivals Nikki Haley and Mike Pompeo from his list of possible cabinet picks. He denied that Gen. John Kelly, one of his chiefs of staff, had warned him against hiring someone who wouldn’t tell him the truth, but more tellingly added that if Kelly had: “I would have thrown him out of the office.”. In fairness to both men, both Kelly’s recollection and Trump’s denial of it might be accurate because the then-president might have tuned it out along with everything else he didn’t want to hear.

If discouraging and punishing dissent is one sign of weakness, another is equally dangerous: Insecure leaders are vulnerable to flattery. Former Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe recognized that immediately, and according to the news agency Nikkei, he consulted psychologists before his first meeting with Trump, followed their advice and never disagreed with the newly elected leader of his country’s most important ally.

To his credit, Abe later found a non-threatening way to explain to Trump why the Korean Peninsula is divided.

Intelligence officials and others at home and abroad are wondering what sweet nothings Elon Musk, Russian President Vladimir Putin, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Hungarian autocrat Viktor Orban and even little Kim Jong Un might have whispered in Trump’s ear.

Trump’s questionable cabinet choices may pose a third danger, one the Senate and the news media might want to take even more seriously: The above-the-law firm of Gaetz, Rubio, Hegseth, Kennedy, Noem and Friends LLC might turn out to be the ones running the country.

Not only is Trump focused entirely on audiences, adulation and approval; he is famously disinterested in the unglamorous business of government.

When he was elected the first time, the President's Intelligence Advisory Board prepared a briefing book on the major issues he’d be facing. He never read it, several board members of different political persuasions said. When intelligence officials briefed him on the strategic Indian Ocean island of Diego Garcia, he asked only two questions: Are the beaches good, and are the people nice? https://time.com/5518947/donald-trump-intelligence-briefings-national-security/

President Trump II’s advisers would do well to be wary, though. In another symptom of insecurity, no failure has ever been Trump’s fault, and someone else always gets fired. In the same vain, when things in Ukraine didn’t go as expected, Putin put the head of the FSB, the country’s foreign intelligence service, and his deputy under house arrest.

If Trump put his own version of President Harry S Truman’s “The Buck Stops Here” sign on his desk in the Oval Office, it would say “The Buck Stops There”, and the side facing Trump would be a mirror.

Depending on what the next few years bring — something none of us knows — history might conclude that Donald Trump was dangerous not because he was a strongman, but because he was a weak one.