Just Trump being Trump

When I was a kid, my mom would sometimes call me Maytag because I was such an agitator.

I could rile up her or my sister not with grandiose actions but with small ones — whispering the same word again and again, tapping a pencil on a counter, making some weird noise or facial gesture.

Over time, those small behaviors, repeated, would elicit angry responses. When they did, I was good at appearing innocent or acting aggrieved. In reality, I knew exactly what I was doing.

We are a few decades removed from Maytag making sense as a nickname — is the company still synonymous with the spindles in washing machines? — but it’s a sobriquet I use often where President Donald Trump is concerned.

In the last three and a half years, we’ve seen his tendency toward agitation many times. If Trump’s presidency were a symphony of disruption, then the volume has increased over the last three months, reaching what could be a crescendo in the last week.

With the COVID-19 pandemic, for example, Trump would say one thing publicly, and then slither back to the White House and tweet something contradictory. For example, he would announce support for plans to reopen the country slowly, based on science and evidence, only to tweet criticism of governors for doing exactly that and attaboys for protestors marching on statehouses, demanding immediate repeal of stay-at-home orders.

Just Trump being Trump, both his supporters and critics said. “Maytag,” I said.

Trump’s erratic, aberrant behaviors had become so accepted, so normalized, that most people on either side of the aisle just shrugged their shoulders. It was the price his followers felt acceptable to get a few more conservative judges on the bench and a few more tax cuts for the wealthy on the books.

But now Trump’s proclivity for agitation is being seen for what it is — a liability in a crisis. Coupled with the president’s thin skin and apparently deep-seated insecurities, it serves only to inflame already tense standoffs between protestors and police in cities across the country.

Last week, for example, Trump, smarting from his portrayal as a leader cowering in the basement of the White House (which led to an alliterative Twitter hashtag that can’t be printed in a family newspaper), decided a photo op was just the thing to strengthen his sagging poll numbers and calm a disgruntled nation.i

So after a weekend of tough-guy tweets and a raucous phone conversation where he called governors “weak” and advised them that they “didn’t have to be too careful” in dealing with their fellow Americans, he addressed the nation from the Rose Garden (more mostly Mafioso-style talk and threats of using the military domestically) and then sauntered over to St. John’s Episcopal Church.

But in a series of events that would be comical if they weren’t by turns so sad and alarming, police had been ordered to move peaceful protesters away from the church because they were standing where the president wanted to go.

So out came the flash grenades and the chemical sprays, clearing the area so the president could pose for a photo in front of the building, holding a Bible, maybe upside down, thus commandeering the iconography of religion to demonstrate ...

Well, nobody can be quite sure what President Trump was trying to demonstrate. Strength wrapped in scripture? God’s ninja enforcer? A modern-day savior driving out the money changers?

Whatever it was, it was roundly criticized by Episcopalian leadership, even as it was embraced by far-right Christian nationalists who were seemingly unfazed by the contradiction of violently removing protestors so the president could use symbols of peace as a prop.

At its heart, the entire incident was more time squandered that could have been better spent listening to protesters, hearing their legitimate concerns about systemic racism, and proposing substantive changes in the way police departments around the nation respond to people of color.

Instead, his ill-advised mission accomplished, Trump retreated to the safety of his Twitter bunker, where he could act aggrieved that coverage of the event wasn’t as glowingly positive as he had imagined in his fevered dreams.

Deeming it all “Fake News,” Maytag Trump has resumed his role as agitator in chief, retweeting his favorite Fox News talking points, along with “LAW & ORDER” and other examples of what passes for conciliation and hope in this long, sordid spin cycle.

chris.schillig@yahoo.com

@cschillig on Twitter