By David K. Shipler
President
Trump’s critics see him as impulsive, willfully ignorant, devoted to immediate
self-gratification, and even mentally deranged. He is all of that. But he is
something more, too. He is canny and calculating, more skillful at playing the
long game than generally recognized.
Even as
he appears candid and unscripted, Trump has cleverly laid the groundwork in managing
both public opinion and government for enhancing his power and shielding himself
from the consequences of his ethical and legal corruption. And for an heir to
moneyed privilege, he is remarkably perceptive about the anxieties and
grievances that have driven millions of working-class Americans into his cult
of personality. Many thought they were voting for a non-politician, but they
got a president with the political instincts of a marksman—at least when they
are his target.
In his first significant play, beginning even before his election, he took a hammer and chisel to chip away at whatever trust Americans retained for news organizations that inform citizens on the workings of society and government. “Fake news!” he cries whenever a press report exposes his lies, incompetence, bigotry, self-dealing, spasmodic policies, defiance of law, and the like. “The enemy of the American people!” he brands the news media, reviving the wording employed by Mao, Lenin, Hitler’s Joseph Goebbels, and Stalin. To anyone who knows history, the phrase is chilling, for millions of Russians under Stalin went into the Gulag or before firing squads after conviction of the charge “enemy of the people.”
