Today, Donald Trump returns to Washington — his first visit since leaving in disgrace after January 6 — to deliver the keynote address for the America First Policy Institute’s “America First Agenda Summit.”
The purpose of this confab is to give Trump some policy creds as he prepares to announce a 2024 run for re-election. Brooke Rollins, one of the organizers of the Institute and the Summit (who was domestic policy adviser in Trump’s White House) says “having worked next to him for almost three years in the White House, a lot of people didn’t give him enough credit for his policy vision.”
Sane people don’t give Trump credit for having a policy vision at all. In the annals of political oxymorons, a “Trump policy vision” must rank very high.
To have a policy vision, it is first necessary to have some capacity for thinking about policy. Trump never did and never will.
To think about policy is to contemplate something beyond oneself. Trump can only think about how something will reflect on his own reflection. The only policies he’s ever cared about are those that advance Trump.
Policy entails a degree of deliberation, of assessment based on logic and fact. That’s not the Trump we’ve known, either. When president, Trump never read memos. He never looked at graphs or charts. He hated numbers. He is contemptuous of data, analysis, science, reality.
To have a vision is to be forward-looking. But Trump always looks backwards – to vindicate himself, retaliate, take revenge, exact retribution, settle scores, counterattack, return fire.
“It’s an opportunity for President Trump to come to Washington and give a visionary speech about why the future would be better with his leadership — and to the degree he focuses on that it could be a very important speech,” says Newt Gingrich, the former Republican House speaker who remains close to Trump, about tonight’s address.
But Trump can’t get over the past. Especially now — after weeks of the Jan. 6 committee hearings exposing his conduct before and during the insurrection at the Capitol — does anyone seriously expect him to stay on message about the future?
Maybe if they drug him and administer an electric shock every time he diverges from the teleprompter text his policy advisers have prepared for him, he may surprise. But the outtakes from the remarks he was supposed to give on January 7 suggest even this will pose a challenge.
On the rare occasion Trump has offered a vision about the future, it’s been a weather prediction. Remember when he warned the public that Alabama was going to be hit by Hurricane Dorian — long after Dorian was already heading toward the Carolinas, leaving Alabama back in the sunshine? Rather than admit error, Trump had his White House policy staff release a 225-word statement defending his erroneous warning, and spent the next four days defending himself with a doctored and outdated hurricane map that looped in Alabama with a black marker, followed by assertions that his prediction was accurate at the time he issued the warning (it wasn’t), a week-old map that showed a low probability of tropical-storm winds in a small corner of Alabama, and incessant tweets culminating with “What I said was accurate! All Fake News in order to demean!” and “I accept the Fake News apologies!”
It's been the same with all his bogus claims – starting with the crowd size at his inaugural, to voter fraud in 2016 and again in 2020, to “unknown Middle Easterners” streaming across the southern border in migrant caravans. He lies, then defends his lies with more lies, then rips into those who tell the truth. That’s always been his MO.
The worst job I can imagine is to be a Trump policy adviser. It would be like running behind an elephant with a giant pooper-scooper.
In addition to Rollins, the America First Policy Institute -- described gingerly as a “White House in waiting” -- is run by Larry Kudlow, Trump’s top economic adviser, and Robert O’Brien, Trump’s national security adviser. It has a staff of 150 and an operating budget of $25 million.
I have no idea if they’re doing serious policy analysis. Trump’s former trade adviser Peter Navarro, appearing on Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast Friday, called the organization “a dumping ground and haven for a lot of the failed people from the first administration, the RINOs, and the disloyalists who let Trump down.”
It’s the nicest compliment I’ve heard anyone give the Institute’s personnel, but I still doubt they’ll get Trump to be a policy visionary.
What's the biggest Trump Oxymoron of all?