What the town needed, as Jack’s Joker had it, was an enema. What it got was the dog that chased the car and, to its surprise, actually caught the car. What the town (and the world) got was an agent of chaos.
Long may he vacation. One is tempted to hope that President Donald Trump vacations until January 20, 2021. But given how freaked out he obviously is about investigations into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election, it's probably best to hope that Il Duce Donald is back in time to face the growing swell of music. Even if some of his more risible media backers are now threatening "civil war" if a serious effort is mounted to remove him from office.
In the meantime, he is where he is and we are where we are (albeit in a bit of a quieter time while the president golfs away his anxiety), dealing with someone I began warning about over two years ago as the coming thing in devolutionary American politics. Every bit as much because of as in spite of his being an erratic megalomaniac with pronounced know-nothing and neo-fascist tendencies. If this were a healthy culture a Trump presidency would never have been possible. Let’s not forget that he rose as the advocate of the ludicrously racist big lie that was Obama “birtherism.”
Trump is such a sad ADD attention addict that he can't get anything but some right-wing judges through a Republican Congress. Well, thanks in health care extremis to the courage of Navy war hero John McCain and moderate conservative Senators Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski. But Trump is remarkably effective at one thing. He makes a tremendous agent of chaos.
Even though he has nowhere near as good lines as those offered by Heath Ledger and Jack Nicholson in their indelible portrayals of the Joker in 2008's 'The Dark Knight' and 1989's 'Batman.' It was Nicholson's Joker who offered up the useful notion of giving the corrupt big city in question an enema. "Drain the swamp," anyone? (Not that Trump, once in office, is not actually doing the opposite, of course.) But it was Ledger's Joker who admitted he was really like a dog reflexively chasing a car, shocked and unprepared once he actually caught it. All he really knew how to do was be highly disruptive, an "agent of chaos."
There is only one crisis around a world filled with kaleidoscopic crises which is actually better and not worse under Trump than it was with Barack Obama. And that crisis, the institutionalized presence of Islamic State in what has been Iraq and Syria, is only better now because fairly obvious actions set in motion during the Obama administration have continued and reached some levels of fruition.
Everything else is at least a little worse. In some cases, much worse. It is uncanny. It is almost as Trump is a sort of global arsonist, someone out to thoroughly disrupt whatever admittedly slender semblance of American-inspired order existed in the world before he took over the White House.
For a moment or two, it seemed as if Trump might have a handle on North Korea. Then the dictator in Pyongyang realized, like the rest of us, that the aircraft carrier strike group Trump had so dramatically brandished as about to arrive off the Korean Peninsula just as a potential NoKo missile test neared had actually sailed in the opposite direction!
Since then, it's been a string of increasingly alarming, ever lengthening, missile tests, with Trump and his erratic rhetorical outbursts all over the lot. Which made him out to be every bit the blustering incompetent young Mr. Kim obviously concluded him to be following the aircraft carrier follies.
Elsewhere, well ... Trump gave up a misguided CIA aid program to supposedly moderate Syrian rebels, but got nothing in return for the move. Leverage? The "art of the deal?" Huh?
The planet's newest humanitarian disaster, caused by the Saudi-led war in Yemen which Trump so vociferously supports, rages on amidst a widespread cholera outbreak.
Israeli-Palestinian relations are worse than they've been in years.
"Collateral damage" civilian casualties from secret drone and special ops strikes against, one hopes, jihadist targets are up everywhere, which will undoubtedly spur future homegrown jihadists, not to mention anti-American sentiment in much of the world.
Efforts to rein in climate change -- which increasingly exacerbates potential conflict situations (Syria and North Korea have both suffered historic droughts) -- are still in disarray from Trump's pro-fossil fuels move withdrawing the U.S. from the UN's Paris Accords. Jerry Brown, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Al Gore, Michael Bloomberg, and other leaders around the world are working hard to pick up the slack. Brown and company may succeed here and with other parts of the world in time. But it should never have come to that.
Relations with Russia are in crisis, thanks to Trump's oddly toadying tone toward the impressive but problematic Vladimir Putin and Trump’s refusal to acknowledge the obvious Russian interference in last year's presidential election. As I wrote repeatedly last year, Russia would have been better off having a somewhat delegitimized President Hillary Clinton to kick around. Unlike the very knowledgeable and stable Clinton, Trump is too ignorant, too erratic, too non-credible on Russia, the pattern of Trumpist lying about Russian contacts too suspicious, for relations to be anything but weird.
As for longer standing crises, such as those with Iran and Afghanistan, well, even more knowledgeable administrations than this intellectually lighter-than-air one have failed to see things that were obvious when I visited those countries not long before several of their major regime changes.
The weight of growing anti-American sentiment I saw as a grad student tourist in the American-equipped police state that was Iran not long before the Shah was overthrown in the Ayatollah's revolution not surprisingly continues to overhang events there.
As for Afghanistan, any American mission there which is predicated on national control and modernist nation-building is simply a fool's errand.
On the one hand, Trump acts like he wants conflict with Iran, thus upsetting the flawed but still useful nuclear deal won by Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry. Be very careful what you wish for.
On the other hand, Trump rages as he has for years about America losing in Afghanistan. He is right about that, but now that he is president, he seems to want to "win." Well, that is simply not possible, at least on the superficial terms he seems to relate to.
What is needed is an appropriate mission, a much more limited mission not unlike that outlined by former Vice President Joe Biden during the fateful early days of the Obama administration, to maintain a striking presence there to prevent the re-emergence of jihadist bases which might threaten America.
Do our generals relate to something relatively subtle and non-triumphalist? I think they would. If they were worked with by sophisticated people. By people, that is, who are not in the Trump administration. By people who know enough not to compare “fixing” the Afghan War with renovating the ‘21’ club in Manhattan. Not surprisingly, our ignoramus president even got his restaurant analogy all wrong.
Meanwhile, as at least some generals look to do their customary thing, i.e., define a bigger mission in Afghanistan to fit a bigger career profile, there is a coterie of brass who are also working to make Trump a more constructive figure. Which is to say, not an agent of chaos.
Every U.S. armed forces officer takes an oath of office. Not to the president or the service, but to the United States and its Constitution.
What concerns me, every day and every night since January 20th, is not so much the fate of the Atlantic Alliance and other elements of a rational internationalist order, which this "axis of adults" is admirably working to preserve -- but the development of a fluid situation which is not easily controlled. Either externally or, more to the point, internally.
In other words, a suddenly spiking crisis in which Trump, who as president has extraordinary discretionary decision-making power over national security affairs, can not be checked by bringing the weight of rational argument to bear. For there are pockets of extremism in the U.S. military. If Trump and his less rational advisors have found some of them, or vice versa, we may have a very unpleasant situation very early some fateful morning.
A stupidly reckless call is then made that, while not something so obviously disastrous as a nuclear strike -- as former Defense Secretary William Perry keeps pointing out, the planet's biosphere may well be irreparably damaged by a "limited" nuclear war -- nonetheless triggers a cascade of events that leads to catastrophe.
Our “agent of chaos”-in-chief is setting the stage for just such a disaster.
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