He could be like a Dale Carnegie in reverse and write a tome titled, “How to Lose Friends and Alienate People.”
Trump would have a lot to say on that subject because he’s good at it.
Great, even.
We’re seeing that on the world stage right now.
Trump wants America’s historic allies to help him extricate himself from the consequences of the foolish war he launched against Iran. Because he devoted less thought to any potential repercussions that might follow setting off fireworks in the world’s great tinderbox than he would to placing his order at a fast food restaurant, the president has found himself stuck with a series of problems that will be difficult to solve, if they can be solved at all.
Chief among them is the task of keeping the Strait of Hormuz open so oil tankers can move through it. The only option Trump has now is having U.S. military personnel escort the tankers, a practice that could prove costly in terms of both dollars and human lives.
So, he asked for help from the very allies he’s spent years insulting and offending.
The allies’ response?
The diplomatic equivalent of: “Talk to the hand.”
The president, as is his wont, has whined petulantly about this refusal to help him clean up the mess he himself made—which he created without consulting any of those longtime partners of the United States. He’s said that the nations in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization—who already are contending with the war in Ukraine begun by Trump pen pal and Russian strong man Vladimir Putin—are making a mistake by not bailing him out.
But what did he expect?
He’s told them, over and over and over again, that he thinks NATO is a waste of time and money and that they cannot count on U.S. help while he is president.
What goes around comes around.
Demonstrations of Trump’s skill at shattering long-term, mutually beneficial relationships haven’t been confined to the grand stage of world events.
He’s also put his talent on display in the dinner theater of Indiana state politics.
Maybe he and his staff in the White House don’t have enough to do. Managing a war and an economy in which both prices and jobless numbers are climbing don’t seem to merit their full attention, so they have decided to insert themselves into Indiana General Assembly primary races.
Team Trump has chosen a handful of Indiana state senators to target in the May Republican primary. All the president’s men are doing so because those senators refused to vote for Trump’s ill-conceived and quite possibly illegal plan to gerrymander Indiana’s congressional districts in the middle of the decade.
The fact that those senators were honoring the wishes of their constituents—polling in some districts showed that 90% of the folks living there were opposed to Trump’s attempt to rig the game—doesn’t seem to matter to the president and his minions.
Nor does the fact that he is taking a meat ax to the Indiana Republican Party.
For nearly 20 years, the Indiana GOP has been almost a monopoly in state politics. No Democrat has won a statewide race in more than a decade. Republicans have held supermajorities in the Indiana House of Representatives and the Indiana Senate for nearly 15 years. And the GOP has owned the governor’s office for more than 20 years.
But—thanks to Trump’s determined attempts to alienate long-time friends—that could change.
Greg Ballard, the last Republican mayor of Indianapolis, has formed a new Lincoln Party that seeks to provide a new home for GOP exiles. He’s running for Indiana secretary of state, and some polls show him leading the Republican incumbent, scandal-magnet Diego Morales.
If Ballard succeeds or just runs strongly, one must wonder how many other disaffected Republicans will drift to his new party, a party that wants independent thinkers rather than unquestioning serfs as members.
Yeah, President Trump does indeed have a special gift.
No other leader has been quite as effective at splintering effective coalitions and driving fervent friends apart.
The subtitle of his book almost writes itself.
“How I Blew Up the World and My Own Party at the Same Time,” by Donald J. Trump.
