Trump a loose cannon on campaign trail

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 13/02/2024 (595 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

There have been claims in the past that Donald Trump is some kind of master strategist, playing some kind of four- or five-dimensional chess his opponents can’t even understand.

One part is certainly true: there are things about Donald Trump and is campaign eruptions that are perilously hard to understand.

At a campaign rally in South Carolina this past weekend, Trump took aim at the United States’ military allies, saying that he had pushed countries to pay more money into defence spending and the NATO Alliance by telling the head of “a big country” that, in the event of an attack by Russia, despite treaties, “No, I would not protect you. In fact I would encourage them (Russia) to do whatever the hell they want. You gotta pay.”

It is a trademark kind of Trump story — an interaction with an unnamed someone where the origins are so nebulous, it’s impossible to prove that it actually occurred.

But this Trump story is more than just the usual sort of alarming yarn.

At a time when Russia has, in fact, done “whatever the hell they want” in attacking Ukraine, it’s extremely unsettling to hear a potential U.S. president saying he’d tacitly support that kind of action.

It’s also the kind of shoot-from-the-lip campaigning we’ve come to expect from a candidate who, buoyed by a fawning crowd, seems unable to imagine the wide-ranging effects his own words might have.

The truth is that he may not ever have had to learn a variation on a basic lesson most lawyers learn: don’t ask a question when you don’t already know what the answer will be.

Just as he opined, perhaps off the cuff, about leaving European NATO treaty partners in the lurch, he also asked his South Carolina audience a question about Nikki Haley, his sole remaining competitor for the Republican presidential nomination: “Where’s your husband? Oh, he’s away. He’s away. What happened to her husband? What happened to her husband? Where is he? He’s gone!”

Nikki Haley’s husband Michael was, in fact, away — serving a military deployment in the U.S. Army Africa Command, as a member of the South Carolina Army National Guard, where he has been for months. (Ignoring or demeaning the military service of another candidate’s spouse is particularly galling coming from a person like Trump, who so rigorously avoided U.S. military service himself.)

Trump either didn’t know, or didn’t care, about the inaccurate insinuation in his questions about Haley’s husband.

Just as he might not know, or may not care, about the implications of reneging on international military treaties, or that he may not know, or may not care, that in Dec. 2023, the U.S. Congress passed legislation preventing a president from arbitrarily breaking with NATO with the approval of the U.S. Senate or an Act of Congress — precisely because of Trump’s threats about the alliance the last time he was in office.

Trump’s NATO musings are just another example of something that was abundantly clear throughout his presidency.

While he possesses a certain charisma, his grasp of detail and his understanding of the effects of his off-the-cuff musings and absurd responses to what he views as personal affronts by other world leaders (let alone his bizarre respect and affection for autocratic governments and their leaders, like Russia’s Vladimir Putin) are actually dangerous.

This is not high-level chess. This is the tragically unco-ordinated, juggling with chainsaws.

Because Trump is instability personified. He makes his treaty partners nervous, he makes his trading partners nervous, and he emboldens NATO’s — and America’s — potential enemies.

Frankly, he makes the world a more unstable, and unsafe, place.