He flabbergasts the Human Race
By gliding on the water’s face
With ease, celerity and grace;
But if he ever stopped to think
Of how he did it, he would sink.
— Hilaire Belloc, on the waterbeetle
Leaving aside the missing element of grace and the improbability of his ever stopping to think, Donald Trump is the waterbeetle of politics. His feral cunning in manipulating the masses and the media is, like the waterbeetle’s facility, instinctive. The 72 days of transition demonstrated a stylistic seamlessness with his 511 days of campaigning, which indicates that the 1,461 days of his term that begins today will be as novel as his campaign was.
Its theme was often a pronoun without an antecedent, his admirers explaining their admiration by saying that “he tells it like it is.” Fortunately, a theme of his transition has been a verbal shrug: “Oh, never mind.”
He won by stoking resentments that his blue-collar base harbors about the felt condescension of elites. He has, however, transitioned with ease and celerity away from the most vivid commitments that made his crowds roar (prosecuting Hillary Clinton, making Mexico pay for the wall, banning Muslims, deporting 11 million illegal immigrants within two years, restoring torture because “it works” but even “if it doesn’t work,” etc.). He shows an interesting disinclination to disguise his condescension toward those he effortlessly caused to roar by giving verbal prompts that he has now abandoned.
Candidate Trump intimated a foreign policy less reliant on military measures than the policies of some recent presidential predecessors. But the most riveting moment of the transition received less attention than did Trump’s tweet snit about Meryl Streep. The moment was when Rex Tillerson, designated secretary of state, told the Senate that China’s policy of building and militarizing islands in the South China Sea is “akin to Russia’s taking of Crimea” and that America should tell China that “your access to those islands also is not going to be allowed.” China might not quietly accept this U.S. Navy blockading of the islands.
