How Trump Co-Opts His Critics

Susan Glasser: “Yet the public spectacle of Presidential name-calling—Trump, while President, has called a former aide who turned on him a ‘dog’ and attacked as a ‘Horseface’ the alleged lover who said he had tried and failed to buy her silence—obscures a highly relevant political truth. Trump may love to hurl insults and quite visibly relishes nothing so much as a public Twitter spat. He is willing, though, to accept and make peace with even his harshest critics, as long as they cease and desist from their public dissent. Trump cares about the appearance of criticism more than the criticism itself. His unheralded genius is not in insulting his critics but in co-opting them—or at least in coming to mutually beneficial truces of the sort that suggests Trump’s social-media histrionics are more calculated than they seem.”

“After all, Trump has essentially stocked his entire government with formerly vehement critics, many of whom said far, far worse things about him than the British Ambassador did. When Trump was elected, the RNC aide who is now the President’s executive assistant wept. His chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney, promised to protect the Constitution from him. Some of his biggest cheerleaders on Capitol Hill today once considered themselves diehard Never Trumpers.”