It was a week of massive flip-flops for Donald Trump and as David Jackson at USA TODAY explains, it’s giving the world “policy whiplash”:
Three months in office, President Trump is giving the world policy whiplash.
A week after ordering a missile strike on Syria — in stark contrast to the position he took as a private citizen in 2013 — the still-new president is now reversing himself on a host of issues, from Russia to NATO, from Chinese currency valuation to the worthiness of the Export-Import Bank.
All presidents change positions once they get into office and receive more information, but Trump's pace "is still pretty remarkable," said political scientist Nicole Renee Hemmer, an assistant professor at the University of Virginia's Miller Center.
"We’ve had plenty of evidence over the past year and a half that Trump is a man of impulses more than a man of doctrine," she said, "which makes his policies much more pliable than most politicians."
David Graham at The Atlantic:
Trump’s tendency to take up the position of the last person with whom he spoke on a given issue has been widely noted. Xi’s claim that North Korea is an intractable problem is a widely held one, and North Korea bedeviled Presidents Obama, Bush, and Clinton, too, but it’s disconcerting that a foreign leader could so quickly dazzle Trump. The combination of little knowledge and practically no ideological commitments also makes the ongoing battle between factions in Trump’s White House much higher stakes than they might otherwise be. [...] When you don’t know things, you are more likely to make errors. This is even more dangerous when, as Donald Rumsfeld could have taught Trump, you don’t know what you don’t know. You’re easily susceptible to the influence of others, too.
Kia Makarechi at Vanity Fair:
Could it be that the same man who claims to know “more than anybody” actually knows less, and about fewer subjects, than he might have assumed?
Frida Ghitis at CNN points out that Trump’s flexibility isn’t an asset:
Flexibility is normally a commendable trait, the mark of the nonzealot. If circumstances change, it makes sense to adjust. But, as in practically all the cases in which Trump is backing away from his earlier stance, nothing has changed. It is as if Trump did not know of Assad's viciousness. The Syrian regime has been using chemical weapons, barrel bombs and mass starvation of civilians. Some 500,000 have died. That is not new.
Just this week, after meeting with NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg and with Chinese President Xi Jinping, Trump reversed course on two more fundamental campaign positions. NATO, he said, is "no longer obsolete." Nothing had changed about NATO. Trump claimed the alliance started fighting terrorism because of his pressure, but that is patently false. NATO has fought in Afghanistan against Al Qaeda.
Ryan Cooper argues that Trump’s ignorance is on full display:
It's tough to grapple with the apparent fact that the president of the United States is a dolt. Liberals used to joke about George W. Bush's constant malapropisms, accidents, ignorance of geography, and so on. And while Bush was still the second-worst president in American history, one still had to admit he at least had a moderate helping of cunning.
President Trump, while he can advertise the desserts at his country club while talking about the latest bombings he's ordered, manifestly does not have the slightest clue about the basic mechanics of politics. Case in point: his latest threat to withhold payments to insurers under part of ObamaCare, supposedly to force Democrats to "start calling me and negotiating." It's a truly bewildering misread of the state of politics.
Here’s Eugene Robinson’s take:
He hasn’t even been in office for three full months, and Trump may already be the most erratic president we’ve ever seen. We have no idea where he really stands because, well, neither does he. [...]
It was inevitable that a rookie president with no experience in government at any level, much less the highest, would have a ridiculously steep learning curve to climb. It was also inevitable that Trump’s lack of focus and his tendency to be distracted by whatever cable news is yammering about at any given moment would hamper his ability to get anything done.
And here is your morning laugh, courtesy of Sean Spicer:
White House press secretary Sean Spicer framed policy changes as not a shift in the president’s position but an evolution to the president’s position, suggesting Trump is the stable force around which a series of issues are gravitating to.
“If you look at what’s happened, it’s those entities or individuals in some cases or issues evolving towards the president's position,” Spicer said.