Lincoln had an advisory ‘team of rivals.’ Trump has a team of flunkies
I just finished reading a piece in Politico about how “extraordinarily weak” President Trump’s national security team has been. It’s worth a read as a round-up of the dynamics and personalities that Trump has picked as advisors, but you can bypass the article and come to the same conclusion by just considering the results of Trump’s “America First” approach to policy.
First off, his conquest of mighty Venezuela stands out as a successful initiative, if you consider overwhelming a country of 28 million people (and about the size of Oklahoma and Texas combined) a resounding success. As an old jarhead with a 13-month tour of duty in Vietnam (and a medal to show for my efforts) in my service record, I was a little put off when our bone-spurred, Vietnam-dodging commander-in-chief called the Venezuela venture “an amazing military feat.”
Nothing against the brave men and women who went in and did the actual fighting – I’ve been that route, I know it well, and I salute them – but to do a rhetorical, high-fiving dance over beating up a hapless little country like Venezuela is boastful at worst, unseemly at best.
More troubling is that Trump and his team of advisors approached the war they started in Iran with the delusion that what they did in Venezuela they could do in Iran – and do it in a matter of four to six weeks. As it is, the weeks have stretched into months, creating a serious and expensive disruption of oil supplies around the world.
What’s more, the national security advisory team’s policies have compounded the mess made by Trump’s economic advisors, causing an “America First” double whammy. The president’s tariff policy and the subsequent gas price shock created by the Iran war gave us an April inflation number, 3.8%, that was the worst in three years. Reacting to the April data, Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s, said “American households are going to continue to struggle trying to manage through this, and that’s going to be the case for the foreseeable future.”
Meantime, Trump and his teams have overseen a serious downgrade in our country’s reputation around the globe. That decline is palpable. It has materialized into a significant drop in international tourists visiting our country. Last year, foreign visitation dropped by 5.5%, costing our tourism sector $14 billion in sales.
My titled comparison of Lincoln’s team to Trump’s make me wish that Trump would have the courage to bring in some contrarian advisors like Lincoln’s, whose team included players that were often in disagreement with him. Lincoln could accept and probably encouraged conflicting advice, which gave him the range of options he needed to win a civil war and start the process of healing a fractured nation.
That’s what propelled Honest Abe to his status as one of our greatest presidents. Sadly for Trump’s reputation, his lock-step leadership style will probably put him on the other end of that spectrum.
John Tsitrian is a businessman and writer from the Black Hills. He was a weekly columnist for the Rapid City Journal for 20 years. His articles and commentary have also appeared in The Los Angeles Times, The Denver Post and The Omaha World-Herald. Tsitrian served in the Marines for three years (1966-69), including a 13-month tour of duty as a radioman in Vietnam. Republish with permission.
Photo: Secretay of State Rubio with Trump, public domain, wikimedia commons
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