\n<\/p>\n
This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.<\/p>\n
Presidents are, like the rest of us, flawed human beings. Many of them had volcanic tempers: Harry Truman, Richard Nixon, and Joe Biden, among others, reportedly could sling Anglo-Saxonisms with gusto. In public, most of them managed to convey an image of geniality. (Nixon might be the exception there, but he embraced being an uptight square and his admirers found it endearing.) But all of them, regardless of their personality, had at least some notion about government, some sense of what they wanted to accomplish in the most powerful office in the world.<\/p>\n
Donald Trump exhibits no such guiding belief. From his first day as a candidate, Trump has appeared animated by anger, fear, and, most of all, pettiness, a small-minded vengefulness that takes the place of actual policy making. It taints the air in the executive branch like a forgotten bag of trash in a warm house on a summer day\u2014even when you can\u2019t see it, you know it\u2019s there.<\/p>\n
Trump\u2019s first run for office was itself a kind of petty tantrum. Trump had always wanted to run for president, a wish he expressed as far back as the 1980s. But Trump\u2019s journey from pro-abortion-rights New York oligarch to anti-abortion Republican populist picked up speed after President Barack Obama humiliated him at the 2011 White House Correspondents\u2019 Association dinner. Trump denies that Obama\u2019s jibes moved him to run, but he jumped into the open GOP field once Obama\u2019s two terms were coming to an end, and to this day, he remains obsessed with the first and only Black president\u2014to the point that he misspoke on at least one occasion and said that he defeated Obama, not Hillary Clinton, to win his first term.<\/p>\n
Trump\u2019s second term has been a cavalcade of pettiness; his lieutenants have internalized the president\u2019s culture of purges, retribution, and loyalty checks. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth\u2019s insistence, for example, on renaming U.S. military bases after Confederate leaders has led to clumsy explanations about how the bases are now named for men who had names that are exactly like the 19th-century traitors\u2019. This kind of explanation is the sort of thing that high-school teachers get from teenage smart alecks who think they\u2019re being clever in class.<\/p>\n
My colleague Shane Harris recently reported an appalling story about how former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper sponsored a rescue dog to become a working animal at the CIA. He named the dog Susan, after his late wife, an animal lover who volunteered at a local shelter. Clapper was looking forward to attending Susan\u2019s graduation ceremony at a CIA facility\u2014but the agency, taking what it believed to be Trump\u2019s lead, barred him from even setting foot on CIA property. (Trump despises Clapper, and blames him for what Trump calls \u201cthe Russia hoax,\u201d among other slights against the president.) As Shane wrote: \u201cThe upshot is that an octogenarian Air Force retiree who spent half a century in his nation\u2019s service was not allowed to attend a party for a dog he essentially donated to the government and named after his dead wife.\u201d<\/p>\n
Meanwhile, those still in government are being harassed and driven out of public service because of who they know\u2014or even what they might be thinking. Over at the FBI, as I wrote earlier this month, Director Kash Patel is reportedly strapping people to polygraph machines to find out whether anyone is saying bad things about him. Michael Feinberg, a senior FBI counterintelligence agent, was told that he could accept a demotion or resign because of his friendship with Peter Strzok, an agent fired years ago who has long been an object of Trump\u2019s wrath.<\/p>\n
Now Trump wants to fire Fed Chairman Jerome Powell because Powell refuses to lower interest rates and make Trump\u2019s economy look better than it is. (Inflation and joblessness are both rising.) Trump can\u2019t summarily fire Powell, but the president is taking the Fed chair\u2019s opposition so personally that he is already ginning up a baseless accusation that Powell is somehow guilty of malfeasance on a building project, on the theory that it might be the kind of misconduct that would allow Trump to remove him.<\/p>\n
Even on matters of grave international importance, Trump governs by emotion rather than any coherent sense of policy. A few weeks ago, the president seemed to change course on the war in Ukraine. He said he would allow arms shipments to continue, and promised last week to have advanced systems such as Patriot missile batteries sent to Ukraine. Trump\u2019s own Defense Department was caught flat-footed after repeatedly putting a stop to those shipments. (After all, Trump and Vice President J. D. Vance seemed to be on Vladimir Putin\u2019s side after they engaged in an unseemly\u2014and yes, petty\u2014ambush of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in the White House this past winter.)<\/p>\n
But Putin had finally done something worse than murdering thousands of Ukrainian civilians and kidnapping Ukrainian children: He had made Donald Trump look like a chump. Putin refused to help Trump fulfill an unwise campaign promise by acceding to a cease-fire. Instead, the Russian president has unleashed some of the most violent attacks of the war, a raised middle finger to the White House and its chief occupant.<\/p>\n
You can do a lot of bad things around Trump. You can ignore court orders. You can deport people without due process. You can let Ukrainian rivers fill with the blood of innocent people. But when you make Trump look weak or stupid, you\u2019ve gone too far.<\/p>\n
Trump\u2019s promises on Ukraine might amount to very little. Emotional reactions pass quickly, and Trump\u2019s attention span is measured in milliseconds; he flip-flops on everything from trade to friendships. So far, some shipments to Ukraine have resumed, but Trump has also offered Putin a respite of 50 days to come to the table\u2014which would be just about the number of days left of good weather for military operations. (\u201cFifty days\u201d could also be just another version of the way Trump uses \u201ctwo weeks\u201d to punt issues that he doesn\u2019t want to deal with further downstream.)<\/p>\n
Now Trump\u2019s attention seems to be on strong-arming the Washington Commanders and Cleveland Guardians football and baseball teams into reclaiming their old names, the Redskins and the Indians. It\u2019s possible that Trump is responding to some hidden groundswell of nostalgia. He\u2019s also not the first president to get fired up about Washington\u2019s home team: Obama was clearly interested in getting rid of the Redskins name, and undoing anything Obama did is something of a Trumpian rule.<\/p>\n
More likely, however, Trump is focusing on this small issue in the hopes of picking a racist scab that will occupy the attention of his base\u2014because much of that base right now is deeply angry about a supposed cover-up relating to Trump\u2019s former friend and the convicted sex offender, Jeffrey Epstein.<\/p>\n
Yet again, when trying to throw red meat to the faithful, Trump picked something small and silly. Trump rules by appeals to grievances\u2014rather than focusing on substantive national problems\u2014because at least some of the MAGA movement revels in that kind of cruelty. This culture-warring behavior helped get him elected, and Trump\u2019s voters have been willing to join him on these capricious roller-coaster rides for the first six months of his second term. But roller coasters don\u2019t have actual destinations, and sooner or later, even the most dedicated riders will want to get off.<\/p>\n
Related:<\/p>\n
\nHere are three new stories from The Atlantic:<\/strong><\/p>\n Today\u2019s News<\/strong><\/p>\n Dispatches<\/strong><\/p>\n Explore all of our newsletters here.<\/em><\/p>\n Evening Read<\/strong><\/p>\n Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Getty.<\/p>\n Should You Sunscreen Your Cat?<\/p>\n By Katherine J. Wu<\/p>\n For all of the eons that animal life has existed on Earth, the sun has been there too. And for all of those eons, animal life has had only one solution for intense exposure to the sun: evolution. Some creatures have thick, dark skin that\u2019s resistant to UV harm; others sprout fur, scales, or feathers that block the sun\u2019s rays. Many fish, reptiles, amphibians, and birds may produce a compound that protects their cells against the sun\u2019s damaging effects. Hippos, weirdly, ooze a reddish, mucus-y liquid from their pores that absorbs light before it can destroy their skin. And plenty of creatures have evolved behaviors that take advantage of their environment\u2014rolling around in dirt or mud, simply retreating into the shade.<\/p>\n But certain modern animals have sun problems that natural selection can\u2019t easily solve.<\/p>\n Read the full article.<\/p>\n More From The Atlantic<\/em><\/p>\n Culture Break<\/p>\n Jonathan Wenk \/ Columbia Pictures \/ Everett Collection<\/p>\n Read. Tyler Austin Harper recommends eight books that break down what\u2019s really going on with America\u2019s universities.<\/p>\n Watch. In 2020, David Sims shared 25 feel-good movies perfect for rewatching\u2014whether you need a laugh, a dose of nostalgia, or just an escape from everyday stress.<\/p>\n Play our daily crossword.<\/p>\n Rafaela Jinich contributed to this newsletter.<\/em><\/p>\n When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting <\/em>The Atlantic.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here. Presidents are, like the rest of us, flawed human beings. Many of them had volcanic tempers: Harry Truman, Richard<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":11673,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[55],"tags":[1671,5125,3888],"class_list":{"0":"post-11672","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-social-issues","8":"tag-atlantic","9":"tag-pettiness","10":"tag-presidential"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11672","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=11672"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11672\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/11673"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=11672"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=11672"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=11672"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n