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March 29, 2024

Those who trusted Trump are finding themselves cooked

Is Donald Trump a Kanamit?

The Kanamits are the space aliens who come to Earth in an old “Twilight Zone” episode. “We ask only that you trust us, only that you simply trust us,” the benevolent-seeming Kanamit emissary tells United Nations delegates while promising to foster the general uplift of the human race.

The emissary leaves behind a book in the Kanamit language. A team of analysts translates the title as “To Serve Man,” but they get no further. Only as masses of credulous people board spaceships for what they think will be a wonderful visit to the Kanamit planet that the real nature of the book becomes clear.

“Don’t get on that ship!” cries the analyst who figures out the book’s true purpose. “The rest of the book, ‘To Serve Man,’ it’s … it’s a cookbook!”

Welcome to the Trump presidency.

If you’re Jeff Sessions, Rex Tillerson, James Mattis or H.R. McMaster, you will have learned by now what it means to have been served by your boss. If you are a less senior member of the administration, consider that your seasoning in government service has its own culinary contronym.

The attorney general was reminded of how ill-fated his voyage to Planet Trump is destined to be, after the president blasted the Justice Department for its “watered down, politically correct” travel ban.

“These tweets may make some ppl feel better,” lawyer George Conway tweeted Monday, “but they certainly won’t help OSG get 5 votes in SCOTUS, which is what actually matters. Sad.” OSG is the Office of the Solicitor General, SCOTUS is the Supreme Court, and George is Kellyanne’ Conway’s better half.

Then it was the turn of the secretaries of state and defense, after the president blasted Qatar on Twitter for “funding of Radical Ideology.” This was as Tillerson and Mattis were seeking to broker a diplomatic compromise between the Persian Gulf’s sore thumb and its angry neighbors.

“His tweets, which a senior White House official said were not a result of any policy deliberation, sowed confusion about America’s strategy and its intentions toward a key military partner,” the Times’ Mark Landler noted Tuesday. Qatar hosts thousands of U.S. service members at the Al Udeid Air Base.

But even this was small beer next to the humiliation the president visited on his loyal national security adviser in Brussels last month. As Politico’s Susan Glasser reported, the president deleted a crucial reference to NATO’s Article 5 mutual-defense provision from his speech at the alliance’s headquarters without so much as giving McMaster a heads-up.

At the time of the speech I thought the omission was more of a squirt of Trumpian mindlessness than a recrudescence of Bannonite isolationism, and gave the president a pass for it in my column of May 26. Note to self: Next time I feel inclined to give this president the benefit of the doubt, I’ll lie down until the feeling passes.

Now, lessons must be drawn.

For those who serve the president: The price of your diligence is his flippancy. The price of your efforts to protect him is his willingness to expose you. The price of your sacrifice — of time, profit, career and, in the long run, reputation — is his indifference. The price of your loyalty is his contempt.

For those who think the president’s character flaws can be softened, or overcome, by the caliber of his advisers: You can’t use water to put out a grease fire.

For those who believe that checks and balances will contain the damage that a president can wreak: Twitter. The president’s digital compulsions may be less obscene than Anthony Weiner’s, but they’re more consequential.

Twitter is the electric current that connects populist to populus, demagogue to mob, the short circuit by which representative government becomes irrelevant. Trump may have hurt his chances of winning five Supreme Court votes with a tweet that betrayed the insincerity of his own “politically correct” travel ban.

But he has animated his base to blame the failures of his policies on someone other than himself. What’s a loss at the high court when he knows he can use it to capitalize politically from the next terrorist attack in the U.S.?

“Trust us,” says the Kanamit, and mankind did. “Believe me,” the president likes to say, and people like Sessions and McMaster did. As the narrator in “The Twilight Zone” observes, such is “the cycle of going from dust to dessert, the metamorphosis of being the ruler of a planet to an ingredient in someone’s soup.”

Bret Stephens is a columnist for The New York Times.

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