Trump's Big CON: It's All About the Show, Explained

UPDATE:  And re-read the Washington Post, President Trump wants to put on a show. Governing matters less., which noted that:

"Last spring, while reporting The Washington Post’s biography of Donald Trump, I asked an executive who had worked for Trump for more than three decades to help me understand a central contradiction about the man: How could he be at once the micromanager who in the 1980s would call an employee at 2 a.m. and order her out of bed to clean up litter he’d noticed in the lobby of one of his buildings, and also the boss who was so detached that he claimed to be ignorant of his hotels’ finances as they fell into bankruptcy?

The executive offered this guidance: 'If you’re ever confused about Trump’s motives, go to showman first.' The building lobby was a showcase for the Trump brand, requiring the close attention of the man behind the name; the finances were backstage stuff, easily ignored.

Those words keep coming back to me as the timeworn rituals of Washington are washed out by the bright glare of President Trump at center stage. News conferences, diplomatic summits, relations with Congress, campaign-style rallies — the public-facing aspects of the presidency are being blown up, flipped on their heads, transformed into platforms for the master marketer to play out his unique approach to brand enhancement.

What Washington has been trained to perceive as disorder — a blizzard of contradictions, a president saying one thing while his top appointees say the opposite — is actually a long-running theatrical event, The Trump Show, a time-tested method by which the star builds excitement, demands attention and creates soap-operatic story lines that at least superficially seem like success. The most important thing about this presidency, to the man in the Oval Office, is how it looks. . .

Great theater both entertains and confronts. Trump gets the first part — his brand of performance aims to deploy his audacity and his authority to rev up the audience and soak up attention. But neither at his campaign rallies nor in the opening weeks of his presidency has he challenged the crowds’ thinking. The Trump Show is, as ever, a spectacle, a cavalcade of provocations. It is designed not to prompt thought or even to persuade, but to sell tickets to the next performance."

"Let’s dispense once and for all with the fiction that Donald Trump doesn’t have a strategy. It may be a deeply-flawed strategy for reasons the neophyte president is not yet savvy enough to appreciate, but make no mistake: there is a strategy. . .

He cares less about winning the [travel ban] case than reassuring his base. . .

[T]he president is trying to maintain his populist street cred and show his true believers that he’s not going wobbly on them after five months in Washington, despite back-tracking on more of his campaign promises than he’s kept.

Trump has always been a flashy show horse. . .

[Now w]ith his agenda imperiled, Trump increasingly seems determined to create an aura of effectiveness in the hopes that core supporters already inclined to support him won’t be able to tell the difference between optics and substance. . .

Consider this: 'Trump employed all the trappings traditionally reserved for signing major bills into law as he kicked off ‘infrastructure week’ on Monday: the stately East Room full of dignitaries, a four-piece military band to serenade, celebratory handshakes and souvenir presidential pens for lawmakers, promises of 'a great new era' and a 'revolution' in technology. Yet the documents Trump signed amid all the pomp were not new laws or even an executive order. They were routine letters to Congress, relaying support for a minimally detailed plan in Trump’s budget to transfer control of the nation’s air traffic control system to a private nonprofit group,' the Los Angeles Times’s Noah Bierman reports.

But low-information voters may not be able to tell the difference when they see the b-roll of the ceremony on TV or an image in the paper.

It follows a pattern of Trump over-promising and under-delivering: 'He touted the unveiling of his tax overhaul in April but released only a one-page set of bulleted talking points,' Noah writes. 'Just last week, he tweeted that his tax bill is proceeding ‘ahead of schedule,’ though he has submitted no bill to Congress … Trump held a Rose Garden ceremony in May to celebrate House passage of a bill to repeal Obamacare … even as Republicans in the Senate served notice that the House bill was unacceptable. His promised ‘beautiful wall’ on the southern border is not yet on a drawing board. Likewise, many of the executive orders Trump has signed failed to live up to the president’s rhetoric.'

Bloomberg’s Toluse Olorunnipa noticed an amusing pattern and just posted a smart trend story about it: 'From overhauling the tax code to releasing an infrastructure package to making decisions on NAFTA and the Paris climate agreement, Trump has a common refrain: A big announcement is coming in just 'two weeks.' It rarely does. … Trump’s habit of self-imposing -- then missing -- two-week deadlines for major announcements has become a staple of his administration … The president has used two-week timelines to sidestep questions from reporters or brag to CEOs at the White House. But his pronouncements have also flummoxed investors, Congress and occasionally even members of his staff.'

Is this strategy gimmicky and cynical? Absolutely. Does it work? For millions of people, yes. . .

The president believes that, so long as grassroots activists back him, his adopted party’s lawmakers will have no choice but to follow. The fact that so many politicians have caved and capitulated over the past two years has taught him that he can get away with his unusual behavior. What the Republican governing class has never understood is that Trump doesn’t really respect people who kowtow to him; he sees it as a sign of their weakness. Seeing such timidity has only emboldened this president to pursue this bottom-up, outside-in approach. There is no evidence he will change until elected Republicans buck him en masse.

Read the Washington Post, Trump signals to his base that he is a man of action.