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Is President Trump a Tool of Tribal America?
How Trump reveals America’s structural problems
Donald Trump’s presidency is a gift not just to comedians but to intellectuals. You can learn ten times more about the world from his presidency than you could have learned from a Hillary Clinton one. It’s like figuring out how something works by taking the thing apart. What we’re seeing from Trump’s time in office is a broken political system, but Trump’s incompetence as a traditional politician reveals the system for what it really is, whereas a more typical American president would be more effective at neutralizing the narrative and hiding the inner workings of government.
We learn from Trump, the Gump-like outsider in Washington, not only about the White House but about American culture. That culture is tribal, as Amy Chua explains in Political Tribes. The commonplace about American tribalism is that Americans are more divided now than they’ve been since the 1960s. Trump’s unshakable base of support in the Republican Party seems to operate like a cult of personality, which means Trump’s style of management is closer to Putin’s or Kim Jong-un’s than to Justin Trudeau’s or Angela Merkel’s. President Obama was hailed as a messianic leader who was going to renew American politics after his predecessor’s “neoconservative” fiascos, but those lofty expectations…
