Respect or Fear? In the course of his losing race with the teleprompter during his Oval Office address on Dec. 17, President Donald Trump returned to a theme that obsesses him — respect. Even before his entry into politics, Trump was convinced that “weak” leaders including Ronald Reagan, the Bushes, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama were despised by other nations and that the U.S. was a laughingstock. As of 2016, according to a Washington Post tally, Trump had fumed that other nations were “laughing at us” at least 100 times.
After a litany of lies and an extra helping of gibberish (“We had men playing in women’s sports, transgender for everybody, crime at record levels with law enforcement and words such as that just absolutely forbidden” — words such as what?), Trump closed with the respect theme:
“When the world looks at us next year, let them see a nation that is loyal to its citizens, faithful to its workers, confident to its identity, certain to its destiny and the envy of the entire globe. We are respected again, like we have never been respected before.”
Suppose you are driving in a foreign country. It’s late at night and you get pulled over by a police officer. After examining your passport and driver’s license, he narrows his eyes, gives his palm a few smacks with his nightstick and demands a $1,000 bribe to let your infraction go. You might pay the man, but do you come away from this encounter respecting him? Or do you drive off, shaken and angry, concluding that the cop and maybe this whole country is rotten?
The president seems genuinely not to grasp the difference between respect and fear, and because he has surrounded himself with fawning toadies, there isn’t anyone available to explain it to him. Accordingly, here is my modest effort to do so.
Dear President Trump,
Of all the wrong things you hold in your heart, perhaps the most gobsmacking is your cherished notion that people respect you when they kiss your ass.
That’s not true. They despise you on two levels. On the first level, because you’ve managed to get elected president, you do have leverage that nearly everyone must grapple with in some fashion. When you use that leverage to extort lavish praise from people, they will offer it. But they don’t mean a word of it. And in their hearts they hate you for demeaning them in this fashion instead of treating them with respect. The second level of contempt arises from the knowledge that your extravagant need for attention and praise is evidence of your emotional stuntedness. With every renaming of a building you are sending up a bat signal that screams, “I am so insecure!” And here’s the truth: You cannot piggyback on the respect John F. Kennedy earned by slapping your name on the arts center that was named by statute to be his living memorial. Your name may be side by side with his on the marble, but in our hearts, you will never be respected. Quite the opposite for all your depredations and twice on Sunday for attempting to hijack Kennedy’s honor.
It gets worse. It isn’t just that your gnawing need for recognition betrays a personality disorder, it’s that your particular style of seeking it really does provoke ridicule — that’s another word for “they’re laughing at us.”
The “Gulf of America”? Musing about absorbing Canada into the U.S. whether they like it or not? Threatening to expropriate Greenland from our ally Denmark? Truly great nations don’t need to prove their manhood by lording it over smaller ones. Panting after a Nobel Peace Prize so flagrantly that you’re claiming to have settled eight wars? In two of those cases, there was no war. In the other six, the conflicts are either ongoing or were largely settled without Trump. Offering Trump meme coins for sale to the highest bidder? Auctioning off pardons to criminals and leaders on the take? You bet they’re laughing.
Among the specific nations whose contempt Trump most often cited against other presidents, the go-to was China. China was supposedly always gloating about getting one over on Joe Biden, Obama, etc. Just in the past few weeks, Trump has agreed to give China access to high-end microchips that are crucial for commercial and military use (and which were withheld by Biden), has held his tongue as China has pressured our ally Japan over its support of Taiwan and soft-pedaled the threat from China in his national security strategy document. A younger Trump might have demanded, “What did we get in return?” Nothing.
Our traditional allies are not always laughing. More often they’re wringing their hands as you luxuriate in the company of international outlaws like Vladimir Putin and Nayib Bukele, and mouth stupendous lies such as that Volodymyr Zelensky started the war with Russia.
In short, there has never been a president who has made the U.S. less respected than you. Whether your twisted ego can recognize that is open to question, but what is not open to doubt is that virtually the whole world knows.
Mona Charen is policy editor of The Bulwark, host of the “Beg to Differ” podcast and author of “Hard Right: The GOP’s Drift Toward Extremism.”