There are a lot of grating things about Trump’s critics, but perhaps the most frustrating one for me is how so many of them still fail to understand the fact that so much of what he says and does has to be understood not as literal statements of what he thinks at any given moment, but rather as tools of persuasion meant to move people into doing what he wants.
He is a businessman. A salesman. A hype man. He is an American type more akin to P.T. Barnum than a college professor or a traditional diplomat.
We can argue about whether that is the best temperament for a president–sometimes it is great, and other times it is grating–but whenever I hear somebody decry some departure Trump has made from his previous utterances, I roll my eyes. More often than not, Trump did change positions–his ultimate goal is the same–he just tailored his new statements…
