Rich Lowry of National Review takes stock of the president’s approach to his job.
Trump isn’t a former general or wizened old Indian fighter like [Andrew] Jackson, but he partakes of the same spirit of aggressive defiance.
By all appearances, the least fearful people in the ballroom of the White House Correspondents’ Dinner were a random old man from New York who kept eating his dinner during the mayhem . . . and the target of the attack himself.
Donald Trump is one of the most indomitable figures in the history of our politics. No matter how much he’s mocked or hated, no matter how intense the controversy or how impossible the fix, no matter how dramatic the situation, he never breaks or loses his sense of command.
The ever-ebullient Teddy Roosevelt, who once gave a speech from shot-through notes immediately after an assassination attempt, might tip his cap. (TR takes the cake for badassery in the face of a threat to his life, given that he delivered that 1912 campaign speech while bleeding and with the bullet still lodged in his chest.)
A fundamental part of the Trump ethos is, as he said right after the dinner attack when everything was still confused, “Let the show go on.” For him, the show must never stop, and he’s always at the center of it.
This is one reason that he had the instinct to pump his fist in the air in Butler, Pa., after he’d been bloodied and nearly killed by an assassin’s bullet, demonstrating fight and lack of fear in an instantly iconic moment.
Anyone inclined to dismiss this trait as that of a mere entertainer should consider how showmanship has always had an outsized role in high-level politics; FDR referred to himself, in a positive way, as one of the top actors in the country.
Trump’s belief that he’s always going to prevail, and that if he doesn’t, he’ll find a workaround, gives him an invincible self-confidence.
