The following article by Kenneth T. Wash was posted on the U.S. News and World Report website March 17, 2017:
President Donald Trump prefers to be sealed inside his White House bubble of isolation and adoration.
Donald Trump is enjoying the most ostentatious lifestyle of any president in a half century and perhaps in U.S. history. Even the richest presidents of the past, including John F. Kennedy and Franklin D. Roosevelt, had a sense of limits in showing off their wealth. Not Trump. He loves to display his gilded lifestyle and vast fortune, exemplified by his glittering homes at Mar-a-Lago in Florida and Trump Tower in Manhattan. He is shattering the norms of how America’s top leader behaves and operates, and it could set precedents, both good and bad, for how presidents operate in the future. One impact could be in reducing transparency in how the president makes decisions, where he gets his ideas, and whom he turns to for advice.
Details of Trump’s presidential lifestyle are gradually emerging. Politico found that Trump “is sticking to his comfort zone,” spending most nights either at the White House, sometimes alone, or at Mar-a-Lago during his golf-filled weekends. He has visited a few other places, such as a Boeing plant, a Florida elementary school and military bases but the people he is in contact with are generally the rich and the nation’s elites, including business executives and members of Congress. He still loves to address big, adoring crowds as he did during the campaign and which he did again in Nashville this week. He is animated by the energy of his supporters, which is common among presidents. The difference is that Trump often seems sealed inside the White House bubble of isolation and adoration and he likes it there. The information he gets about the wider world is usually drawn from cable TV news shows and friends around the country, especially in New York, who communicate with him via his cellphone and emails, White House officials and Trump’s friends say.
His wife Melania and 10-year-old son Barron have remained in New York until Barron completes the current school year. This seems to have resulted in Trump being rather footloose after business hours. His cellphone chats leave White House aides unclear what he is hearing and what his sources of information are. They know he stays up late watching TV, then gets up early to watch more TV and read some newspapers and make more phone calls. He will often vent his anger and frustrations on Twitter, his favorite form of communication, which gives him a direct pipeline to millions of Americans without having his views filtered through the news media or through his staff.
He is using the same public-relations techniques that brought him enormous success in business. “I play to people’s fantasies,” he wrote in his first book, “The Art of the Deal.” “People want to believe that something is the biggest and the greatest and the most spectacular. I call it truthful hyperbole. It’s an innocent form of exaggeration – and a very effective form of promotion.”
Trump’s problem is that the presidency, at least up to now, has required different standards. The expectations are much higher than for a business mogul. And so he is constantly under scrutiny by the media for lying, spreading falsehoods or changing his mind on policy issues, including the budget priorities he outlined this week. This damages his credibility except among hard-core supporters who remain loyal to him. He has yet to expand his base, and his job-approval rating is already historically low for new presidents, who usually enjoy more of a honeymoon with the public, Congress and the media than Trump is experiencing.
In terms of ideology, he is mostly conservative, as illustrated by his call for tax cuts, increased military spending, reductions in environmental programs and slashing regulations by executive action. But he is veering away from traditional Republicanism by opposing free trade agreements that GOP leaders have endorsed for a generation. He opposes cutbacks in Social Security and Medicare that GOP leaders have advocated for years. He favors massive federal spending on infrastructure, an idea popularized by Democrats including Barack Obama.
But it is on matters of lifestyle and modus operandi that Trump’s new approach emerges the most starkly. Among the “unpresidential” aspects of his preening presidency: He makes wild statements with no evidence to back him up, such as his claim that his predecessor Obama ordered wiretaps to spy on Trump during the campaign. He sometimes spreads falsehoods such as his argument that the crowd that witnessed his inauguration was the biggest in history.
Trump, a billionaire real estate developer, says adjusting to life in the White House has been no big deal. “Well, it started off being a surreal experience,” he told Fox News. “You know, you wake up and you’re in the White House or you’re walking through the front door and it’s the White House and all of that. But you do get over that.”
Regarding Trump’s ostentatious lifestyle, political scientist Bill Galston says, “If he delivers for the people who supported him, they won’t care.” Galston, a former White House adviser to President Bill Clinton, says about one-third of the population consists of white working class people who are the core of Trump’s backers. “Can he bring back jobs in the steel and coal industries?” Galston asks, adding that working-class Americans are “expecting to see the difference. These people say, ‘It’s my lifestyle I’m worried about, not his.'” If he truly helps them, his costly trips to Mar-a-Lago, his frequent golf games and his over-the-top lifestyle won’t matter very much. If he doesn’t deliver, the monarchical way Trump lives could be very harmful to his claim to be in touch with everyday America.
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