America’s New President Is Not a Rational Actor | Foreign Policy

When sober voices like distinguished professors at Harvard sound alarms like this, you know that the situation is serious.  Yet candid responses to Trump's foolishness and extremism are limited to academics, journalists, abd some Democrats.  We desperately need Republicans to stand up and say that the emperor has no clothes. - gwc
America’s New President Is Not a Rational Actor | Foreign Policy
by Stephen Walt (Professor of International Relations, Harvard University)

A lot of people have been appalled by Donald Trump’s behavior during the transition, at his inauguration, and in his first week in office. You can count me among them. But I also find his actions baffling from the perspective of Trump’s own self-interest. People who opposed his administration’s policies should take heart, because his conduct so far will make it harder to proceed as he seems to want.

For starters, Trump made zero effort to exploit the honeymoon period traditionally accorded a new president by the press, didn’t try to drive a wedge or two in the large coalition that opposes him, and declined to appeal to a broader sense of national unity. Thus far he has played entirely to his base, painting a dark portrait of a crumbling America where everybody except Trump himself is untrustworthy, corrupt, deceitful, and not to be heeded at all. The result: a president who lost the popular vote by 2.5 million people is even less popular now, and he enters office with the lowest approval ratings of any new president in history.

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