Now that the America-firsters are more or less in place, others are saying that the President has assembled a ‘war cabinet.’
That strikes me as giving Psycho Trump too much credit. His goal isn’t war. His goal is attention, and he pursues it through a borish, juvenile belligerence that could result in war but more through hare-brained miscalculation than any conscious strategy.
My feeling is that Trump fears war, as he fears any real-world consequences he could not control. On some primal level, he probably considers reality an annoyance, or even an enemy. He lives in TV land, and there he directs, produces, and stars in the Trump Show. The Show is an absurd, never-ending farce where Trump invents a crisis, receives groveling suitors, backs down while declaring victory, and then invents another crisis. The Show has nothing to do with solving problems or managing conflicts. But it is a ratings machine, where all eyes are focussed on him.
That’s why I believe it’s misleadng to call Trump a nationalist. The term implies that Trump puts America first. Trump puts Trump first, and ‘America First’ is the rhetorical means he uses to achieve that more visceral goal.
So in the end, the new cabinet is not a war cabinet per se, although may be end up being used for that purpose. It’s a Trump Show cabinet, where all the restraints of the President’s attention-craving impulses are gone. That development may take us to war, or merely to complete absurdity. It may take us to both.