Crosstalk: Is Trump working a game plan?

Another reason I don’t pay much attention to “@realDonaldTrump” is that the vast majority of his statements are mean- spirited and show a personal nastiness that I find unacceptable in a leader. And when he isn’t being mean, he’s hammering away at the divide between Democrats and Republicans in attempt to set us against each other.

Yet I am also bothered by the predictable response of those who oppose him, a response which conservatives have begun describing as “Trump Derangement Syndrome.”

Most recently, Trump described the media as “driven insane by their Trump Derangement Syndrome,” in failing to portray him in a positive light due to “anti-Trump haters in the dying newspaper industry.”

In an interview with National Public Radio’s Here and Now program host Robin Young, military analyst Andrew Bacevich, who writes an op-ed for the Boston Globe, suggested that even the president’s critics might agree “Trump Derangement Syndrome” is a problem not just for the president, but for the nation.

The “syndrome” was introduced when President Trump tried to downplay the backlash to his roundly criticized meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin by tweeting, “Some people HATE the fact that I got along well with President Putin of Russia. They would rather go to war than see this. It’s called Trump Derangement Syndrome!”

Critics of Trump “have allowed their understandable dismay with the president to become an all-consuming mania,” Bacevich suggested regarding their response.

“We have a penchant for the paranoid style,” he says. “It occurs periodically in our politics, and it has a tremendously distorting effect. And I think that in some respects, we are experiencing a similar phenomenon right now,” Bacevich explained in the interview.

“It is, I believe, anger on the right — not confined to a small minority — that led to the election of Donald Trump. The focus of my essay was to suggest that now that Trump is president that has induced a paranoid response on the left, among Trump’s critics.”

“Trump has certainly distorted our politics in ways that I certainly don’t approve of. But I fear that this obsessive response to Trump deepens that distortion and that the events of the past couple of weeks — the G-7, the NATO summit, the Helsinki summit — all illustrate this problem. We should take cognizance of the idiotic things that [Trump] says, but I think it’s equally important to recognize that much of what he says actually doesn’t end up producing any substantive change,” he said.

The president, especially on Twitter, is something of a squeaky wheel and journalists are among those getting caught up in Trump’s rhetoric.

“So much of what the president says is utter nonsense, and it’s important to call him on it. But I think it’s also necessary to think about what happens next,” Bacevich sugested.

“So we have a president who makes all of these extraordinary statements about NATO ... and then lo and behold, that doesn’t happen.

“So yes, we should take cognizance of the idiotic things that he says, but I think it’s equally important to recognize that much of what he says actually doesn’t end up producing any substantive change. We’re still in NATO. There still are sanctions on the Russians for their annexation of the Crimea. The G-7 is still up and running. I think his statements are beyond counterproductive, but it doesn’t mean the end of the world.”

“What I’m saying is pay attention to more than Trump.”

I have to agree. When we focus solely on the president, we are missing the real issues and threats to peace and stability in the world today.

— Mark Gibson

Whether you think President Donald Trump has some type of a detailed strategy behind his provocative Twitter blasts and public statements that will ultimately benefit America or that he is a dangerous idiot seems to depend upon your political ideology.

It has become abundantly clear that no matter what Trump does, even if America gains, the Left is going to continue to debase him.

The case for Trump playing a larger and longer game can be made by the fact that, while Democrats and the liberal media are in histrionics over his latest remarks, a great deal of good work is getting done.

For example, after all the doom and gloom predictions of Trump stirring up a trade war that was going to tank the economy, the leader of the European Union agreed this week to work toward resolving trade disputes.

Jean-Claude Juncker met with Trump at the White House and then they held a news conference in the Rose Garden to announce their agreement to discuss zero tariffs, among other things.

Trump announced as a candidate that he was going to change the status quo on trade deals because they were highly unfair to U.S. workers, so it should be no surprise he went there.

“For years, politicians ran for office pledging to crack down on unfair foreign trade, only to get elected, get into office and then do absolutely nothing except let our country get ripped off,” Trump told steel workers Thursday.

“But I’m not like other politicians … I keep my promises. I keep my promises to your industry, and I keep my promises to the workers of this country.”

Who can think it fair that China’s tariff on imported passenger vehicles is six times higher than what the U.S. assesses? Or that Canada imposes dairy tariffs ranging from 201.5 to 313.5 percent under a quota system?

Those are only a couple of examples of egregious trade imbalances.

While Trump stirs the pot with China to equalize trade, his administration has come up with a $12 billion plan to ease the sting of retaliatory tariffs on U.S. farmers through a mix of payments, purchases and promotional efforts.

By providing aid to American farmers, Trump is making it clear to China and EU that he is serious about leveling the playing field.

Trump is also intent on seeing that NATO members spend at least 2 percent of their gross domestic product on their own defense each year as agreed. Currently, only five of the 28 members meet that goal and they are the U.S., Greece, Britain, Estonia and Poland.

Again, Trump is trying to fix a problem created by a past administration.

On the domestic front, Trump is strongly criticized by conservationists of rolling back habitat and resource preservation measures. Yet, his Environmental Protection Agency has cleared up more polluted or contaminated sites in less time and at a faster pace then the Obama administration did in all of 2015 and 2016, according to government records.

No one raised in a politically correct world is going to be comfortable with Trump’s brash way of getting business done. He is stirring up so much wrath that many Democrats now appear to be unhinged.

Not only can they not contain their hate of Trump, it spills out into insults and vitriol against anyone who supports him.

I was concerned about Twitter being the platform for an exchange of threats between Trump and Iranian President Hassan Rouhani. Sure, Rouhani stepped over the line by threatening war with the U.S. if new sanctions were imposed. But a response to his rash statements needed to be well thought out and not reactionary.

Twitter lends itself to juvenile and petty barrages but it’s not the right venue for discussions that can lead to serious consequences. Yet, Trump’s rhetoric worked with North Korea’s dictator Jim Jong-un, who agreed to a historic summit in June to discuss denuclearization ...

Is Trump a genius or an idiot? Only time will provide the answer...

— RaeLynn Ricarte