The president surprises his NRA hosts with a new executive order, signed on stage.
Indianapolis, Ind.
President Trump is known for his showmanship, but he may have reached a new high (or new low) when, at this year’s National Rifle Association annual meeting, he announced a new executive order withdrawing the United States from the United Nations Small Arms Treaty, revealed he had brought the order to the stage in a folder, signed it at the podium, held up the signed order for everyone to see, and then threw his pen into the crowd like a rock-star guitarist rewarding a fan with a pick.
Before announcing the order, Trump giddily teased, “I haven’t even told Chris or Wayne about this” (referring to Chris Cox, the director of the NRA’s Institute for Legislative Action, and Wayne LaPierre, the NRA’s executive vice president), letting the tens of thousands in the Lucas Oil Stadium know they were about to witness a big surprise. “The good thing with me is you never know. You never know.”
Some might argue that “never knowing” is in fact a deeply unnerving trait in a president. But it is also an irreplaceable element of Trump’s appeal, and certainly the keystone of how he manages to dominate the news cycle almost every day of the year, two and a half years into his presidency. You have to watch, because you never know what he’s going to do next.
Back when Trump was running in the Republican presidential primary, a television-industry professional observed to me that viewers of fictional programs could handle almost anything except predictability, which leads to boredom. The moment a viewer felt like they almost always knew what was going to happen next, they would change the channel. This industry professional contended Trump was whooping his GOP-primary rivals because he was relentlessly unpredictable, and his rivals were largely predictable to the point of being boring.
This observation undoubtedly has quite a bit of truth to it. We’ve all heard political speeches that have been watered down and intensely reviewed to ensure that nothing even remotely controversial — or interesting — escapes the speaker’s lips. If you follow politics, you’ve undoubtedly sat through some politician’s boilerplate stump speech that is full of happy talk and indistinguishable from the lyrics to Whitney Houston’s “The Greatest Love of All”: “I believe the children are our future. Teach them well and let them lead the way. Show them all the beauty they possess inside.”
In remarks that lasted more than an hour at the NRA convention, Trump mentioned the height of Indiana governor Eric Holcomb, qualitative easing and interest rates, how he and his team were “draining the swamp faster than anyone thought possible,” and invited three citizens who had used firearms to defend themselves in dangerous situations to tell their stories beside him onstage. He used a teleprompter but ad-libbed quite a bit, making his arguments in his characteristically impulsive stream-of-consciousness style.
Every president likes to tout good economic news, and Friday morning brought the news that the U.S. gross domestic product had grown at a healthy 3.2 percent in the previous quarter. Most presidents would offer some standard remarks about how America’s economic engine is humming and how employers are hiring. Trump noted that this was in the year’s first quarter, “always the worst quarter, for whatever reason,” and told the attendees, “Your 401(k)s are going through the roof! The stock market keeps hitting record highs! Everybody’s like a genius now if they buy stocks! They go up! But it can all be taken away if you have the wrong people in office.”
Trump boasted that he had 145 judges confirmed, and that he was on pace to have a larger percentage of federal judges named than any other president, except one. “George Washington! He gets 100 percent, because he named everyone!” Trump lamented, with a hint of comic envy.
He gave the audience a few glimpses of his irritation at the recently completed report from special counsel Robert Mueller: “Democrats have never been angrier, especially now that their collusion delusion has been exposed as a complete and total fraud. . . . Democrats are obsessed with hoaxes, delusions, and witch hunts.”
Conventional politics would suggest a president shouldn’t publicly fume about judges who rule against his administration — it won’t change the judge’s decision, and it may alienate the judge who may rule on future cases involving the administration. Many traditional consultants would argue that if a president is going to criticize a court, he should focus on the particular legal reasoning behind particular decisions. Few would recommend that a president publicly proclaim that an entire federal circuit is stubbornly and hopelessly opposed to him.
Trump, perhaps calculating that his administration’s odds of success on the Ninth Circuit can’t get any worse, painted the circuit judges as intransigent ne’er-do-wells whom the Supreme Court always needs to correct.
“We have the ban — we lost in the Ninth Circuit, we should have won; we lost in the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, and we should have won, and we won at the United States Supreme Court!” Trump said with comic exasperation. Then he complained about a news article that said his administration had lost the legal fight over the so-called “Muslim ban.” Trump mimicked an argument with a reporter saying the president had lost his legal arguments. “They say they meant the lower court, I say, ‘What about the upper court? We won!’”
Some will no doubt argue Trump’s style is better suited for a carnival barker than for a president. Others would say he’s a demagogue. He certainly exaggerates, boasts, blusters, fumes, jokes, and mugs for the camera. But Trump is never boring, and he breaks through the noise of our modern media environment. If the prepared text of a speech is bombing, Trump scraps it and just improvises until he hits upon applause lines and jokes that work. Oftentimes, Trump will simply go through his opponents’ wildest stances and offer variations of “Can you believe this?” And it’s true, his audience can’t believe it — and when Trump shakes his head and shrugs in disbelief they feel as though he’s visibly expressing what they themselves think. When his supporters declare they feel like Trump understands them, it’s often that they laugh at the same things and they’re incredulous about the same things.
Many of Trump’s foes on the Left — and a few on the Right — positively loathe him. But they rarely study him to see what would be useful to emulate. When Trump is on stage, he looks like he’s having the time of his life, and his audiences usually share that excitement. It is almost impossible for a standard-issue talking-point-reciting politician to beat that.