A small spat arose during today’s Editors recording, as Charlie, Noah, and Rich debated the merits of Trump’s recent National Security Strategy announcement. In his exit question to the panelists after a discussion of the document, Rich asked everyone to give the strategy a letter grade. Noah gave it an “F,” while Charlie gave it a “C,” prompting Noah to push back and ask why he’d “give it a passing grade when it fails in its objective, which is to establish a national security strategy for this administration.”
Rich thinks it represents a direction for the administration, and, despite the fact that “Trump will do what Trump wants to do and is erratic . . . if you do the Venn diagram, there’s significant overlap with what Trump basically thinks about the world in this document.”
Charlie says he’s “just not persuaded at all that this is the considered product of people who have sat down and tried to contrive a geopolitical worldview.”
“It does not describe our shared reality,” says Noah, “with the exception, you can say, of the drug boat strikes and the attempt to establish some direct doctrinal thinking around that. But it is definitely an attempt to describe retroactively what the president has sort of settled on . . . in an ad hoc basis.”
While Rich and Charlie do agree that this is a “Trumpy” document, Rich believes that it “reflects a significant aspect of his worldview.” Charlie, however, believes this is transient.
“I don’t think there is such a thing as Trumpism. I think the whole thing is an attempt to place an ideology on the behavior of one man. And this is where he is right now. But I don’t think that that a doctrine makes.”
The Editors podcast is recorded on Tuesdays and Fridays every week and is available wherever you listen to podcasts.