President-elect Trump may have been “elected chieftain,” as Secretary of State John Kerry put it, but his policy priorities will be constrained by a need for consensus.
Kerry made the comments during a question-and-answer session with young transatlantic professionals in Germany, including one woman who asked “what do liberal Americans want us to do” now that German Chancellor Angela Merkel is “literally here, the last leader of the free world.” Kerry pointed out that Trump has modified some policies since Election Day and suggested that Congress and European leaders might continue to influence him.
“There are a lot of leaders still in the United States,” Kerry said during the Berlin event. “And part of the nature of our democracy in the United States — and I think it’s true here in Germany — is you may have a powerful position and you may be the elected chieftain, but you still have to reach out to people and you still have to listen to people, you still have to build consensus, and you have to make things happen.”
The outgoing secretary of state underlined the point by noting that “even in countries that are totalitarian by most measurements, there’s a lot of consensus-building … our future is not defined just by an election. I guess that’s the bottom line of what I’m saying.”
Trump’s presidential victory prompted attendees to ask if he would imperil women’s rights and “the foreign policy agenda of the U.S. about multiculturalism,” questions Kerry described as “very fair” but didn’t answer. His initial statement provided perhaps the most direct reply to such concerns, as he pointed out that Trump has already changed some of his positions since coming off the campaign trail.
“He isn’t fully defined in a lot of those things, and we’re watching that process,” Kerry said. “I’ve already seen that a lot of things have changed. I mean, evidently, there’s no deportation now of 12 million people … there’s no building of a wall, there’s closing of some fence and this and that. There’s no — we’re not going to prosecute the candidate he ran against … I mean, there are a whole bunch of things that have changed. So I don’t think anybody can predict to you exactly where we’re heading here.”
