What a difference a week makes. Last Friday Donald Trump took off in Air Force One for the Middle East and Europe. He left behind a Washington and a nation buzzing about his firing of FBI Director James Comey and the multiple reasons he gave for doing so, the meeting he had with the Russian foreign minister a day later and his statement that Comey was a “nut job.”
The I-word — impeachment — was in the air, as Democrats and mainstream media muttered that he was obstructing justice by attempting to throttle investigation of “collusion” with the Russians. The brainy and quirky conservative New York Times columnist Ross Douthat argued that the Trump cabinet should remove him from office as unfit under the 25th Amendment.
So it has been something of a surprise to see the Trump that emerged from Air Force One in Riyadh behaving quite differently, like a competent American president.
In Saudi Arabia he delivered a sobering speech that invites comparison with Barack Obama’s Cairo address to the Muslim world almost exactly eight years ago.
Obama apologized for the misdeeds of the West, covering the Crusades a millennium ago to 19th- and 20th-century colonialism to the overthrow of the Mossaddegh regime eight years before he was born. Trump apologized for nothing.
Instead, before an assembly of leaders from about 50 Muslim nations, Trump denounced in no uncertain terms Islamist extremism and Islamist terror groups and insisted that Muslims must “drive them out” of their places of worship, communities and “holy land.”
Trump also announced a $110 million arms sale to Saudi Arabia and denounced Iran for fueling “the fires of sectarian conflict and terror.” This presumably delighted the Saudis and the leaders of the Gulf states, Egypt and Jordan, who were dismayed at Obama’s eight-year tilt toward Iran.
That started with his cold indifference to the mullah regime’s squashing of the 2009 protests and culminated in the 2015 nuclear agreement, which as Obama adviser Ben Rhodes confessed to the New York Times magazine was pushed through with a false “narrative” and a compliant media “echo chamber.”
At best, the deal delayed Iran’s acquisition of nuclear arms; it has not normalized Iran’s terrorist-supporting behavior, as Obama apparently hoped. Trump’s turn to an explicitly anti-Iran policy may turn out better.
Trump then journeyed to Israel — on the first nonstop Riyadh-Tel Aviv flight — and became the first sitting president to visit the Western Wall. In Bethlehem, at the side of Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas, he condemned the “evil losers” who bombed the concert hall in Manchester. In Rome, emerging from an apparently amicable meeting with Pope Francis, Trump said, “I won’t forget what you said.”
The next stops, as this is written, are a NATO meeting in Brussels and a G-7 meeting in Taormina, Sicily. It’s possible that Trump will commit some dreadful faux pas along the way. But so far he has been behaving presidentially.
That may come as a surprise to critics. New York Times editorialists whined that he was forsaking the policies of his two predecessors, without much explaining why they should be followed. In fact, Trump has not gone as far as his campaign rhetoric sometimes suggested he might.
The U.S. Embassy remains in Tel Aviv, not Jerusalem; the Iranian nuclear deal has not been renounced; America remains (as of this writing) a signer of the Paris climate declaration. John Bolton complains in the Wall Street Journal that Trump has failed to make changes abroad, just as Ann Coulter is complaining that he is failing to build the wall along the southern border.
My tentative conclusion is that Trump is more of a conventional president than he promised or than his critics fear. His early-morning tweets are unnerving; his propensity for unrehearsed ad libs is potentially dangerous; his taste in interior decoration is appalling.
But the notion that he won the presidency through “collusion” with Russia is implausible and is wholly without evidence. His odd campaign statements about Putin and Russia were known to voters, and Hillary Clinton made intelligent criticism of them in the debates.
Democrats and journalists assuming that further investigations will lead to impeachment are pursuing what movie director Alfred Hitchcock called a McGuffin — something a movie’s characters are pursuing that is, to quote Wikipedia, “typically unimportant to the overall plot.”
Now the question is whether Trump, after acting like a president abroad, can start doing so at home.
