When a Diminishing President is a Good Thing

[EasyAce]

For now, worse is better
By George F. Will
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/449974/donald-trump-diminishing-presidency-good

Looking, as prudent people are disinclined to do, on the bright side, there are a few vagrant
reasons for cheerfulness, beginning with this: Summer love is sprouting like dandelions. To the list
of history’s sublime romances — Abelard and Heloise, Romeo and Juliet, Elizabeth Bennet and Mr.
Darcy — add the torrid affair between Anthony Scaramucci and Donald Trump. The former’s sizzling
swoon for the latter is the most remarkable public display of hormonal heat since — here a melancholy
thought intrudes — Jeff Sessions tumbled into love with Trump. Long ago. Last year.

Sessions serves at the pleasure of the president, who does not seem pleased. Still, sympathy for
Sessions is in order: What is he to do? If dignity concerned him, he would resign; but if it did, he
would not occupy a Trump-bestowed office from which to resign. Such are the conundrums of current
politics. Concerning which, there is excessive gloom.

“To see what is in front of one’s nose,” George Orwell wrote, “needs a constant struggle.” An unnoticed
reason for cheerfulness is that in one, if only one, particular, Trump is something the nation did not
know it needed — a feeble president whose manner can cure the nation’s excessive fixation with the
presidency . . .

. . . [T]oday’s president is doing invaluable damage to Americans’ infantilizing assumption that the
presidency magically envelops its occupant with a nimbus of seriousness. After the president went to
West Virginia to harangue some (probably mystified) Boy Scouts about his magnificence and persecutions,
he confessed to Ohioans that Lincoln, but only Lincoln, was more “presidential” than he. So much for
the austere and reticent first president, who, when the office was soft wax, tried to fashion a style of
dignity compatible with republican simplicity.

Fastidious people who worry that the president’s West Virginia and Ohio performances — the alpha
male as crybaby — diminished the presidency are missing the point, which is: For now, worse is better.
Diminution drains this office of the sacerdotal pomposities that have encrusted it. There will be 42 more
months of this president’s increasingly hilarious-beyond-satire apotheosis of himself, leavened by his
incessant whining about his tribulations (“What dunce saddled me with this silly attorney general who
takes my policy expostulations seriously?”). This protracted learning experience, which the public
chose to have and which should not be truncated, might whet the public’s appetite for an adult president
confident enough to wince at, and disdain, the adoration of his most comically groveling hirelings . . .