U.S. President Donald Trump after landing at Palm Beach International Airport on Friday.Roberto Schmidt/Getty Images
Donald Trump is chewing gum and walking at the same time. That pleases some of his supporters, bewilders some of his backers and infuriates nearly all of his critics.
Lyndon Johnson, who knew Gerald Ford when both served on Capitol Hill, once said that the future Republican president (according to a far less salty, sanitized version of the original LBJ comment) couldn’t walk and chew gum at the same time.
Mr. Trump is chewing gum (over Iran) and walking (toward, among manifold other things, ending the Communist government of Cuba that has bedevilled 13 American presidents). Plus he is engaged in constant wrangling with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, battling with traditional American allies, critiquing press coverage of the Middle East war, sending late-night blasts over social media, overseeing the construction of the new White House ballroom and the renovations of the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, engaging in midterm congressional elections where the Republicans may be facing a thumping, and pressing GOP lawmakers to restrict access to voting booths (saying that “only sick, demented or deranged” lawmakers would oppose the legislation).
Mr. Trump, who reaches age 80 in June, is a multitasker for the ages.
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“All presidents have a lot on their plates, because things come at them and they have their own things they want to do,” said David A. Bateman, a political scientist at Cornell University’s Jeb E. Brooks School of Public Policy. “But Trump has ambitions that are different from other presidents, including overhauling the universities, strong-arming the media, changing how American culture operates, fighting the law profession, demolishing part of the White House and worrying about the colour of the draperies – and running a war.”
Indeed, even in Iran there are multi tasks. Here is a brisk summary, as presented recently by White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt:
“The United States has won – the regime is significantly weakened and the evil ayatollah is dead. But the President will not rest until the objectives of Operation Epic Fury are fully realized – destroy their ballistic missiles and their ability to make them, permanently end their ability to build a nuclear bomb, annihilate their Navy and weaken their evil proxies in the region.”
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Some of that wish-list has been fulfilled. Other elements have not and may prove to be beyond even the reach of a President who has said, in frustration but with frankness, that he doesn’t need the help of traditional American allies.
In his possible next endeavour, the transformation of Cuba, he is likely not to seek, and almost surely would not win, the support of the allies who sustained American foreign policy through the 20th-century Cold War and into the new century.
Even so, now Mr. Trump – with a war to run in Iran, another one to monitor in Ukraine, a regime overhaul to track in Venezuela, a political insurgency to mollify after having promised its members no new wars and no nation-building efforts, and with multiple opponents to fume at – seems to believe he has room on his agenda to take on another assignment in the Caribbean. At least he postponed a meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping in Beijing.
But somehow, though American presidents for 47 years have had at hand plans for military action against Iran, Mr. Trump and his team were caught flatfooted when the Strait of Hormuz became impassible.
However, for all his action on fronts that American presidents never breached, Mr. Trump has a very slim legislative agenda beyond his One Big Beautiful Bill that was passed early last summer.
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Barack Obama wanted in his first year (and won) the health care overhaul that bears his name, a children’s health care initiative, land-management legislation, and bills to address the 2008 financial crisis.
Mr. Johnson’s questioning of Mr. Ford’s intelligence and his ability to keep more than one political ball in the air may be because the former had such broad ambitions and crafted such a robust legislative record, first as Senate majority leader and then as president. In his first full year as president (1964), LBJ won passage of 31 pieces of legislation, including a tax cut, landmark civil-rights legislation, and the elements of his War on Poverty. The next year, amid escalation of American involvement in Vietnam, he won passage of 48 bills, including the Voting Rights Act, Medicare, and the creation of the Department of Housing and Urban Development.
And, unlike Mr. Trump, who manoeuvred to rename the cultural centre on the Potomac for himself, Mr. Johnson sought and won legislation to change the name of the National Cultural Center, in 1964, to the Kennedy Center.
Congress has not approved the renaming for Mr. Trump.
Postscript: Actually Mr. Johnson’s assessment of Mr. Ford wasn’t fair. Mr. Ford took degrees from two selective universities, Michigan (where he played football) and Yale (where he coached the Bulldogs’ team), and was smart enough to become Republican Leader of the House of Representatives. Today he is regarded as a great healer, and his most controversial act, pardoning Richard Nixon for his Watergate crimes, is widely regarded as having soothed a divided country. Even his most ardent supporters would acknowledge that healing and soothing are not likely to be Trump legacies.
Editor’s note: An earlier version of this article inadvertently pointed to Gerald Ford as having broad ambitions and a robust legislative record. This version has been corrected.