La Dowd Has Doubts About "The Adviser With The Yeti Moustache"

Click here for an op-ed in The New York Times by Maureen Dowd, entitled "Will Trump Be the Sage One?"

The lead picture shows Trump and John Bolton, and the caption is "Many people won’t recognize the adult in the room in this picture. He’s the guy without the mustache."

La Dowd's premise is that Trump is more cautious than his advisers, especially the reckless John Bolton: "... we count on the president to pump the brakes on out-of-control advisers."

She compares and contrasts the situation with W.'s presidency, where a naive and unprepared president was dealing with hawkish advisers.

There is the same feeling of the hawks building a calculated campaign for a Middle East invasion. W.’s administration had a monthslong rollout strategy. “From a marketing point of view,” Andrew Card, W.’s chief of staff, said in the summer of 2002, “you don’t introduce new products in August.” Have the hawks around Trump been waiting to get through two rings of fire — the Mueller threat and Benjamin Netanyahu’s re-election — to roll out their latest ingenious product: World War III?

She says:

W. and Trump are similar in some ways but also very different. As Trump biographer Michael D’Antonio notes: W. was interested in clarity. Trump wants chaos. W. wanted to trust his domineering advisers. Trump is always imagining betrayal. W. wanted to be a war hero, like his dad. Trump does not want to be trapped in an interminable war that will consume his presidency.

Certainly, the biographer says, Trump enjoys playing up the scary aspects of brown people with foreign names and ominous titles, like “mullah” and “ayatollah,” to stoke his base.

But Trump, unlike W., is driven by the drama of it. “It’s a game of revving up the excitement and making people afraid and then backing off on the fear in order to declare that he’s resolved the situation,” D’Antonio said. “Trump prefers threats and ultimatums to action because that allows him to look big and tough and get attention without doing something for which he will be held responsible. This is who he is at his core: an attention-seeking, action-averse propagandist who is terrified of accountability in the form of coffins arriving at Dover Air Force Base.”

She ends with a quote from David Axelrod:

“If part of your brand is that you’re not going to get the U.S. into unnecessary wars,” he said, “why in the world would you hire John Bolton?”