At the end of his first address to a joint session of Congress in his second term, after more than an hour of very combative rhetoric, President Donald J. Trump offered a description of the American character, saying that “Americans have always been the people who defied all odds, transcended all dangers, made the most extraordinary sacrifices, and did whatever it took to defend our children, our country and our freedom.”
This was less than a week after the unprecedented scene in the Oval Office in which he and Vice President JD Vance berated President Vladimir Zelensky of Ukraine, accusing him of ingratitude and disrespect for the United States and of “not being ready for peace” because of his insistence that any cease-fire agreement with Russia must include security guarantees for Ukraine. Before that meeting ran off the rails, it had been expected to cement an agreement with Ukraine for American access to its mineral resources as a way to compensate the United States for its expenditures in support of Ukraine’s defense against Russian aggression.
In these last weeks, but especially after the Oval Office meeting, I have been thinking about my maternal grandfather. He retired as a colonel after a career in the U.S. Army, having served in Europe during World War II, in the occupation of Japan and in the Korean War. He was as fine a man as I have ever known: faithful, honorable, decent, generous and dependable.
He was also a staunch Republican, committed to limited government and policies that supported the American economy. After his career in the military, he worked for New York Life and was a disciplined and careful student of the free market. I remember him attempting to explain to me when I was 12 or 13 how currencies could fluctuate in value relative to each other.
He made “buy American” a principle of the first order, going so far as to once return a new vehicle, made by one of the Big Three of course, when he discovered from reading the documents attached to the bill of sale that it had been assembled outside the United States.
From those economic views, he would have agreed that trade imbalances between the United States and other countries need to be rectified and might have supported the use of tariffs to do so. At least in that regard, I can imagine him having some policy agreement with the Trump administration.
But I cannot imagine him abiding the scene of an American president telling the leader of a country that is suffering under years of Russian assault that he does not think he would “be a tough guy without the United States.” I cannot imagine him cheering on American leaders talking over an ally attempting to describe why U.S. security interests are also implicated in Ukraine and why apparent Russian willingness to negotiate cannot be taken at face value.
The reason I cannot imagine my grandfather tolerating that scene is because he would never abide bullies, which is how Mr. Trump and Mr. Vance were acting.
Some of Mr. Trump’s proponents claim that his bluster and bravado are a mark of authenticity, of his willingness to say what others will not and to speak bluntly. Some claim that, as a deal-maker, he is deliberately pushing buttons to disrupt a broken status quo and put new options on the table, and they point to the frantic responses of other world leaders to his provocations as evidence that these tactics are working.
Such views, however, betray an assumption of hypocrisy. They suggest that no one is really motivated by values beyond immediate advantage and leverage in negotiation, and that Mr. Trump is simply the first leader smart enough or brave enough to drop the charade and, as he says so often, “put America first.”
That brings us to the question of what the United States aspires to be.
At its best, the United States defines itself not primarily by its borders, but by its values and principles. To be sure, such values are honored as often in the breach as they are in the observance. We can point to the pendulum swings between American welcome to immigrants on the one hand and nativist prejudice on the other, or to the centuries-long struggle to build a racially integrated democracy. There are many instances where we might say that the United States and its leaders have been hypocritical about our own best values.
But if so, such hypocrisy has at least been, as the saying goes, the “tribute that vice pays to virtue.” I fear that what we are seeing in Mr. Trump’s bullying and transactionalism is something different. It is not hypocrisy but instead a meanness, a lack of generosity that distrusts the motive for generosity in others. Vice is no longer paying tribute to virtue, but instead holding it for ransom.
These tactics may succeed at a transactional level, if only by destabilizing the status quo so much that some leverage can be gained from the chaos. But we must hope and pray that they do not become what our country aspires to be.
