All the president’s words
Puerto Rico’s debt has been a major problem for years. On Tuesday, President Donald Trump supported a solution: We have to look at their whole debt structure . . . we’re going to have to wipe that out. You can say goodbye to that. I don’t know if it’s Goldman Sachs, but whoever it is, you can wave goodbye to that.
It only took hours for White House budget chief Mick Mulvaney to knock down the whole idea. “We are not going to bail them out,” he said. “We are not going to pay off those debts. We are not going to bail out those bond holders.” Odds are it’s dead.
This is not normal. Presidents simply don’t make policy pronouncements only to have them overridden within their own administration.
Now, granted, with Trump it’s hard to tell whether this was a real presidential decision which was then rolled by his own staff or if he just blabbed away without really meaning to be making policy at all. That’s the problem. When the president just says things because, say, he’s echoing some cable news show he just watched, then everyone learns pretty quickly not to care what he says, and he finds it hard to get taken seriously even when he really means it.
That’s why normal presidents are extremely careful about what comes out of the presidential mouth (or pen, or Twitter account). It’s not because they aren’t willing to tell it like it is. It’s because skilled politicians treat everything they do as part of an attempt to fight for influence within the political system.
That’s also why normal presidents, who are certainly willing to bend the truth or even outright lie when it suits them for strategic reasons, won’t lie the way Trump does—gratuitously, transparently, and with no discernible purpose beyond making himself look good for the moment. A politician who spins successfully can actually increase the respect others have for his or her professional skills. Trump, on the other hand, just devalues his own future words with clumsy and obvious falsehoods. For example, when Trump apparently referenced a fictional story about a Puerto Rico truck driver strike (there is no strike, but Trump nevertheless said, “We need their truck drivers to start driving trucks”), it only contributed to the notion that the president’s words just shouldn’t be taken seriously.
It’s devastating for the president’s words to be devalued so badly. And the results are clear: The OMB director rolling him on Puerto Rico debt; the secretary of defense openly breaking with him on the Iran deal; the secretary of state reportedly calling him a moron. And if that’s what he gets from the executive branch, just imagine how little sway his words have on Capitol Hill or with foreign leaders.
Jonathan Bernstein is a Bloomberg View columnist.