‘Fantastic,’ ‘terrific’ ways to tell when Trump is bluffing

‘Fantastic,’ ‘terrific’ ways to tell when Trump is bluffing December 2, 2016

World leaders have to keep an up-to-date rolodex. Think about the ritual of congratulatory phone calls following every national election. Those involve a bit of homework.

Say you’re the president of Estonia. You might not have any urgent direct concern about the upcoming Ecuadoran elections in April, but you’ve still got to be ready to make that phone call. It’s a thing. So you’re gonna need some phone numbers. More than one, because you can’t know who’s going to win until after the election. You’ll need current contact numbers for all of the viable candidates in that race. (For the record, the favored front-runner is progressive candidate Lenin Moreno, but you’ll need his opponents’ numbers too, because you never know.)

You’ll also need to know a bit more than just that phone number. You’ve got to be sure you can pronounce the new leader’s name. You’ll need some common language or a capable translator. And you’ll need to have at least some basic knowledge of who they are, and where their country is, and some idea of your own nation’s relationship with them, whatever that may be.

Because if you don’t understand any of that when you make (or receive) such a phone call, then you may wind up sounding like a total idiot. You may wind up embarrassing yourself and your country, agreeing to something reckless or ill-advised, or undoing years of careful diplomacy and negotiation.

You might sound, in other words, like this:

Prime Minister Muhammad Nawaz Sharif called President-elect USA Donald Trump and felicitated him on his victory. President Trump said Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif you have a very good reputation. You are a terrific guy. You are doing amazing work which is visible in every way. I am looking forward to see you soon. As I am talking to you Prime Minister, I feel I am talking to a person I have known for long. Your country is amazing with tremendous opportunities. Pakistanis are one of the most intelligent people. I am ready and willing to play any role that you want me to play to address and find solutions to the outstanding problems. It will be an honor and I will personally do it. Feel free to call me any time even before 20th January that is before I assume my office.

On being invited to visit Pakistan by the prime minister, Mr. Trump said that he would love to come to a fantastic country, fantastic place of fantastic people. Please convey to the Pakistani people that they are amazing and all Pakistanis I have known are exceptional people, said Mr. Donald Trump.

Oy. That phone call, as Nikhil Kumar writes for Time, was “reckless and bizarre”:

There are few foreign policy topics quite as complicated as the relationship between India and Pakistan, South Asia’s nuclear-armed nemeses. Any world leader approaching the issue even obliquely must surely see the “Handle With Care” label from miles away, given the possibility of nuclear conflict.

U.S. President-elect Donald Trump, however, doesn’t seem to have read the memo, injecting a pronounced element of uncertainty about the position of the world’s only remaining superpower on this most complex of subjects. …

The relationship between the U.S. and Pakistan is a complicated, delicate minefield. It’s one of the subjects near the top of the list in those security briefings that President-elect Trump has been blowing off because he doesn’t like homework.

Fantastic

Trump doesn’t need a deep, personal understanding of every nuance of every such issue. He just needs to have people around him who do have such an understanding.

And then — and this seems to be the vital, missing piece — he needs to listen to those people and pay attention when they tell him what he needs to know.

Trump’s phone call with Pakistan’s prime minister shows he’s not doing that. He seems to regard these post-election phone calls from world leaders as an inconvenience of little interest to him (if he doesn’t have some real estate project in the works in that country). My guess is his “briefing” in preparation for each of these calls consists of something like having an aide hold up one to five fingers, depending on the relative importance of the nation whose leader is on the line. When Sharif called, Trump glanced over at the aide, saw five fingers, and launched into the hyperbolic flattery he always uses when he knows someone might be important to him one day but he doesn’t care enough about them to bother learning anything more specific than that.

That’s why Pakistan’s readout of this phone call reads so much like a penny-stock salesman chatting up a potential customer on a cold call: “You are a terrific guy. You are doing amazing work which is visible in every way. … I feel I am talking to a person I have known for long. Your country is amazing … the most intelligent people … a fantastic country, fantastic place of fantastic people. Please convey to the Pakistani people that they are amazing and all Pakistanis I have known are exceptional people.”

Translation: I have no idea who you are or where your country is and the only thing I’ve ever thought about Pakistan is using the first two syllables as an ethnic slur.

This is a pattern with Trump — a recognizable tell. “Terrific,” “fantastic,” and “amazing” are the words he always uses when he’s forced to talk about something he doesn’t have the first clue about. Whenever he says “terrific” or “fantastic” or “amazing” we know he’s bluffing his way through a subject he doesn’t understand and doesn’t care to know anything about.

Unfortunately, one of the subjects he doesn’t understand and doesn’t care to know anything about is a populous, nuclear-armed nation that’s a key ally, and that’s also home to radical insurgents and has been on the brink of war with its neighbor for 50 years.

 


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