President Donald Trump’s political maneuvers, from TikTok flip-flops to controversial pardons, highlight his shamelessness and strategic recalibrations in the political arena. Every politician operates with a certain degree of shamelessness, which is practically in the job description. As they try to navigate in howling political winds, they regularly have to justify changing their positions, whether it’s due to a shift in the country’s mood, party loyalty, or pressure from big donors. At times, they may be being hypocritical, as something they opposed during the Biden administration is now perfectly fine in the Trump administration.
It’s shameless to offer an explanation that everyone knows is garbage. Politicians have to do it with a straight face, as they can’t openly admit to being primaried if they don’t conform. This, you could argue, is the nature of politics. You need some flexibility and wiggle room. In one of my two interviews with President Trump last year, he tried to explain why he had completely flipped on TikTok. After all, he had spent his first term trying to ban the Chinese-owned company on national security grounds, only to be blocked by the courts. Now, suddenly, he had done a 180 and was trying to save the app, despite a congressional ban.
Trump told me he changed his mind because outlawing TikTok would help Facebook, which he considered a greater threat. I didn’t buy it. He had concluded that TikTok was incredibly popular, especially with younger people, and wanted to position himself as its savior. This was before Mark Zuckerberg began cozying up to Trump, such as by making a million-dollar donation to his inaugural. Trump may have the biggest shameless gene of them all, and that’s part of why he’s successful.
He doesn’t get hung up on what he said the day before or an hour before. He can go from expressing sympathy for Joe Biden’s prostate cancer diagnosis to saying he doesn’t feel sorry for Biden at all. He can go from blaming the Ukraine war impasse on Volodomyr Zelenskyy to finally condemning Vladimir Putin to calling it Biden’s war. Ross Douthat has a smart take on this in his New York Times column, suggesting that the willingness to swerve and backpedal is part of what keeps the president viable, and the promise of chickening out is part of Trump’s implicit pitch to swing voters—reassuring them that anything extreme is also provisional.
This brings them into John Kerry territory, where he said, ‘I actually did vote for the $87 billion before I voted against it,’ referring to military aid to our troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Republican ads immediately portrayed the 2004 presidential nominee as a flip-flopper. Kerry later allowed that he had been ‘inarticulate.’ It’s useful to think about flipping the script. In the media furor over Trump’s spate of pardons, the president gave one to the leader of a violent Chicago gang, Larry Hoover, a drug dealer who’s been serving six consecutive life sentences for killing a man. Largely symbolic? Sure, because Hoover will remain in prison on state charges. Doesn’t matter.
If Biden had done that, conservative voters would have gone haywire. How dare he side with a murderer? Does Biden have no regard for human life? The man who was killed doesn’t get a second chance. The MAGA-driven story would have been on television every 10 minutes. With Trump, it was a blip, barely a story at all. Naturally, Biden’s hands aren’t exactly clean on the pardon front. He repeatedly promised not to pardon Hunter, then did exactly that after the election. It was a blatant lie and a big story. The other day, Trump got angry when a CNBC reporter asked him about his TACO nickname, Trump Always Chickens Out, based on the chatter on Wall Street. He called the question ‘nasty,’ this from the king of bestowing derogatory nicknames (see Joe, Sleepy).
Poultry metaphor aside, the president does frequently delay draconian tariffs, conduct quick negotiations and declare victory. His supporters like that because the markets usually shoot up, though the turmoil clearly shakes up the global economy. One reason Trump gets away with all this is that the Democrats don’t have a national spokesman. Tim Walz, the VP flop, toying with running for president? People like Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer aren’t breaking through. AOC gets some good jabs in on social media, but she’s not even a member of the leadership. You also have to credit Trump’s political skills. He doesn’t have the slightest fear of being shameless.