20 | SAM MAGAZINE 1/25 Things are a bit chaotic in Washington, DC these days. The sheer number of policy announcements as well as the extraordinary range of policy changes being proposed make it a daunting task to try to keep track of, much less make sense of, what the Trump administration is seeking to accomplish. Observers’ confusion and uncertainty about what is happening and where everything is headed, however, does not merely reflect the fact that it seems like the administration is trying to bulldoze most of Washington and uproot vast fields of deeply planted domestic and foreign policies virtually overnight. It also reflects the fact that it is extraordinarily difficult to get a clear reading of the President himself, and of what his actual goals, intentions, and likely next actions are going to be. It’s not that President Trump doesn’t provide clues. Rather, it is that he provides a constant flow of clues, and they point in seemingly random or disconnected directions. So, how do we make sense of President Trump and of what he is saying? Two ways to interpret the President's words There are, in general, two views of how to interpret President Trump’s orders, tweets, speeches, and off-the-cuff remarks. The first, more long-standing and widely accepted view, is that one needs to take President Trump seriously, but not literally. That is, the assumption has been that we should not worry too much about the fact that the specific claims he enunciates frequently involve hyperbole and not-infrequently are pure make-believe. There is no evidence, for example, that Haitian immigrants in Ohio have actually been hunting and cooking their neighbors’ pets. The don’t-take-the-President-literally view argues that when the President makes exaggerated or even wildly implausible statements about reality, we should not waste his time or ours debating whether these statements are literally true. We should simply understand that these statements are (let’s call them) “imaginative illustrations” of what the President believes are deeper truths. It is these deeper truths, or the underlying concerns that he is expressing, he wants us to take seriously. In other words, whether Haitian immigrants are actually eating their neighbors’ dogs is irrelevant; the point that the President is making in repeating this urban legend is that Haitian Americans are different from American Americans, that this difference makes them disgusting Taking President Trump Literally KOLUMNI Edward Rhodes is a professor of Government and International Affairs at George Mason University. Rhodes is best known for his research into the philosophical and cultural roots of American foreign and national security policy. Rhodes served for six years on the U.S. State Department's Advisory Committee on Historical Diplomatic Documentation, the Congressionally mandated, nonpartisan body that reviews and certifies the official, published account of American foreign policy for completeness and accuracy.
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