It wasn’t a big surprise to read that in addition to not knowing how to swim or to drive a car, Adolf Hitler couldn’t dance.
Donald Trump can’t dance either. He moves like a man who never had to court a woman.
Dancing isn’t particularly difficult, but it’s impossible for control freaks, as it requires a person to momentarily let go of what others think of them. Demagogues can’t do it, either, as the act of it would risk their public image, which to them is everything.
The other dance Trump can’t do is the figurative one, the dance that the best politicians can pull off, which is to think one thing and do another, or to say one thing and do another. Like a quick step on the dance floor, it’s hard to see, but it works.
A skilled politician is here, then he’s there and if you try to pin him down, he shows up somewhere else.
Think Billy Flynn, the defense attorney played by Richard Gere in the mod musical “Chicago,” and the tap dance he performs in the courtroom when faced at the last minute with an incriminating piece of evidence against his client, the murderous Roxie Hart.
Flynn raises unrelated questions, implicates prosecutors in possible evidence tampering, and generally so distracts the jury from the question at hand that it effectively disappears.
John F. Kennedy and Barack Obama danced beautifully. Both, for example, were hailed as peace advocates while continuing or deepening wars their administrations inherited. They made fine, inspiring pronouncements, but moved in the opposite direction of their words.
If you missed it, that was the point. The best dance moves are too smooth for the eye to catch, and the overall effect is pleasing.
JFK and FDR were astounding dancers. Both used the mafia to gain power, then went after the mob once elected. Mob king Lucky Luciano famously said: “What (Roosevelt) did was legal. But the pattern of it was exactly the same; we was both shitass doublecrossers, no matter how you look at it.”
Kennedy double-crossed, cheated or lied to so many people in his career that an entire industry sprung up on which of his victims did him in.
Politics, on the city council or U.S. Senate, is not for choir boys. To win a typical election, a candidate has to mean good things to more than half the voters. Given the broad interests of half the electorate, not all those good things can possibly be true. So elections are like a first date, with candidates projecting themselves as flawlessly appealing and voters so wanting it to be true.
Joe Parnell, the most dangerously truthful man in Haines, often said to me: “Get over it. People don’t want the truth. They want a carefully crafted lie they can believe in.”
We suspect the truth but we prefer the illusion. In this way, professional politicians give us what we want.
Only because it works to make a point, let me use the sexist and cliché example of the wife asking her husband if a dress she’s wearing makes her look fat.
A bad politician husband says, “No.”
A mediocre politician husband says, “I love you honey, any way you look.”
A skilled politician husband says, “Hey honey, what’s for dinner?”
The best at the game can answer a difficult question in a way that moves the discussion in an entirely different direction, without answering the question asked and without lying and without you even noticing what happened. That’s finesse, an entry-level political skill Donald Trump never bothered to learn.
He was an amateur, awkwardly sharing the stage with pros, astoundingly believing that he didn’t need to learn the moves.
During the early 1980s, President Ronald Reagan faced considerable pressure from the international Nuclear Freeze movement.
Nuclear Freeze was a powerfully simple and appealing proposal: That the U.S. and Soviet Union simply agree to stop producing new nukes. The freeze sidestepped decades of rhetoric by the two nations about which side was “ahead” in the arms race, invariably resulting in both sides building more.
Reagan brilliantly sank the freeze movement in a single speech, saying that nuclear weapons would soon be obsolete, as the U.S. was building a “peace shield” in outer space that would shoot down Soviet missiles before they could do any damage.
In the following week, Newsweek and Time featured the “Star Wars” missile defense system prominently. The freeze movement died.
On COVID, possibly his most fateful political issue, Trump staked out untenable positions, first diminishing the gravity of the virus, then defying his administration’s own protocols, and finally contracting the virus personally, requiring advanced medical care.
A more savvy politician, even one doubtful of COVID’s dangers and the scale of its coverage by the news media, could have laid the issue on Dr. Anthony Fauci, saying, “Well, I’m skeptical about these things, but Mr. Fauci is a scientist and I’m not, so I’m asking Americans to follow his advice – for now.”
Such a nuanced position would have signaled to COVID disbelievers that he was on their side – a position he obviously felt he needed to maintain his political base – while still casting Fauci as the bad guy but also simultaneously appearing reasonable to centrists whose votes he needed to win re-election.
Trump couldn’t do it. The man couldn’t dance. So he lost. No big surprise.