专栏作家凯文·威廉姆森（Kevin Williamson）说，唐纳德·特朗普总统“不管理国家，他管理他的嘴”。
威廉姆森向《快讯》描述特朗普是一个“边缘文盲”，他“作为总统选择了一种奇怪的策略：成为”备忘录、推文和总统声明的作者”。
“我的意思是，他是这样的一个作家，就像他是写《交易的艺术》（The Art of the Deal）的作家一样——也就是说，他没有写出这个东西，但从更广泛的意义上讲，它是他工作的作品。而关于这样的工作，问题是特朗普并不喜欢。
但选后的政治和真正的政策制定需要“枯燥、耗费体力、艰苦的工作”，而特朗普的·工作并不像参议员阿瑟·范登伯格（Arthur Vandenberg）那样，“在面对二战时将共和党从孤立主义的地堡中拖了出来”。
“特朗普并不真正参与政治——因为他事实上，在谈判方面完全无能，这就是为什么他花了这么多时间坚称自己是这门艺术的大师，”这位右翼政治评论员说。
特朗普的“低能量专制”包括“长时期以来充斥着大量的易于发布的行政命令”，这与通过实际立法而持久生效的改革不同。他是一个承诺大事的“传令兵”，但是“没有可以让任何事情发生的机制。所以什么都不会发生”。
威廉姆森说，在这一点上，特朗普与列宁这样经验丰富的独裁者不同。“列宁是一个怪物，但他也是一个世界的塑造者。特朗普是一个怪物和一个社交媒体喷子……他不是世界事件的推动者，而是世界事件的评论员”。
尽管如此，特朗普还是“希望你相信他身处其中，这就是为什么他谎称参与了印巴停火的原因，这在德里和伊斯兰堡都是新闻。…这是造雨的第一条规则：下雨时，开始跳舞。
当然，信号可以影响世界市场等因素，他补充说。“告诉市场你打算遵循一个混乱的、准自给自足的愚蠢的经济政策，其他人可能会信以为真，以至于导致自己的崩溃，”但更常见的是，只有当它有比信号本身更强大的东西支持时，它才有意义。
President Donald Trump, says columnist Kevin Williamson, “doesn’t run the country. He runs his mouth.”
Williamson described Trump to The Dispatch as a “borderline illiterate” who “has chosen a strange strategy as president: being a writer” of “memos and tweets and presidential statements.”
“I mean that he is a writer of these in the same way he is the writer who wrote ‘The Art of the Deal’—which is to say, he didn’t write the thing, but it is, in a broader sense, his work. And the thing about work is, Trump does not like it.”
But post-election politics and real policymaking requires “boring, labor-intensive, grinding work,” and Trump is no worker like Sen. Arthur Vandenberg, who “dragg[ed] the GOP out of its isolationist bunker in the face of World War II.”
“Trump doesn’t really do politics—because he is, in fact, utterly incompetent at negotiation, which is why he spends so much time insisting that he is a master of the art,” said the right-wing political commentator.
Trump’s “low-energy autocracy” consists of “lots of easy-to-publish executive orders amounting in the long run to approximately squat,” unlike more durable reform through actual legislation. He is a “signaler” who promises big things, however “[t]here’s no mechanism for making anything happen. And so nothing is going to happen.”
In this way Trump differs from a seasoned autocrat like Lenin, says Williamson. “Lenin was a monster, but he also was a world-shaper. Trump is a monster and a social-media troll … He is not a driver of world events but a commentator on them.”
Still, Trump would “like you to believe he is in the thick of it, which is why, for example, he falsely claimed to have had a hand in the India-Pakistan ceasefire, which was news in Delhi and Islamabad. … That’s the first rule of rainmaking: When it rains, start dancing.”
Of course signaling can impact things like the world market, he adds. “Tell the markets you intend to follow a daffy economic policy of chaotic quasi-autarky and they just may take you seriously enough to crash,” but it more regularly only matters “when it is backed by something stronger than the signal itself.”
亚当·林奇 （Adam Lynch） 的故事
