Is Trump trying to be America's mayor?

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Is President Trump trying to run the White House like a city hall? That's the proposal of Politico's Jack Shafer, who argues much of Trump's behavior that strikes us as strange in a president would make sense in a mayor:

Our classic big-city mayors all cut a similar figure. Even after winning office, they kept campaigning, stumping for their causes without apology. They blustered in the name of the neighborhoods, the parishes, and the synagogues. They feuded with their enemies. Loudly. They "fixed" things, looked for deal-making partners and struck alliances. They maintained peace between labor and capital, and they kept civil order. They played the booster. The classic mayors knew how to shame companies from moving their headquarters out of town, how to crowd their way to the center of any photo opportunity, how to junket, and how to get results. Most of all, classic mayors were virtuosos in the art of blowing their own horns. [Politico]

Trump seems most in his element, Shafer notes, when he engages in the sort of "civic theater that mayors specialize in" — the photo-ops and dramatic, well-publicized slayings of what are really rather tiny dragons. The "America's mayor" theory also explains Trump's predilection toward rule by personal influence and edict: City councils can be manhandled in a way Congress, the judiciary, and federal bureaucracy cannot. Read Shafer's full analysis here.

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Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.