Hollow Threats

The Truth at the Center of Trump’s Hollow Threats

The president knows it’s easier—and often more effective—to bluster than actually make good on his intimidation.

By JACK SHAFER

Donald Trump issues threats with the frequency other people take out the garbage.

This week he’s threatening to regulate or shutter Twitter for placing a fact-checking mark on his spurious tweet about mail-in voting. He has threatened people and institutions with libel suits. He has made economic threats against corporations (General Motors, AT&T; NBC; NFL; foreign automakers) whose business practices offend him. He has threatened to adjourn Congress, not something that appears to be within his power. He has encouraged violence against protesters at his rallies. He has threatened to withhold wildfire aid to California, to fire government employees (Robert Mueller; Rod Rosenstein), and to close the Mexican border. He has threatened allies (South Korea; NATO) as well as adversaries (North Korea; Iran). He has threatened to investigate both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. He threatened to release nonexistent tape recordings of his conversations with FBI Director James B. Comey. Once, he even threatened a Time magazine photographer with prison for taking a picture of a letter from Kim Jong Un that he was brandishing in the Oval Office. And that’s just an overview (see CNN and the Washington Post’’s round-ups and New York Times coverage of Trump’s threats).

More recently, Trump ordered states to reopen but then threatened forced shutdowns if it turned out he disliked the reopening plans. Trump isn’t the first president to issue ultimatums. Remember Obama’s “red line in Syria” speech? The press and the opposition—quite rightly—never allowed Obama to forget his empty words. But Trump has an easier time skating away every time he puts somebody on notice and then does nothing. If you tabulated an ultimatum line score between Trump and his predecessors, Trump would be the easy winner.

Trump’s penchant for ultimatum-making—like his penchant for lying—appears to be congenital. Thrusting his forepaws in somebody’s face, baring his teeth and snarling was bringing him joy long before he moved into the White House. As his former lawyer Michael Cohen told Congress, Trump directed him to make at least 500 threats to businesses and journalists over 10 years of representation. During a 2015 phone call in which Cohen famously told a Daily Beast reporter he could expect a $500 million libel suit if he published a story, Cohen went on to imply violence. “I’m warning you, tread very fucking lightly, because what I’m going to do to you is going to be fucking disgusting. You understand me?” Cohen said to the reporter.

The difference between a businessman making threats and a president, as scholar Jennifer Mercieca has written, is that a president possesses the coercive power to make good on the intimidating words that a businessman does not. It may be outside Trump’s direct power to shut down Twitter or issue a murder warrant for Joe Scarborough, but just the idea that he could encourage officials with regulatory or police powers to do so is intimidation enough. He deliberately serves notice to those who disagree with or oppose him that they can see their business destroyed, face a murder investigation or get a punch in the face.

While President Trump has consummated some of his dire warnings—instituting tariffs, closing the government over the border wall, withdrawing from the Trans-Pacific Partnership, and canceling the Iran nuclear deal—most but not all of his saber-rattling is empty. By mixing up the real with the fake threats, Trump keeps everybody on edge, wondering if this time he’ll follow through. The constant stream of threats enslaves the news media to Trump, and their reports terrify his targets. Just look at the way his threats to defund states that rely on postal voting has scattered the Democrats and united his supporters. He’s made the perfectly normal act of voting by mail sound fraudulent and planted seeds, at least among his supporters, that the November election is doomed to be tainted.

A Trump threat like this also foists make-work on reporters who are dispatched to answer the question, “Can he really defund a postal voting state?” Trump did it again on May 23, when he vowed he would “override“ any governor who did not allow houses of worship to reopen over the weekend. His White House did not and would not explain what governmental power Trump was invoking to order the states around. Three days after the announcement, Trump still couldn’t cite what authority gave him the right to make governors stand down. Even if a state attorney general assures a governor that President Trump can’t legally punish his defiance, what governor wants to force the test match? No less a liberal luminary than Gretchen Whitmer, the Democratic governor of Michigan, who has been savaged by Trump, just admitted that she censors herself when talking about him publicly.

Trump doesn’t pay a political price for his threatmanship for a couple of reasons. First, even though we act like we think Trump means all of the wild things he says, 3½ years of his presidency have conditioned us to understand that much of what he says is bluster and that we should wait for action before we scramble the jets. Second, we tend to let many of the outlandish things Trump says slide because the last thing Democrats want to do is hold his feet to the fire and force him to make good on his threats. In a weird sort of gentleman’s agreement, Trump gets to say wild things and the Democrats get to shout back their displeasure until the portable outrage generator runs out of fuel and a peaceful silence returns. Except for when it doesn’t.

It would be convenient to discover in Trump’s threat management evidence of a diabolical genius at work, but no such luck. Trump blusters and bullies because it’s an easily deployed, emotional technique that works for him. He thinks threats make him look strong and decisive—especially when he’s not—and that there is no such thing as going too far. (Witness his increased bullying of MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough, whom he wants investigated for murder in the death 19 years ago of one of his staffers—a completely unfounded accusation, of course.)

The most frightening thing about Trump’s threats is not the harm caused to Twitter or Joe Scarborough or to the family of the woman Trump maintains was the victim, although that harm is very real. It’s that some day Trump will use these same techniques to make an extraordinary geopolitical threat and when his bluff is called by a foreign power he’ll learn, to the nation’s detriment, that he’s holding an empty hand.