The Empty Chair
We now have the iconic symbol of the Trump presidency. As we have all seen, Trump chose to absent himself from the G-7 meeting on Global Climate Change. He literally was a no-show, leaving an empty chair at the roundtable of world leaders. There are several ways to interpret this phenomenon. To begin with, there are a series of empty chair metaphors. I suppose it is possible that as a student of European history, Trump might have harkened back to Charles DeGaulle’s intentional boycott of the European Commission meeting in protest for his disagreement with major policy issues. He may have been channeling DeGaulle given the location of the Biarritz summit. But then again, that would have required Trump to know who DeGaulle was, the nature of his specific nationalistic and anti-supranationalistic thoughts and the history of that prior Empty Chair Crisis. Maybe he has a complex version of the Luxembourg Compromise to offer up as a concession.
Perhaps it was an extreme psychological ploy. The discipline of psychoanalysis employs an empty chair technique where a group of family members talk to an empty chair to encourage them to express their deepest concerns on behalf of the missing person. That would require world leaders to out themselves about what they really think of Trump and God knows they are all too well-versed in diplomacy to go there. Then again, sometimes debaters use an empty chair as a means of embarrassing a petulant person who disagrees but is afraid to engage in the debate. But that would go counter to the otherwise tip-toeing approach of world leaders when it comes to the child-like and petulant Trump. Whatever you do, don’t wake the crying baby.
The most likely reason and explanation for the empty chair is that Trump was too busy to stop tweeting and watching Fox and Friends, too self-involved to pay attention to his sycophantic handlers who tried ever so lightly to suggest that he had a meeting he needed to attend, and too petulant on the topic of climate change to want to honor such an obtuse and “niche” topic that bears no meaning on all the wealth that his nation has in the ground and his obligation to extract and exploit that wealth at all costs. I’m sure the other leaders, led by Macron on this and other topics, just carried on thinking that his absence was good luck in that it might allow them to stay on point and get something done. Of course, without the U.S., what resulted was a whopping $20MM commitment to help quell the flames destroying the Amazon rainforest. That would literally be like using an eyedropper of water to put out a house fire.
Trump made his excuses for his absence by saying he had important meetings with the leaders of Germany and India. Those were clearly the only people he could think of at the moment, given that he had seen both already. However, he failed to realize that both those leaders would be sitting right next to the empty chair and that his lying would then be on full display for the entire world to reconfirm. The amazing thing about that lie is not that Trump lied, or even that he lied so badly and was easily exposed. The amazing thing is that the rest of the world is so immune to his lying, so used to his lying, that they just took it in stride and carried on.
So, Trump proceeded to his finishing news conference and then further undermined his reputation and the reputation of the United States. Trashing his eloquent and far more intelligent and decisive predecessor while showing his ignorance of world events, world geography, the constitutionality of emoluments restrictions and common civility have, unfortunately, just become another aghast example of Trump’s total debilitation. It is all almost too absurd to repeat since the morning news shows are already repeating the evening news shows from last night. Its all too much for us at this point. The man is beyond non compos mentis. Webster’s declares that as meaning “balmy, barmy [chiefly British], bats, batty, bedlam, bonkers, brainsick, bughouse [slang], certifiable, crackbrained, cracked, crackers, crackpot, cranky [dialect], crazed, crazy, cuckoo, daffy, daft, demented, deranged, fruity [slang], gaga, haywire, insane, kooky (also kookie), loco [slang], loony (also looney), loony tunes (or looney tunes), lunatic, mad, maniacal (also maniac), mental, meshuga (or meshugge), moonstruck, nuts, nutty, psycho, psychotic, scatty [chiefly British], screwy, unbalanced, unhinged, unsound, wacko (also whacko), wacky (also whacky), wud [chiefly Scottish].” I find no problem with any of those synonyms to describe the man, the myth and the horribly bad influence that he represents.
What we must all ask ourselves as we ponder where to go from here is where does it leave the United States. The world now understands that we are so self-involved that we (in this case Congressional Republicans) will do anything for another seat on the Supreme Court. There is a scene at the end of Empire of the Sun when John Malkovich asks a young Christian Bale whether he has learned anything from him. Bale (directed by the amazingly insightful Steven Spielberg) responds, “I’ve learned that a person will do anything for a potato.” That is the message here as well. Republicans are in a war for their lives and they will literally do anything for what they perceive as their last best chance for survival. It is totally Maslowian and in accordance with natures laws. It is almost reptilian. The cerebral cortex reaction to a deadly threat is to attack without regard to conscience or thought. There is no room for conscience or thought in the equation. Thinking about the long term means nothing if there is no short term future.
Zhou Enlai, the first Premier of China after its 1949 revolution, when asked at a G-7-like gathering in the 1970’s about what he thought of the impact of the French Revolution two-hundred years prior, said “It is too soon to say.” There is controversy as to whether he was asked the question properly and meant it as it sounds, but it is still the classic example of how China thinks about the world versus how someone like Trump thinks about the world. Zhou would certainly have felt that the world would not be changed by his presence or lack thereof at any particular meeting, so an empty chair would likely not concern him. But even China, one of the world’s biggest polluters for the sake of growth (playing catch-up to the Western Democracies) has started to shutter thousands of petrochemical plants that are simply polluting too heavily. Go to Beijing and you will see more separated recycle bins than you will see on the streets of New York. China is not in the G-7 even though it possesses the world’s second largest economy. Unlike Putin, who has pulled every puppet string he has to make Trump flop around in Biarritz saying Putin should be there, President Xi seems OK with his spot in the G-20.
And there we have it, the empty chair wins. The dead guy gets elected. The world “leaders” can meet all day long and at the end of the day, money talks and bullshit walks. It is sad to acknowledge, but without the U.S. taking its seat at the table, we have handed a victory to Putin and Xi. We have abdicated to the might makes right and power of the purse models of diplomacy. The empty chair speaks volumes about the state of the world.