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Will Romney or Mattis make a difference?

A friend brought this to my attention:

He noted that you don’t have to speak a word of Italian to understand the message: make Italy great again! We know how that turned out.

The similarity of rhetorical style to Donald Trump is in fact remarkable. A tweeter pointed out to me earlier this week that Trump’s technique involves “enthymeme,” an ancient Greek device in which the crowd is permitted to complete the thought of the speaker. While Mussolini doesn’t exactly do that, he uses pregnant pauses to allow the crowd to anticipate, if not quite to enunciate, what he will say next. Clearly the effect is similar: the crowd loves this man and is ready to do battle in support of him.

Another friend provided this to me, from Adolf Hitler:

The broad masses of a population are more amenable to the appeal of rhetoric than to any other force.

I confess I find Trump an inarticulate speaker, one whose facial expressions are at least as silly as Mussolini’s. His hand gestures are worse. But of course I am not Trump’s audience. And though I speak good Italian, Mussolini leaves me cold too. But George Lakoff’s exegesis is pretty convincing (read it to the end): Trump is practiced and successful in knowing how to appeal to those he has rapport with.

What I don’t know is how well Trump’s popularity will hold up as he appoints obvious bigots, it becomes clear that he can’t deliver on many of his promises, those he can deliver on fail to produce the expected results, and he combines his private business interests with his public office. Mussolini ended up hanging upside down in a public square. Hitler committed suicide in his bunker.

Neither end is likely for Trump, who has the advantage of living in a society attached to a long tradition of allowing its former leaders to live out their natural lives in peace and prosperity. The bigger concern is what kind of America he will have created by the time he leaves office. So far he shows no sign of wanting to bridge the divide with his opponents: he has appointed only hard-line white males, signaling unequivocally his attachment to white nationalist goals and aspirations.

Will it make a difference if he appoints Romney Secretary of State or General Mattis as Defense Secretary? Not in my book. My admittedly minor contact with Mattis left me unimpressed. He is tough talking and intelligent, but hardly likely to reform the Pentagon in a meaningful way. He will welcome the flood of money the Republican Congress will throw his way and get on efficiently with the killing of extremists in Syria, Iraq and elsewhere, but he is unlikely to rethink the merits and demerits of that policy, which is essentially identical to President Obama’s.

Romney, as everyone else has already commented, looks the part of chief diplomat and has the considerable virtue of recognizing President Putin as the menace he is. That will put him at odds with Trump, as will his advocacy of free trade and a more forward-leaning American posture in the world. That is much more akin to what Hillary Clinton was offering than what Trump has promised. So if Romney takes the job, he’ll need to knuckle under to a White House that definitely does not share his cosmopolitan views or his commitment to resolute American civilian as well as military leadership in the world.

Romney and Mattis would certainly raise the intellectual level of the Trump administration, which at the moment lies somewhere between the gutter of white nationalism and the cesspool of Benghazi lies. But it will take a lot more than their nominations to convince reasonable people that this new administration wants to govern with respect for us all.