David M. Shribman: The many contradictions of Donald Trump

What to make of Donald Trump now?

What to make of a president who powered a Middle East peace agreement that eluded Egypt, Qatar and France; who won an accord that matches and perhaps exceeds that of Jimmy Carter with Menachem Begin and Anwar Sadat (1979) and Bill Clinton with Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat (1993) — and who has dispatched federal troops to cities in his own country, used a government shutdown to fire federal workers and redefined the extent of executive power?

What to make of an American chief executive whose fondest hopes include a Nobel Peace Prize but who is making war in the high seas off Venezuela, the home country of Maria Corina Machado? She won the award for being, as the selection committee put it, a woman "who keeps the flame of democracy burning amid a growing darkness" — evocative, even ironic, language for the Americas that likely went unnoticed or was swiftly dismissed in the White House.

An examination of press accounts will do you little good in understanding this moment, for the mainstream press, too, are struggling to understand an American president like no other, a Januslike figure of contradiction, peering in two opposite directions.

But though the mainstream media — smug in the conviction that they are keeping the flame of democracy burning amid a growing darkness — are in disrepute, it may take a composite of their headlines to help capture the dizzying confusions and deep ambiguities of Donald John Trump.

One part crusader for peace, one part instigator of conflict. One part charming old shoe, one part menacing jackboot. One part political improviser, one part dogged ideologue.

Have a quick look at some of those recent headlines:

The Trump Split Screen: A Peacemaker Abroad, a Retribution Campaign at Home (The New York Times)

Donald Trump is an awful person — but a brilliant president (The Spectator, London)

Trump, Feeling Emboldened, Pushes Agenda Into Higher Gear (The Wall Street Journal)

The United States has had enigmatic presidents before: Andrew Jackson (democratic sentinel, Native American fighter), Franklin Delano Roosevelt (ordering Japanese-Americans to internment camps, presiding over forces liberating Nazi concentration camps); Lyndon B. Johnson (high priest of the war on poverty, flawed minister of the war in Vietnam), Richard Nixon (masterly in big-power politics, paranoid in domestic politics), Bill Clinton (skillful practitioner of the pastoral role of the office, fatefully addicted to raging personal hungers).

But even the word "enigmatic" fails to capture Trump, especially the Trump on vivid display in the first half of October.

In that brief period, he has reached heights of achievement above the dreams of his most ardent supporters, even as he descended to new depths of retributive actions at home. No American president has shown two sides of his personality and politics that have diverged so dramatically in so short a period.

Trump in full is, to be sure, full of himself. Trump the crusader for peace is as much a warrior for conflict and revenge. Trump the aspiring winner of the Nobel Peace Prize campaigned for the honor in a manner destined to deny him the medal. The face that appeared in silhouette across the front page of The Jerusalem Post, an art composite of images of the last hostages from the Hamas attack of 2023, in other settings glowers and appears in sneers.

The president who speaks as if he possesses great truths about human nature and practical politics traffics in untruths; he never has been, as James Boswell said of the 18th-century explorer James Cook, "a plain and sensible man with an uncommon attention to veracity." No one has ever said, as Roy Hattersley (the deputy leader of Britain's Labor Party, 1983-1992) did about Herbert Henry Asquith (British prime minister, 1908-1916), that Trump's "life was a victory for the vigorous application of a fine mind and highly developed conscience."

A man of contradictions and chaos, Trump seems to create both as he barrels through the workday. He's made an entire country delirious while dividing his own. His peace plan depends in large measure on Egypt, even as Egyptian worries about its access to American arm sales are prompting it to cozy up to China, one of Trump's many arch foes. His tariff threats against Canada and rhetoric about making it the 51st state have produced a spike in nationalism north of the border that, on the surface at least, seems in conflict with both countries' enthusiasm for the deepening military links that would result from cooperation on a defensive missile shield.

And consider this: The very day of Trump's silhouette (appearing beneath a bold-faced, all-capitals headline: HE'S BRINGING THEM HOME), the president lashed out at China, threatened what he called on his social media platform "a massive increase of Tariffs on Chinese products coming into the United States of America," and precipitated a collapse in the financial markets, prompting a 2.7% drop in the S&P 500 for the first time in six months. Not every president can do that.

The Wall Street Journal's Feeling Emboldened headline presents the greatest danger for Trump and, in turn, for the country.

Presidential overreach is both a practical and constitutional threat for any president, but especially so to a chief executive who tends to excess in every aspect of his life — in architecture and home decor, in bombast, in threats, in wild exaggerations, in claiming and extending executive power.

Prior successful presidents mastered the arts of subtlety and nuance. Trump does not do subtlety or nuance. He is not known for a single sentence of understatement. He lacks the gentle touch.

Other presidents wielded the equivalent of a slender lit matchstick as an instrument of enlightenment and, ultimately, of power; here Harry Truman and, on their best days, George H.W. Bush and Barack Obama come to mind. Trump employs a blow torch. Other presidents have romanced Congress in a style that suggests the soothing piano tones of Claude Debussy's "Clair de Lune"; Trump addresses Capitol Hill much like Franz Schubert's "Marche Militaire."

But days ago, when appearing triumphantly in the Israeli Knesset, he heard Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu salute him as "the greatest friend Israel has ever had in the White House" and speak of a "covenant between our two promised lands." The Trump mystery and confusion only grow.

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David M. Shribman is the former executive editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.