If only Donald Trump could realize the damage he does to his own interests.
If only he could grasp that he is his own worst enemy.
If that happened, he might receive the reverence he longs for. He might earn the honored place in history for which he pleads.
Should it hold, the cease-fire in Gaza — with its return of the hostages Hamas held and an end, at least temporarily, to the wholesale bloodshed — will be a huge diplomatic triumph for President Trump. The hostilities there seemed intractable. Continued and mounting tragedy seemed to be the only possible outcome.
Somehow, though, it appears that Trump — at least temporarily — has untied a knot that has proved unyielding not just to previous U.S. presidents, but to other world leaders.
He deserves credit for that.
If he were any other president, an achievement such as this one would push his public approval ratings to almost stratospheric levels.
That likely won’t happen with this president. He may receive a short-lived bump, but soon he will be back to where he always has been — battling to prevent his polled public support from dipping below the 40% level and conjuring up stunt after stunt and distraction after distraction to keep his devoted base in a state of constant uproar.
Trump and his partisans would say this is the fault of his political opponents — the vast conspiracy of Democrats and progressives determined to deny him credit for any achievement.
It isn’t.
In the first place, Trump’s assessment of the left’s capacity for organization and cooperation is not grounded in anything resembling reality.
Lock two Democrats in a room for an hour with nothing to do but talk and argue with each other and they will emerge from the experience having formed three factions. They couldn’t and can’t organize a sock drawer, much less a conspiracy large enough and effective enough to prevent a Republican Party with control of the entire federal government from functioning.
Second, Trump’s finger-pointing overlooks the fact that no one alive at the moment dominates the world stage the way he does. Virtually every important conversation we Americans have now in this country is conducted by the terms this president has established.
No one, no one, no one has a microphone anywhere near as big or as powerful as the one Trump has at his disposal.
For that reason, there’s always been only one person who could keep Donald Trump from achieving his goals and receiving the credit he craves.
That person is Donald Trump himself.
Most Americans — Republican, Democrat, independent or apathetic — wouldn’t care that much one way or the other about who was president, so long as they left alone to go about their business and live their lives as they wished.
But that is not the Trump way.
Because he sees the world in binary terms — one is either entirely for him or entirely against him — he forces many people who otherwise might support him, at least on many things, into opposition.
And his presence in the American consciousness is so large that even those people who simply would like to ignore him can’t do so.
This has been his fundamental misunderstanding from the beginning of his political rise.
It is the thing that made his insistence that he “won” the 2020 presidential election so absurd.
Trump had a point in insisting that Joe Biden couldn’t possibly have defeated him. Biden didn’t beat him.
Trump defeated himself.
By wearing the public out with one manufactured crisis after another, he wore out his welcome with many Americans. When it became clear that he had no idea how to deal with a mess not of his own making — the coronavirus pandemic — most Americans were ready to look elsewhere for leadership.
But it could have been otherwise.
Now, at what should be a moment of real triumph for him, Trump presides over a shut-down federal government — a government closed over a delusional contention on his part that undocumented immigrants are consuming costly government services without paying taxes.
In fact, the opposite is true.
Undocumented immigrants pay taxes without being able to consume services.
The fact that he wages this war against his own fellow citizens is the stuff of tragedy.
Most Americans would like to celebrate Donald Trump’s triumphs as their own.
But Trump’s worst enemy won’t let that happen.
That enemy’s name is Donald Trump.