The method in Donald Trump's maddening communications habits

There seem to be specific objectives behind Trump's seemingly scattershot missives and comments

Is it method or madness?

That is the question perplexing the world as President-elect Donald Trump continues his unorthodox campaign-season communications habits. He tweets, apparently randomly. He wades into subjects that he could easily avoid. He picks fights. Monday night, he tweeted of North Korean hopes of developing a nuclear weapon that could reach the U.S.: “It won’t happen!”

It is a risky approach. By weighing in on all sorts of matters large and small, Mr. Trump already may be in danger of devaluing the most valuable asset any president has, which is the bully pulpit. Will any individual message from the new president have the impact he wants if it is lost in the static of running commentary?

It’s also hard to argue that a presidential communication can have the depth, texture and subtlety often required when it comes in 140 characters.

Yet it also would be a mistake to dismiss Mr. Trump’s transition-season interventions as random musings. That was a mistake his opponents made consistently through a long presidential campaign.

In fact, there seem to be specific objectives behind many of Mr. Trump’s seemingly scattershot missives and comments. Often, say those who know him, he is posturing or positioning in pursuit of broader goals. He doesn’t mind roiling the waters in the process—and, as a consequence, some of what he says isn’t to be taken literally.

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, who speaks regularly with Mr. Trump and is developing a lecture series and book examining Trumpism, suggests the president-elect is in this regard similar to Franklin Roosevelt, who sometimes seemed to cultivate chaos in preparing the ground for his initiatives. Mr. Gingrich also predicts the style won’t change:  “My advice is to relax. It’s going to be this way for eight years.”

So what might Mr. Trump be trying to accomplish? There are three likely goals:

He is positioning himself for a negotiation or a deal. Mr. Trump has said that a good way to understand how he operates is to read his book, “The Art of the Deal,” which describes his approach to business negotiations. And in any negotiation, the opening posture isn’t the same as the bottom-line position.

The best example may be the way Mr. Trump has approached China, a country with which he figures to have plenty of tough negotiations on trade and military manoeuvring in the South China Sea. His opening bid came when decided to accept a call from the president of Taiwan, a step that was sure to rile the government in Beijing. He then followed with a series of tweets saying that the Chinese don’t ask for permission to take steps that irritate the U.S., implying they shouldn’t expect the new president to worry too much about keeping them happy either.

“That was the surest signal to the Chinese that things are going to be different,” says Mr. Gingrich.

Then, when the Chinese navy snatched an American underwater drone from the waters of the South China Sea, Mr. Trump, seemingly unprompted, tweeted out a message to the Chinese that the drone wasn’t that important and that they could just keep it—even as the U.S. Navy was scrambling to try to retrieve a valuable piece of sensitive equipment. The apparent goal was to lower the value of the drone in Chinese eyes, lest they think they could use it as a bargaining chip with the new president.

He is seeking to control the agenda. Early-morning tweets have a way of establishing what everyone else will be compelled to talk about that day. They also have had a way of upstaging the man who still happens to be the president, Barack Obama, annoying the White House and potentially creating confusion abroad about who really is in charge.

Thus did Mr. Trump tweet that the U.S. should veto a United Nations Security Council resolution condemning Israeli settlements on the West Bank before that resolution was even formally debated, and that the U.S. should be prepared to enlarge its nuclear-weapons arsenal soon after Russian President Vladimir Putin suggested Russia might do the same. In both cases, the question immediately became what the new president thought as much as what the current president might do.

He is creating rabbits for others to chase. For two weeks Mr. Trump nursed along the idea that he might pick former Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney as his secretary of state. Ultimately, he didn’t—but he sparked a string of news stories suggesting he was reaching out to embrace former enemies, and distracting from less beneficial topics such as potential conflicts of interest in his nascent administration.

Certainly there is danger in leaving the world unsure which messages to take literally, and in trying to handle subjects as sensitive as nuclear-weapons strategy on the fly. But it’s also likely Mr. Trump knows exactly what he is doing.

Source: The Wall Street Journal