Donald Trump’s Superficiality Is Bone Deep

Donald Trump is reluctant to anoint J. D. Vance as his successor, and understandably so. But The New York Times recently discovered a peculiar basis for the president’s concern. “Mr. Trump, always keenly attuned to the optics of the presidency, has zeroed in on moments when Mr. Vance might not look the part,” the paper reported. “He has repeatedly brought up a moment from last spring, when Mr. Vance fumbled Ohio State’s national football championship trophy on the White House South Lawn.”Of all the reasons for Trump to hesitate to crown Vance as the Republican presidential nominee in 2028, he has fixated not on Vance’s inflammatory comments about single women or on the difficulty vice presidents have detaching themselves from their administration’s unpopular record, but instead on the one time that Vance briefly mishandled a football trophy.This is an extraordinarily shallow method for picking your party’s standard-bearer. It isn’t a surprise, however, because Trump is almost certainly the shallowest man ever to inhabit his office. Superficiality is a value system that has guided some of his administration’s most important decisions as it has drifted from menace into frivolity and decadence.Trump has devoted his second term to the aspects of the presidency that would appeal to an apolitical tourist who visits Washington, D.C. He has poured himself into redecorations of the White House, interior and exterior, and has updated the city’s public spaces. This attention to renovation has yielded some undeniably lovely results, such as restored fountains and plazas. Other changes are more, well, taste-based, such as replacing the White House Rose Garden with a patio, and giving the Oval Office hotel-style signage and filling it with expensive knickknacks and gold leaf.[Read: Donald Trump’s paint jobs]What’s striking about this campaign is not its aesthetic but its obsessive quality. Other presidents have engaged in monument-building and public-space remodeling, but Trump m