‘Whiplash leadership’

US President Donald Trump’s disruptive moves in and outside his country is him practicing “whiplash leadership.”

And, the earlier we see that the easier we Filipinos navigate any recent and forthcoming decisions from him impacting our national interests and saves us a lot of pain down the road.

Now, “whiplash leadership” in business circles is defined “as a leader’s rapid series of decisions that often send entry level employees, senior executives, institutional shareholders, die hard customers, and every other form of shareholder scrambling.”

As you can readily see, the above definition neatly describes all the disconcerting shockwaves he caused and that’s now gripping inside and outside his country, all of which elicited strong reactions and retaliatory backlash.

What Trump is doing inside his own country, of course, shouldn’t detain us further, leaving these to the Americans themselves to sort it out.

But what mercurial Trump does which impacts our national interests and the well-being of our relatives and friends in the U.S. does concern us.

A fact which explains why the global freeze on American aid and the deportation of undocumented Filipinos easily hog recent local news headlines.

Deportations of undocumented Filipinos have started, with some 24 Filipinos already sent home. It is still a developing story.

The recent suspension of US foreign aid globally, however, sent scores of senior Filipino officials grasping for breath about its domestic implications.

Surprisingly, however, most officials concluded the aid suspension was unlikely to severely affect the country, without even having on hand either conclusive information or official confirmation from the Americans.

Several reasons were given for the reassuring conclusion. What stood out, however, was the fact that contrary to common impressions American aid counted for less than what our other allies, like Japan, had actually given. So we probably can rest easy for now.

For our purposes here, however, that “aha” reassuring moment about US foreign aid is also related to Trump’s brand of “whiplash leadership.”

In fact, nervous senior officials baring the real score about US foreign aid inadvertently - and without them really knowing about what it meant - gives us valuable lessons on how to smartly approach and deal with mercurial Trump, without us losing sleep over it.

And, the first advisable thing we all should do about mercurial Trump is to step back from the headlines. Why?

For the practical reason that trying to understand the actions of the Trump administration in real time likely misleads us about Trump’s brand of “whiplash leadership.”

How this happens is largely because of how American news media still cover Trump and which narcissistic Trump is using to his advantage.

To get a handle of this, here’s what an American media practitioner tells us about most American news coverage of Trump 2.0: “He’d (Trump) make an announcement, and we’d (media) all rush to cover what he’d said. Then, an hour later, it would come out that what he said wasn’t representative of what was happening, so we’d all rush to cover the gap between what he’d promised and what he’d said. And then he would deny he ever said what he said, and we’d all rush to cover that. And in the end, we’d end up basically where we started, but we’d have put readers through several rounds of whiplash in pursuit of being ‘first.’”

In short, this bobbing to-and-fro state of affairs causes pains in the neck, hence the related medical term whiplash.

It also doesn’t tell us much about what dealmaking Trump eventually has in store, which means we have no other choice but to patiently wait what he is bargaining for or reveal his real political motives, after all the smoke and dust have settled.