Steven L. Isenberg, former publisher of New York Newsday and chief of staff to New York Mayor John V. Lindsay, is chairman of the board, emeritus, at Adelphi University and a senior adviser for the Committee to Protect the Journalists. He has written for The American Scholar, the Los Angeles Review of Books and Essays in Criticism. The opinions expressed in this commentary are his own; view more opinion at CNN.



(CNN) Some days, America gets a reassuring sign that President Trump has a sense of the responsibility and stature of the office he holds. When he spoke of "the love, the respect for the office of the presidency" he encountered in Dayton, Ohio, and El Paso, Texas, or when he called upon China to be "humane" in dealing with the Hong Kong protesters or when he said that while no one could surpass his support for the Second Amendment, he did not want guns in the "hands of a lunatic or a maniac," he thereby acknowledged the place the presidency holds in confronting violence and the prospect of chaos.

Steven L. Isenberg

And yet those moments are short-lived. It is never long before the President's communications become prickly and personalized, combatively thin-skinned. Something deep and reflexive seems to overtake him. The presidency never fully inhabits him nor inhibits him.

We saw this in Texas after the El Paso shooting, where the community at large, bruised by past statements and the day's horror, never felt words or gestures of presidential comfort and sympathy that were offered in the hospital. Shock, anxiety and anger naturally had taken hold, and perhaps because the White House wanted to avoid emotional displays of hurt, resentment and demands for action on gun control, Trump never spoke in public.

And once again, the ground of disagreement quickly became a launching pad for disparagement. What infuriates Trump is an accusation or a call for accountability, any comment that points toward his words or actions as a cause for what has gone wrong.

It feels hopeless to think that Trump will ever admit that anything he may have said or done has helped to fray the material of civility and ignite the chemistry of estrangement among young men, especially white young men. His claim that "my rhetoric brings people together," which he absurdly mustered with a straight face, betrays his pathological aversion to taking responsibility for his own acts.

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