When I first became a dad, now almost 30 years ago, I told friends that everything I knew about parenting I had learned from a horse. I don’t mean, like, there was a horse training me – I didn’t know Mr. Ed. I mean that in riding and caring for a horse, which I did as a kid and as a young man, I got some life lessons in how to relate to people and projects. And lately, as I’ve been watching what’s going on in American politics, I’ve decided that good horsemanship could improve both our domestic policy and our foreign policy. You may think that Donald Trump’s kind of a wild cowboy, but the man can’t ride.
One of the things you learn when you’re beginning to ride a horse is that you need to display genuine and continuing care for the animal. I’ve been straining to see where Donald Trump has shown that he cares about other people. Just one of his many initiatives, shutting down the U.S. Agency for International Development, is likely to result in more than 14 million deaths in the next five years, including 4.5 million children under age 5. (That’s according to Oxfam and the Brookings Institution.) How can somebody who loves a child possibly make such a decision?
Not that America should be a pushover in foreign policy – any more than a rider lets a horse make decisions about where it’s going and when. Firmness is needed. Doing nothing to discourage Benjamin Netanyahu from his attempt to annihilate the people of Gaza is not displaying the kind of firm leadership that we have always expected of American presidents.
I was taught to never give a horse a command that I didn’t intend to carry out – that is, mean it and execute on it, or else that big animal will run away with you. Consider that in the context of Trump’s on-again-off-again trade war. I’ve lost track of where we are: Is Trump imposing tariffs now, or is he putting them off till some future date – or is he just talking? Mind you, those tariffs are a terrible idea: They’re going to hike prices for Americans and lead to international tensions, and they’ll strengthen other countries as they pick up markets in our aggrieved trading partners. But setting a deadline to impose tariffs and then abandoning it is like telling a horse to giddy-up and then pulling on the reins.
Speaking of reins: Good riders have what’s called soft hands. Even while being firm with a command, they know when to give that horse’s big head a bit of extra leeway, so the bit doesn’t pull back and hurt the horse’s mouth. Trump’s bluster is like an eager cowboy who’s yanking on the reins and not understanding why the horse doesn’t want to cooperate.
On a horse you have to control your emotions. Every action by a rider brings a reaction from the horse, and being harsh with a sensitive animal always backfires. Donald Trump has no emotional control. Proof: The many instances when he has changed policy apparently based upon the latest person to speak to him.
And there’s the matter of patience. When you’re working with an over-sized animal with a small brain, developing new habits takes time. Consider the mess that DOGE made of cutting federal spending. If Trump had patiently worked through the government’s spending priorities, he might’ve accomplished useful savings for taxpayers. But he gave carte blanche to Elon Musk because he couldn’t be bothered to pay attention to details. It’s well known that Trump doesn’t read – so he rarely digests the President’s Daily Brief, the crucial information source he needs to have. That’s leading the Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, to plan to hire a Fox News producer to create a video segment Trump can watch and understand.
You know, just because Trump grew up as a rich kid in Queens doesn’t mean he couldn’t have learned to ride a horse. There are several stables in the borough, and many next door, in Nassau County. But it’s well-known that Donald Trump just doesn’t like animals. The New York Post says he’s the first president in 150 years to have no pets in the White House. During his first term, he criticized Mike Pence for bringing a cat, a dog and a rabbit named Marlon Bundo when he moved into the Vice President’s residence. You know, I think Trump’s the kind of a guy who watches the movie Old Yeller and roots for the rabies.
Look, there are a lot of lessons that we can learn from the time we spend with our animal companions. Patience, emotional control, doing what you promise, caring over the long haul: Good lessons for me, as a young dad all those years ago, that came from my horse. I just wish we had a president who had absorbed some of them, too.
Rex Smith, the co-host of The Media Project on WAMC, is the former editor of the Times Union of Albany and The Record in Troy. His weekly digital report, The Upstate American, is published by Substack.
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