Is Donald Trump a weak president? A number of political scientists and commentators have answered this question affirmatively. A strong case can be made for this view. I was in the affirmative camp in February 2019. By December 2019, I had begun to harbor doubts. In this post, I survey why Trump is regarded as a weak president. In a subsequent post, I will look at the strong grounds we have for challenging this view.
Presidential Power
Generations of political scientists have looked to Richard Neustadt’s analysis in Presidential Power, which suggests that our constitutional system, featuring separated powers, institutional constraints, and competition among political actors, limits what a president can accomplish through the sole exercise of formal powers (though these are substantial). Thus the president must elicit the cooperation of others to get things done. A president’s effectiveness is found in his power to persuade.
We might better think of ‘persuasion’ as negotiation, because Neustadt envisages “hard bargaining” and a give and take between the president and other political actors.
The essence of a President’s persuasive task, with congressmen and everybody else, is to induce them to believe that what he wants of them is what their own appraisal of their own responsibilities requires them to do in their interest, not his. Because men may differ in their views on public policy, because differences in outlook stem from differences in duty—duty to one’s office, one’s constituents, oneself—that task is bound to be more like collective bargaining than like a reasoned argument among philosopher kings.
Jonathan Bernstein, who argued before Trump’s inauguration that “We may be at the beginning of a historically weak presidency,” observes (in “The 1960 Book That Explains Why Trump Is a Failure“) that in Neustadt’s view:
“persuasion” doesn’t necessarily mean changing anyone’s mind. It may just mean convincing someone in a position of power to do nothing rather than something.
Bernstein also notes that
skilled presidents … rely on more than just threats. They work hard to build strong relationships, and know when to dangle carrots to loosely affiliated supporters, too.
A savvy and effective president makes good use of the tools at his command, which may include: a reservoir of knowledge and the know-how to command the levers of power; an understanding of the political interests and needs of, for instance, the senators and members of Congress with whom a president must deal; a reputation as someone who can articulate what he wants, whose word can be trusted, and is prepared to do what he says he will do; and a favorable standing with the American public.
Donald Trump lacks virtually every asset on the list. It is safe to say that Neustadt’s image of a strong president looked nothing like our current president. Several distinct critiques of Trump’s shortcomings illustrate why this is so. Let’s begin with Daniel Drezner’s “Immature Leadership: Donald Trump and the American Presidency.”
Trump as Toddler
Drezner notes Trump’s meager legislative accomplishments, feckless executive orders, and the absence of trade or arms control agreements, among other failures. Drezner attributes this record to specific psychological traits of the President. Drezner has observed that friend and foe alike (and even Trump himself) have depicted Trump in language applicable to “a rambunctious two-year old.”
Even a cursory examination of the Trump literature reveals a peculiarity unique to this president: almost all his biographers, even his acolytes, describe him in terms one would use for a toddler. He offers the greatest example of pervasive developmental delay in American political history.
Between April 25, 2017 – when Drezner posted a tweet noting that Trump’s staff talked about him like a toddler – and April 27, 2020 – three years later, Drezner had writen a book, The Toddler in Chief: What Donald Trump Teaches Us about the Modern Presidency, and posted 1,358 tweets citing references to Trump as toddler. “It is safe to say that Donald Trump has not grown into the presidency. At this point, the thread itself possesses more maturity than the commander in chief.”
Drezner identifies Trump’s quick temper, short attention span, and poor impulse control as primary traits that have greatly impaired Trump’s effectiveness as president. Making the case for Trump’s deficiencies, based on the review in “Immature Leadership,” is child’s play. Drezner concludes: “If Neustadt is correct in his view that the chief power of the presidency is the ability to persuade, then Donald Trump has been a weak, ineffectual president.”
Trump as Failed Deal Maker
We can make an equally strong case with a different approach. Consider a calling card of Donald Trump years before he ran for president. As the nominal author of Trump: The Art of the Deal (actually ghostwritten by a writer “who put lipstick on a pig“) and in his starring role as the chief executive on NBC’s “The Apprentice,” Trump convinced much of the country that he was a skillful deal maker. The evidence of the past 3+ years reveals the opposite. His shortcomings as a negotiator have become well known during his presidency. Seven months into his term, Calculated Risk, an economics blog, distinguished two kinds of negotiation – distributive (win-lose) and integrative (win-win) – to explain Trump’s failures as a negotiator.
Trump’s approach is win-lose. Distributive deals are zero-sum. Bluster, bluffing, empty threats, even lies might carry the day with the sale of real estate, especially if one has no intention of ever making another deal with the buyer. Take the money and don’t look back.
A successful president, on the other hand, must rely on integrative negotiating skills, which Trump lacks.
Trump can’t be trusted, since he is both irresolute (saying one thing one day, and another thing the next) and has a reputation as a cheat (well-earned before he ran for president). He’s certainly not working hard “to build strong relationships.” He fails to master substantive matters, including policy choices, proposed legislation, and international conflicts. This deficit – and his lack of empathy or even a modicum of curiosity – blind him to the concerns and even the incentives of whoever is on the other side of the negotiating table.
More than once Trump’s threats to Democrats made no sense because he was warning of consequences that his own party had more reason to fear than did Democrats. His misreading of Kim Jong Un has been grotesque.
Trump’s reliance on gut instinct and on fantasies regarding personal relationships (and even ‘love letters’), and his aversion to strategic planning, have yielded few agreements after 40 months in office. His inability to persuade negotiators on the other side demonstrates glaring weakness.
Trump as Narcissist
Trump’s self-love and hunger for the adoration of others, which crowd out virtually everything else in his personal space, is in evidence every day.
Trump, as Ashley Parker put it last month, clings to a “me-me-me ethos.” In the face of a rising death toll, millions of unemployment claims, and long lines at food banks, Trump made the coronavirus briefings all about himself – “his self image, his media coverage, his supplicants and his opponents, both real and imagined.”
George Conway – employing DSM criteria for narcissism – has taken time and care to document Trump’s compulsive focus on himself and his profound lack of empathy for others (“Unfit for Office”). It is critical to note that Conway (an attorney, not a psychiatrist) is focused on Trump’s publicly observable behavior and how that renders Trump incapable of fulfilling the fiduciary responsibilities of the office of president. He has no interest in rendering a medical/psychiatric diagnosis.
There is no contradiction, in fact, in both calling Trump “a world-class narcissist” and declining to label him as mentally ill. It doesn’t take a degree in medicine or psychology to see in plain sight Trump’s extraordinary vanity and callousness. Conway argues convincingly that, “Trump’s ingrained and extreme behavioral characteristics make it impossible for him to carry out the duties of the presidency in the way the Constitution requires.”
For our purposes, we can conclude that his distinctive psychological makeup robs Trump of managerial competence and the capacity to persuade.
Trump as COVID-19 Bystander
Finally, the COVID-19 debacle, and Trump’s flight from accountability, is documented daily by the news media. Last month David Hopkins cataloged Trump’s blunders in response to the pandemic (“The Weakest Modern Presidency Faces a Pandemic From the Couch”), including failing to engage meaningfully with the issue. “According to recent reporting, Trump is unengaged with the substance of his administration’s COVID mitigation efforts: his discursive appearances at task force meetings reveal a limited understanding of relevant subjects when he attends at all, and he spends much of the workday watching cable television.”
Hopkins summarizes:
All of these traits were visible before COVID came along. But now the demands on this presidency have grown stronger while the president looks less and less comfortable in the job, unable even to mimic the seriousness of purpose that other elected officials have marshaled in the moment. [Emphasis added.]
Trump as toddler, failed deal maker, narcissist, and passive bystander: all point to the same conclusion. Trump lacks basic managerial skills, an affinity for negotiation, and an informed understanding of government. His deeply rooted self-absorption renders him incapable of acting as an effective executive. He is deficient in both credibility and the power to persuade anyone not predisposed to defer to him.
On the other hand
As strong as the case is for the conclusion, ‘Trump is a weak president,’ it leaves something out: Trump’s singular, imposing dominance over the Republican Party, which is without precedent among other presidents stretching back to FDR (Neustadt’s starting point). While Trump displays many conspicuous weaknesses as president, his command over the GOP undermines the conclusion.
Mark Shields alluded to this dominance in December, noting (in my words, not his) that LBJ was a weakling compared to Trump regarding the fear that each man generated among the party faithful. The fearsome LBJ could only dream of dominating the Democratic Party as Trump dominates the GOP.
I will argue in a subsequent post that Trump’s domination of the GOP is not an empty illusion (contrary to advocates of the view that Trump is a weak president); that as ham-handed, uninformed, and constrained by compulsive self-absorption as Trump is, he has become more powerful over the past three years; and that these (and other) considerations undercut the conclusion.
(Image: small man creates a commotion, flailing and whining about how unfairly others treat him, and grasps for a simplistic solution.)
