Tag Archives: Paul Ryan

Democracy, Donald Trump

Amid deep background reporting and anonymous bravado, the overall picture is unchanged: a train wreck of a presidency

In a week when Bob Woodward’s “Fear” paints in chilling detail a portrait of a White House engulfed in conflict, chaos, and covert insubordination, and an anonymous op-ed in the New York Times attests to the derisive views of President Trump by those closest to him and persistent workarounds to keep him from getting his way, what have we learned?

Conflict in presidential administrations is commonplace. Appointees often represent wings of a political party with different priorities than the president. Directives are often ignored by cabinet members. Aides try to protect the president from his worse impulses. This is all normal.

“But,” Jonathan Bernstein writes, “what we’re hearing about in these Trump stories is sort of a radical version of standard operating procedure for White House staff and the executive branch when faced with a president who is utterly unfit for the job.”

Donald Trump is impulsive, indulges in reckless rants and incoherence, has a short attention span, is easily distracted, lacks intellectual curiosity, is ignorant of history and policy, and reveals an irrepressible narcissism. We already know all this (which touches only on Trump’s mental capacity, not on his prejudice, avarice, or lack of principle) from watching the public Donald Trump and, for anyone who reveres democratic government, this is frightening. In Bernstein’s words:

What’s really scary is that Trump’s ineptitude at his job means that the normal constraints that keep presidents from doing terrible things may simply not apply. Normal presidents care about their professional reputation among those they work with, and about their popularity among the nation at large, and so they attempt to do the sorts of things that would enhance their reputations and make voters like them. Because he’s unable to even try to do those things — because he has apparently has no sense at all of how the job works — Trump doesn’t see the clear warning signs and then back off things that damage himself and the nation.

Or, as my Bloomberg Opinion colleague Timothy L. O’Brien puts it, “he generally doesn’t care about the long-term damage he might inflict on himself or those around him as long as he’s the center of attention.” That’s truly scary because the entire political system, as those who have read Federalist 51 will recognize, depends on politicians who care deeply about avoiding damage to themselves.

Federalist 51, generally attributed to James Madison, describes the features of the Constitution intended to “furnish the proper checks and balances between different departments” of government, such as constraints on personal ambition and buffers against encroachment of one branch on another. As remarkable as Donald Trump’s incapacity is, equally remarkable is the implacable abdication of the Republican majority in Congress to provide oversight over the executive branch.

Two of the President’s ‘critics’ in the majority party – both of whom have chosen not to seek reelection, which would require them to face the GOP voter base (still in lockstep with Trump) – find no grounds for disputing the devastating portrait of their leader.

Senator Bob Corker: “This is what all of us have understood to be the situation from day one… I understand this is the case and that’s why I think all of us encourage the good people around the President to stay. I thank General Mattis whenever I see him…”

Senator Ben Sasse: “It’s just so similar to what so many of us hear from senior people around the White House, you know, three times a week. So it’s really troubling, and yet in a way, not surprising.”

Neither Senator proposed any activity by Congress to remedy the situation our nation finds itself in. Congressional investigations of the executive branch are commonplace, even when the same party controls both Congress and the White House. Yet taking a closer look at what is going on is not in the cards for this Congress.

There is ample evidence, dating back to Newt Gingrich’s first days as Speaker of the House, of Republicans paring back the capacity of Congress to do its job. The inability to repeal the Affordable Healthcare Act (aka Obamacare) is the most glaring example of this failure in the current Congress (in part because no one on the Republican side of the aisle had developed the policy expertise to understand the ACA or to craft a plausible alternative, and no one in the leadership or among committee chairmen cared enough to do so).

Nonetheless, Speaker Paul Ryan and his team, which encouraged investigation after investigation of Benghazi (while boasting that it would harm Hillary Clinton’s 2016 election prospects) hasn’t simply forgotten Congress’s investigative role. Republicans have actually catalogued scandals and controversies that Congress could be investigating, if it had the will to do so (which is anticipated if Democrats regain the majority in the House this fall). A partial list from Axios, which obtained a copy of a document prepared by House Republicans:

  • President Trump’s tax returns
  • Trump family businesses — and whether they comply with the Constitution’s emoluments clause, including the Chinese trademark grant to the Trump Organization
  • Trump’s dealings with Russia, including the president’s preparation for his meeting with Vladimir Putin
  • The payment to Stephanie Clifford — a.k.a. Stormy Daniels
  • James Comey’s firing
  • Trump’s firing of U.S. attorneys
  • Trump’s proposed transgender ban for the military
  • Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin’s business dealings
  • White House staff’s personal email use
  • Cabinet secretary travel, office expenses, and other misused perks
  • Discussion of classified information at Mar-a-Lago
  • Jared Kushner’s ethics law compliance
  • Dismissal of members of the EPA board of scientific counselors
  • The travel ban
  • Family separation policy
  • Hurricane response in Puerto Rico
  • Election security and hacking attempts
  • White House security clearances

Things aren’t normal in either the executive or legislative branches of government. (I’ll set aside for the moment consideration of the judicial branch, which will be transformed for at least a generation as Brett Kavanaugh takes a seat on the Supreme Court and the U.S. Senate continues to approve ideologues to district and appellate courts nationwide.)

Things aren’t normal because the Republican Party has become an outlier, trashing traditional governing norms whenever it has glimpsed a partisan advantage, while ignoring – and diverting attention from – the resulting harm to the country.

September 9, 2018 update: Barack Obama reentered the political fray on Friday, decrying the course our nation is on, the absence of checks and balances, and the urgency of changing direction.

“This is not normal. These are extraordinary times. And they’re dangerous times.”

Image: Dr. Richard Kimble (Harrison Ford) running for dear life in “The Fugitive.”

 

Donald Trump, Polls, Tribalism

If it looks like a Blue Wave is coming, Republican voters will double down to suppress it

“Mr. Trump’s job approval rating rose to 45% in a new Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll, the highest mark of his presidency and up 1 percentage point from June….

Underpinning Mr. Trump’s job approval was support from 88% of Republican voters. Of the four previous White House occupants, only George W. Bush, in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, had a higher approval rating within his own party at the same point in his presidency.”

Donald Trump appears to be defying gravity:

When it comes to polling, Mr. Trump has proved paradoxical.

“Welcome to the latest and most daring of Donald Trump’s high-wire acts, in which the president increases his degree of difficulty and manages yet again to stay on his feet,” said Fred Yang, a Democratic pollster who helped conduct the survey with Republican Bill McInturff.

These survey results point to the greatest threat to a Blue Wave election that flips the House from Republican to Democratic control in November. Wave elections are powered by the amped up enthusiasm of voters in one party and the deflated spirits of voters in the other party. Both factors contribute. (Let’s set aside for another time various definitions of ‘wave election.’ For the purposes of this post, just suppose that we’re considering something simpler: Whether or not the Democrats will retake the House in 2018. Of course a host of factors, not just emotional highs and lows, generate election victories. And a host of factors, including events that will take place between now and November 6, will influence the results this fall. Put aside these complicating factors for the purposes of this discussion.)

Donald Trump’s support is ‘paradoxical’ because, on the one hand, surveys show he is highly unpopular (“Mr. Trump’s overall approval rating continued to rank among the lowest of any modern president at this point his first term, and the poll turned up warning signals for him.”) and he persists in acting as president of a factional government: he is focused on his base (not unusual), but (unlike previous post-World War II presidents), he is making few if any moves to attract support from voters not already on board with him. Much of what he says and does appears by design to alienate folks who aren’t part of his base – which “increases his degree of difficulty,” as Yang observed.

On the other hand, focusing virtually exclusively on the base is working for him on at least one level: His support, as measured by polling, shows that he has an extremely high “own party” approval rating. (In polling at the 500-day mark, approval from his own party exceeded every previous president, going back to Truman at the beginning of the polling era, with the single exception of the 43rd president, when Americans rallied ’round the Commander in Chief following 9/11.)

Paradoxical though it may be, Trump’s strategy is to focus on riling up his base – and the way to do that is often to deliberately provoke the opposition. A headline in this morning’s Washington Post featured a quotation from Paul Ryan (on the proposal to revoke security clearances of Trump critiques). Said the Speaker of the House: “I think he’s just trolling people.”

I agree. I believe this is a deliberate strategy. Like the popular campaign chant, “Lock her up!” (which Jeff Sessions heard and repeated this morning while addressing a crowd of conservatives), this is another case of trashing longstanding institutional and governing norms. And that’s the point: Trump vents, critics jump, and his base rallies behind him.

The result – as the Wall St. Journal/NBC News poll suggests – is an extraordinary level of support from the GOP base, at a time of general presidential unpopularity. This is something we haven’t seen before.

Republicans are doggedly sticking with Trump, even as his overall approval numbers are at historic lows.

There have been mixed signals regarding the likelihood that we are heading into a wave election, or even a more modest result that will bring a Democratic majority to Congress.

All kinds of things can – and will – happen between now and election day, but at this stage, the greatest threat to Democrats flipping the House is the possibility of sky high Republican turnout for an unpopular and divisive president.

November 21, 2018 update: Donald Trump succeeded in generating the “sky high Republican turnout” I referenced in this post. But there just weren’t enough of them to hold back the Blue Wave: “Trump’s Base Isn’t Enough.”