Trump Has 3 Strengths That Could Revive His Presidency
(Bloomberg View) -- If you are looking for reasons to be optimistic about the success of the Trump administration, it’s certainly not in the results of its first 100 days. Very little has passed Congress. The main executive order which demanded immediate action -- the travel ban -- has been shot down in court so far. He hasn't managed to build a team. While he did successfully fill the Supreme Court vacancy, he hasn't moved forward on other judicial openings.
There's no tax plan. No infrastructure plan. No financial regulation plan. Nothing happening so far with renegotiating trade deals. His wall isn't going to be paid for by Mexico, and it doesn't appear Congress is particularly interested in doing so, either. He does have a budget outline to submit to Congress, but it's far from clear how it will do there. The administration (and Congress) have successfully killed some Obama-era regulations, which is a reminder that even a moribund administration can change policy in many ways. By a large margin, Trump is the least popular president 100 days into office of the polling era, so that's not helping. And his professional reputation is in tatters.
Policy Indifference
Trump certainly has some longstanding attitudes: He's suspicious of foreigners, multilateral treaties, foreign trade in general, and more. But he shows no commitment to any policy. That's probably a plus for a president; it means he's relatively free to negotiate for any wins he can get, even if they aren't the wins he initially campaigned on or sought to achieve early in his presidency.
According to Richard Neustadt's classic "Presidential Power", flexibility in policy goals gives a president the ability to listen to organized groups and their representatives and seek agreements where they can be found, which can mean policy better grounded in the realities of the nation compared to policy simply driven by the president's personal concerns.
Take infrastructure. Trump has no apparent commitment to a Democratic-style direct spending program, a Republican-style tax credit plan, or anything else. That should leave him open to find something (as Neustadt suggests) "manageable to [those] who must administer it, acceptable to those who must support it, tolerable to those who must put up with it, in Washington and out" since Trump can, at least theoretically, shift easily away from strong opposition and toward wherever the votes are.
He Wants Wins
Trump, we're told, is desperate for wins -- whatever the content of those wins might be. Again, that's very compatible with succeeding in the Oval Office. For Neustadt, it's the presidential drive for power -- the search, we might say, for "wins" -- that powers the entire constitutional system. The ambitious politicians who reach the White House remain ambitious, and it turns out (Neustadt argues) that the same things that produce presidential influence also produce viable public policy (that is, government which actually works).
Listening to Voters
The campaign version of Trump was always testing applause lines out at his rallies, and sticking with whatever works; he's said that his anti-immigration focus came in part from the reaction of his very first audience at his campaign kickoff event to his bigoted comments about Mexican criminals. While that example shows one of the potential problems with allowing the worst of the crowd to dictate policy, in general it's still a good instinct for a president to care how what he or she is doing affects rank-and-file voters. Anything to get a president out of his own bubble and force him to connect with the nation is at least potentially a positive.
Unfortunately, Trump hasn't really deployed any of these attributes as the assets they can be.
As far as political skills are concerned, Trump has basically comes up empty so far. He's supplemented policy indifference with policy ignorance. Instead of voraciously vacuuming up useful information, he's watching cable TV news and chatting with a kitchen cabinet filled with people who know as little of government and public policy as he does. He's used huckster rhetoric to (attempt to) paper over failures, rather than working hard to achieve wins -- and he's especially prone to using that technique on his own supporters, which makes a mockery of representation.
The 100-days marker isn't just arbitrary, as Julia Azari reminds us: Trump can never get back the time he's wasted, which is usually the most fertile period a president ever gets. And the truth is it's unlikely he'll turn anything around. Bill Clinton had an awful transition and began his presidency poorly, but his core political skills and deep ambition helped him eventually get things back on track and allowed him considerable success in the long run, even though he had squandered his opportunity for some large-scale successes. But Trump doesn't have that skill set, and so far at least doesn't seem particularly interested in learning anything new -- his surprising electoral success appears to have just further convinced him to ignore useful criticism.
If he is to turn it around, however, those are the assets he'll need to work from.
This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
Jonathan Bernstein is a Bloomberg View columnist. He taught political science at the University of Texas at San Antonio and DePauw University and wrote A Plain Blog About Politics.
The administration is backing off Trump's claim that one would be introduced this week.
He did formally kill off the already-dead Trans-Pacific Partnership, but there's no movement on anything else.
Unfortunately, being gifted at "Look at me!" is virtually useless for a president of the United States, because even the most bland and boring president can capture the nation's attention whenever he or she wants. It goes with the office. Perhaps there's some benefit at the margins, but it's hard to see how the ability (and, again, it is a real skill) to get CNN to talk about the president an extra 10 or 20 percent of the time is at all helpful to Trump's presidency.
Having some outsiders to bounce ideas off and using independent media as a reality check on internal government sources of information can be a very good idea for an information-seeking president, but by all accounts these and other accidental sources (such as what foreign leaders happen to tell him appear to be where Trump begins.
This is hardly an exhaustive list of his faults, which probably begin with a blatant disregard for ethics rules and practices; it's certainly possible his various misdeeds will still derail his presidency even if he manages to get everything else right, and at the very least they've given others bargaining leverage over him.
To contact the author of this story: Jonathan Bernstein at jbernstein62@bloomberg.net.
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Mike Nizza at mnizza3@bloomberg.net.
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