Let me explain why National Review‘s editor in chief Rich Lowry has identified the fatal flaw in Trump’s administration but has nothing legitimate to offer as a solution. Here’s what Lowry gets right. He sees that the Republicans’ two main legislative priorities right now, Obamacare repeal/replace and tax reform, are things that candidate Trump promised but not things that really drove his victory. After all, these are both things that would have been on the priority list for a President Rubio or Cruz.
Lowry also understands the skewed dynamic that he describes here:
This is a product of how the Republican sweep of 2016 was won on separate tracks. Trump tore up many Republican orthodoxies and went out and found a different way to unlock the electoral map, winning in the industrial Midwest. Congressional Republicans more or less stuck with the usual script, kept Trump at arm’s length, and held their majorities in the House and the Senate.
As a result, there is no significant Trumpist wing in Congress. The faction most favorable to him, the House Freedom Caucus, is made up of ideological conservatives whose philosophy is at odds with Trump’s economic populism, even if they are drawn to his anti-establishmentarianism.
Insofar as Trump has fellow-travelers within the party, they’re the ones who are least inclined to support more government spending or projects. As Lowry notes, Trump’s campaign message was so high on signaling (anti-Mexico border wall, anti-China trade deals) and so low on substance that when he arrived in the White House, “there was no off-the-shelf Trump legislation that Congress could begin on immediately.”
And this led to the Trump team’s fatal mistake. They saw themselves as besieged by the political establishment and legitimized by the silent far-right plurality that elected them. Their inclination was to keep going back to the far right for support and message amplification, but that meant that they were cutting off all avenues of cooperation with the Democrats. And, without any realistic prospect of moving bipartisan legislation, that left the administration completely dependent on the very congressional Republican establishment Trump had basically defanged and discredited in the primaries.
Lowry suggests that the Trump adminstration’s decision to rely on Congressional Republicans to push their agenda was a “natural reflex” arising out of the fact that they didn’t have their own bills ready, but I think that’s not quite right:
The natural reflex, then, was to defer to the Republican leadership in Congress. Trump could have come roaring out of the gate with one of his distinctive proposals, the $1 trillion infrastructure plan, and wooed Democrats to support it and dared Republicans to oppose it. Instead, infrastructure has been put off to the second year, the polite way of saying it may not happen at all.
It’s probably more accurate to say that the Trump administration was so interested in pursuing their ideological plan through radically unacceptable administrative appointments that they didn’t give much thought to the legislative repercussions of cutting off the possibility of Democratic cooperation in Congress. They thereby stumbled into a situation where their only option was to pass the ball to Ryan and McConnell and tell them to do what they can on their own.
One way of putting this is that, yes, it was a mistake not to make infrastructure and jobs his top priority, and to make sure that he had Democratic buy-in for his bill, but that effort would still have failed because of other decisions that were made, like appointing Jeff Sessions as Attorney General and coming out of the box with an unconstitutional Muslim ban.
Trump wasn’t elected to be the most far right Republican in the country. He was elected, in large part, because he wasn’t a Republican. He wasn’t anything like George or Jeb Bush. He wasn’t like John Boehner and Eric Cantor. That was a huge part of his appeal. And it wasn’t just that he was more pugnacious. It was that he was different when it came to trade and infrastructure and entitlements and health care. He picked off a lot of traditional Democrats because of this, but he didn’t follow up with that advantage once he started to form his cabinet and craft his legislative priorities.
And I think this is why Lowry doesn’t have a solution for Trump’s conundrum. Because, for Lowry, the main thing is that Trump needs to find a way to get this health care bill passed or everything is going to go to shit for him.
Even more than most politicians, Trump has no interest in owning failure. The explanation of the president and his supporters won’t be that he backed a flawed strategy and bill in the House and paid the price. It will be that he was stabbed in the back. He went along with a GOP establishment politics that doesn’t understand or care about Trump voters, and he can never make that mistake again…
…This would mean Trump would be a president not without a party necessarily, but without a Congress. It would make major legislative accomplishments impossible…
Lowry does acknowledge that the current health care bill has its problems but, just like the rest of the GOP establishment, he doesn’t seem to understand or care about Trump voters.
It is better for everyone that Obamacare repeal-and-replace succeed. Ryan should amend his bill to, among other things, get the coverage numbers up and make it a sturdier vessel for the turbulence ahead. The alternative is a defeat that may precipitate a nasty, perhaps enduring, split in a party desperate to paper over its divisions.
The political problems with the Republicans’ health care bill can’t be solved by magically amending it to get the coverage numbers up. For Trump’s strongest congressional supporters, the coverage numbers are still too high and the bill represents an ideological defeat by permanently enshrining the principle that the federal government should subsidize health insurance for those who can’t afford it. Trump can take their side and lose in the House or he take Ryan’s side and lose in the Senate. His problem is that he needs the Democrats and he’s pushed them so far away that he will never get them back.
Trump could have been true to his word of shaking things up in Washington if he had gone in there and had no regard for party and just put together coalitions to do stuff he wanted done. He could have told Schumer to come up with an infrastructure plan and then whipped just enough Republicans to get it passed. He could have gone after Dems to support his vision for trade and tax reform.
Instead, he and his team waddled into the threshing blades by choosing a strategy where he would be completely dependent on a Republican Party that he had discredited and ought to have been working around rather than with.
There really is no solution for Trump. He has, as they say, screwed the pooch. He still needs Democrats to achieve his agenda, but they won’t be there for him. The Republican congress can’t pass much by themselves, and what they can pass isn’t what Trump’s voters want or expect.
good
Trump Airlines, Trump Taj Mahal: it’s deja vu all over again!
He really has brought checkers to a chess match.
The Trump administration is looking like Bush/Cheney on fast forward. This is not what the American people signed up for. For example, looking at the latest Gallup results regarding education (Aug. 2016), people are satisfied with the quality of education their oldest child is receiving in public school (76%). When people are asked the more general question regarding overall satisfaction with the U.S. public school system, the number drops to 43%. (This difference in opinion is probably due to media reporting and the dissatisfaction has been greater in the past.) People favor public schools for their children and do not want privatization. IMO, the attempts to destroy the public school system will backfire on the Trump administration.
http://www.gallup.com/poll/1612/education.aspx
Privatization because the Religious Right is a controlling majority of the GOP, but mostly exists only within the GOP. But these are pretty much the only constituency for school privatization, while they are very much in the minority within the entire public.
You’re leaving out another constituency for school privatization, the most powerful one: billionaire investors.
“Privatization” — get it?
Examples:
https:/www.thenation.com/article/9-billionaires-are-about-remake-new-yorks-public-schools-heres-the
ir-story
https://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/got-dough-how-billionaires-rule-our-schools
If you want to read the first link, join “the” to “ir” in the URL to make “their”
Alas, not enough of them voted for the candidate who was offering that stuff, especially in the states that needed it the most.
The pundits think serious issues like this don’t matter, because they don’t decide elections, and I’m afraid from a technical standpoint they’re probably right.
A rather serious indictment of America.
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Actually, Bush 43 in his first year was well on his way to being an unpopular and ineffective one-term president.
Then some planes hit some buildings and everything changed.
Betcha Trump remembers that.
If he doesn’t, I’m sure Bannon does.
Who knows what the American People thought they were signing up for. I’m 80 years old and have never seen an election so devoid of content. Trump at least had his appeals to racism and ultra-nationalism, but the Democrats had no actual proposals. They just ran on, “We aren’t as bad as Trump!”
Trump’s “economic populism”? What is that, a joke?
What “populism”? A bunch of carvival-barker patter about how “everyone will do well” and “I’m going to take care of everyone”?
The problem, obviously, is that Trump is so stupid that even the slight degree of guile and cunning with which Conservative true-believers float their theories about tax cuts and “job creators” and etc. is lost on him. He’s not even in that ballpark of political duplicity or economic faith. He’s just going to cut taxes for the rich and slash all benefits and social programs and regulation, wrecking the whole country, and then stand there saying, “I’m for you; I’m going to ‘make America great again’; we’re going to be winning; everybody’s going to be winning” not just because he doesn’t see the contradictions but because the lines that come out of his mouth are pure sales pitch; pure self-aggrandizement.
It would never even occur to him to be a “populist” because the concept has no meaning for him; it’s just words at a podium he doesn’t even understand or believe as he’s saying them.
Trump just panders to all the GOP interest groups – the racists get the Justice Department, the home schoolers get Education and HUD, etc. So the administration gets biased towards ideological extremism.
That’s just poor old Trump. Then there’s Stephen Bannon, whose passionate populist hatred of the elites apparently stems from the fact that his father lost a lot of money on a bad investment tip he saw on TV, from that fraud Jim Cramer. It adds up to a desire to punish people he’s mad at, and a completely incoherent one at that–not to relieve the suffering of the working class.
And then there’s the hard core of his support, which is about as populist as Grover Norquist:
While poor old Kentuckians and West Virginians thought/prayed Trump was lying when he said he was going to take away Obamacare, these ideologues have made sure he won’t give them anything in its place, even if he does “want” to.
That’s who dominates in the domestic cabinet they’ve given him, too, people who want to destroy the departments they’ve been appointed to run.
It’s so conservative-intellectual to pretend, as Lowry always does, that one has aims comparable to those of progressives, just slower or more modest in scope; what conservatives want is to maintain the distribution of power in the favor of their class. But Trump has even less than that. The whole project of giving Trump advice is predicated on the false assumption that he wants to achieve anything whatever, beyond high scores in his game, measured in money or ratings.
It’s not really relevant to policy what Trump thinks about an issue; he’s just doing for the GOP what he does for a Central Asian hotel, selling it his brand appeal.
It’s fine to use Lowry as a foil, but he is clueless and glib in the usual “conservative” manner, blathering that all that’s needed is to “get the coverage numbers up” and make Trumpcare a “sturdier vessel”, whatever that means. As though this is somehow possible when the entire bill has simply been reverse-engineered to pass via 50 senate votes. Repubs have no actual answer to healthcare insurance whatsoever, they appear not to understand the most basic aspects of the problem.
“Increasing coverage” is not on the “conservative” menu; that was never going to fly with the Repubs that are needed, and presumably Dems were never going to lend a single vote for Trumpcare. Given that it now appears the main focus on the bill will simply be to de-fund Medicaid, which allows Der Trumper to protect his incompetent white proletariat and keep the subsidies flowing just to them. Pure racism as government.
But I simply cannot believe that Reichsfuhrer Bannon and the Repub Congress are going to let their historic control of government from sea to shining sea go to waste. However much this collection vicious incompetents thrash around, this is wishful thinking.
At a minimum they will succeed in enacting very serious cuts, de-funding and eliminating of dozens of (non defense) government programs, as well as the complete deregulation of most aspects of the economy. They don’t need 60 votes for any of this, and they have a long-standing ideological consensus on many, many elements of the 19th Century budget Der Trumper just submitted. The deregulation program will likely result in lawsuits, but they will have (at least) 5 conservative activists masquerading as justices as the final trump card.
It is frankly inconceivable that Repubs will fail to cut income, estate, capital gains and corporate taxes for the plutocrats, while raising “defense” spending. It may take them some time, since they are not a party of governance, but it will be accomplished. As will the gutting of all environmental protections, in whatever form they may exist. There is no critical mass to stop any of this, and of course Der Trumper simply need not enforce any regulations. If these things do not come to pass, it will be a political miracle. Who believes in miracles?
As for what “Trump voters want or expect”, they are too incompetent even to know what has or hasn’t been done by their Glorious Leader and Congress. They are lied to on a daily basis by their self-selected media, and exist in the world of tweets and fake news as analysis–the graveyard of American democracy.
It is forgotten now, but Ronald Reagan proposed draconian cuts in his budget submission. He didn’t get them, but did get his tax cuts.
And a ton of Keynesian Stimulus as a result.
But there is no one to save Trump from himself in the way that Reagan was saved from himself.
So the candidate with the 1 Trillion dollar stimulus plan enacts austerity.
As I said before, Trump will come to grief, if he does, because conservative orthodoxy is wrong and if enacted unpopular. There is no constituency for cutting The NIH apart from the Freedom Caucus.
Good analysis but I would just like to note that, after the way he treated HRC in the general election, his outrageous behavior toward Obama and the general thrust of his promises, few, if any, Democrats were ever going to work with him or take him seriously as a policymaker. Certainly, after the first 50 days of his chaotic administration, he is dead to them. As for the rest of your analysis, you’re correct but it is also true that he was never going to prepare a smart legislative strategy during the transition because that requires reading and serious policy discussions and debates and he is never going to do that. Even this absurd, sociopathic budget proposal will be DOA when it reaches Congress. Hence, both the Executive and Legislative branches are in an indefinite quagmire of negativity.
Why wouldn’t they work with him? There’s no daylight on policy between Trump and the neo-liberal-dominated Washington DLC Democrats. If anything, on issues of war and peace, Trump’s better than they are.
Or so I’ve been told.
Over and over again.
I have to double down on what I wrote here earlier, because I’m just so infuriated that people persist in giving Trump even what little credit they give him (meaning, not just Lowry but BooMan with some of his “if Trump had” hypotheticals):
The words “Donald Trump” and “legislative agenda” don’t belong anywhere near each other, period. Even the cabinet appointments were not “strategy” so much as they were the transition tasks put in front of him, so he picked the people recommended by whatever right wing nut he’d spoken to last.
Every other President-Elect has spent the transition furiously gearing up; filling the departments; getting the legislative and budget plans into shape; figuring out how to hit the ground running. Trump did none of this because he doesn’t understand the government. He signed a bunch of executive orders that Bannon gave him that were pure Emperor Nero grandstanding; he was astounded to discover that there was a judicial branch who could stop him. “Nobody knew” health care was so complicated, etc. so he went back to campaigning, which is all he cares about or knows how to do.
It’s a difficult mental process because we’re talking about the President of the United States and there’s so much ceremonial/cultural/historical inertia involved, but we have to force ourselves to keep remembering just how stupid, incompetent and inept this man is. He’s a failed real estate guy and a branding con-man and a pro-wrestling figure (which means, in today’s crazy TV-based world, that he had “what it took” to get elected). He has no “agenda.” He has no “plan.” All these hypotheticals about how he could have or should have pursued some coherent set of initiatives are pure, projective fantasy. (Reagan and Bush II were the warm-up for this; now we’ve got the real thing.)
“Trump did none of this because he doesn’t understand the government.”
In part – in part because he doesn’t care. He has no interest in the operational aspects of government.
. There is one sort of operation he’s interested in, insofar as the purpose of the state is to get people.
Get the Muslims.
Get the Mexicans.
Get the blahs.
Get the uppity women.
Get the liberals.
That’s it. That’s all there is. That plus enriching yourself, and your dynastic heirs.
It’s a political philosophy straight out of 13th c. Europe.
It’s a political philosophy of Hate.
I’ve noticed it with the ‘conservatives’ and libertarians’ I know. They cannot help themselves, every conversation turns to distain against some person or group. After months of Trump speeches, it’s become more noticeable when others do it. Even so called progressives…..they hate Clinton (and Obama and Democrats, for that matter), so Trump and Putin and republicans are given the benefit of the doubt.
‘They voted for him because he hates he same people they do’ goes very deep.
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So he’s improvising.
You miss the most important thing about Trump voters: what they care about is pissing off liberals and sticking it to those they consider inferior or unworthy. Policy be damned.
I’m not “missing” anything. I’m staying on BooMan’s topic: people like Lowry (and, I’m saying, even BooMan) who make the mistake of imbuing Trump with any kind of “plan” at all — even an improvised or failed one — for actual governance.
It’s pattern recognition; it’s the man in the moon. There are podiums and photo-ops and the Oval Office so it looks like there’s a President. But there’s just this dumb TV personality.
I’ve seen this movie before, when it starred Reagan, but he could take direction.
Don’t worry, Ted Cruz is here to save the day:
~Bob Costa
” He picked off a lot of traditional Democrats because of this, but he didn’t follow up with that advantage once he started to form his cabinet and craft his legislative priorities.”
Trump and his core team (except for Sessions) had no clue about how to govern. I always thought that Pence and Priebus were there to make sure the “traditional” GOP made th governmental decisions. Pence virtually said, more than once, that’s what he was going to do — for example, when he said he wanted to be a VP like Cheney.
http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/mike-pence-role-model-vice-president-dick-cheney/story?id=42170897
Read how Pence was picked for VP:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/donald-trump-mike-pence_us_578fa289e4b0f180da63defd
Martin, this is about the most cogent analysis I’ve seen of Team Donald’s problems. You deserve a lot of credit for your brilliance and insight. I’d add only the obvious — that Trump himself is not politically sophisticated and probably doesn’t understand most of what’s going on around him. He can read from a teleprompter in an almost normal way and speak off the cuff like a carnival barker. But it’s really Bannon and Priebus who have maneuvered him into a paper bag. By not coordinating together effectively (despite their best-bro banter).
It’s been so many years since Republicans have actually tried to govern (think Ike as a form of quasi-governance, Teddy Roosevelt as the real deal and James Garfield as what-might-have-been), that their ability to think strategically has atrophied. They know how to throw hand grenades and play the press. That’s all.
And they know how to race bait.
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I’m truly amazed that you may have, even for a single moment, thought Trump had any personal commitment to anything that came out of his mouth during any part of the primary or general election campaign.
Even his ignorant racist white working class supporters thought ‘he’s just saying that’ to get elected, where ‘that’ was anything they valued.
Trump got elected strictly on tribal identity and he’s not going to lose those people just because he’s screwing over the same people like every Republican since Reagan. They’ll show up in 2018 and vote the tribe all over again.
Trump ran as a racist, misogynist, dishonest sexual assaulter without any plan to actually do anything but mouth off for the next four years.
That’s it. That’s what he’s going to do. Anything that actually gets done is just a bonus. Gridlock, dysfunction, lack of meaningful progress on any issue that could materially improve the racist, misogynist WWC Trump voters is just proof that the institutional inertia is even greater than they thought.
These people voted for Bush II twice. They got no jobs from the black Kenyan. In their minds, things are so hopeless that just having a moron tweeting non-PC stuff is like the fulfillment of their racist, misogynist anti-intellectual, give them all the finger dream.
Nobody expects the coarse, highly manipulative used car salesman to actually sell them a car driven by a little old lady without the odometer being altered. And they don’t expect Trump to be some legislative genius who can figure out how to get stuff done.
There’s no master plan with Trump. Everyone knows and knew that. To try and project a pattern or strategy is like trying to discern the motivation of that Jack Russell Terrier – http://www.today.com/pets/face-planting-jack-russell-wins-hearts-adorably-terrible-dog-show-t109146
The dog did it because he was amusing himself. No other explanation or deep thought exercise required. Ditto Trump.
Your/their claim that “they got no jobs from the black Kenyan” is not true, regardless which of you makes the claim.
“His problem is that he needs the Democrats and he’s pushed them so far away that he will never get them back.”
Nonsense. The richest billionaires in the country back Trump. Robert Mercer alone could buy the entire Democratic leadership without even having to give up one of his exotic cars (at least he has produced work of real worth — just the work he’s done so far on statistical linguistics deserves riches, although I don’t think anything like the riches he’s gotten from applying the same algorithms to stock trading). We know how much Chuck Schumer loves some banks. There are some Democrats who I think would not be for sale, but enough of them are, and the party has no unifying program.