I have provided you with a roadmap for what would happen, and why, to the Trump administration when September rolled around. It’s important to understand what I did as a structural analysis more than a prediction of how any particular individual would act or what they might say. There might be some slight psychological component to the following essays, but not much. Not really.
Insofar as I discuss what anyone is thinking it is to argue that they aren’t thinking. I say that Trump has been sold a bill of goods, but also that the salesmen are nearly as deluded as he is. I say that Trump is in error, but I don’t really take much of a shot at explaining why he is susceptible to this error. I don’t think I make any mention of what people might be feeling at all.
I also don’t spend any time wondering how people might make decisions and spinning out various scenarios that are dependent on what they ultimately decide.
None of this was really necessary to game this out. They created a legislative plan that could not and would not work, and its failure was so certain that there wasn’t any way to change their course of doom.
Trump is Failing for Same Reason That Boehner Failed, April 5th, 2017.
And Now the Trump Presidency Begins to Fail for Real, June 29th, 2017.
How Trump and the GOP Congress Failed in Just Six Months, July 19th, 2017.
Trump has a tendency to do this to himself all the time. Just this weekend he said he wanted to cut off economic ties to every country that trades with North Korea. It took two seconds for people to point out that China trades with North Korea and that we can hardly cut economic ties with China. Laying out plans that have no prospect for success is part of his DNA and probably explains why he’s gone bankrupt five separate times.
But the legislative plan was sold to him by Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell. They explained how they would achieve Trump’s goals and Trump believed them when they said they could deliver. He can be blamed for this, of course, but less so than for the self-inflicted mistakes he makes, like promising that Mexico will pay for a border wall.
Trump is magnificently bad at his job, but show me the workable plan to pass a 2018 budget, or repeal and replace Obamacare or to enact tax reform. Those tasks require a lot of steps and some legislative and procedural expertise. Trump ought to be able to rely on the Republican leaders to come up with a plan that has some prospect of success. But they gave him plans that were unlikely to work and then showed no sense of urgency about completing the preliminary steps that would be required.
What they all agreed on was that they could succeed without worrying about a legislative filibuster or the need to win any Democratic votes. They’d be able to muscle all of it through with just Republican votes.
But there was never any prospect of that actually happening.
You should really read the Heritage Foundation’s action plan for September to see just how radical the right’s ambitions are and just how bad their advice is to the people responsible for getting basic stuff done. I wouldn’t necessarily call the authors of that report deluded because they’re advocates and they’re taking a hard line. Taken at face value, though, their recommendations certainly read like the ravings of madmen.
And no one has really had the balls to stand up to them and explain that these things are not possible, and that even attempting them is worse than folly.
Stan Collender and I have been writing on these topics in similar ways, and I have to agree with him that the House Freedom Caucus is about to be neutered and angered. That’s an essential component of the reckoning I’ve been describing.
But it will only be a beginning, and it will come far too late. The fatal mistake was made at the inception of this presidency when Trump failed to understand that he had defeated both party establishments and could not succeed by relying on either of them to push his agenda through. He needed subject-dependent ad hoc coalitions, which could only plausibly be found at some intersections in the middle. In most areas, Trump could not rely on the far right either because they’d disagree or because they’d refuse to make compromises to attract vulnerable or sympathetic Democrats.
This isn’t one more call for centrism or bipartisanship. It’s a simple analysis of how you get the votes to pass legislation. And if you decide your entire strategy will be to use budget and procedural gimmicks to avoid working with Democrats, you have to have the unity pull it off.
You need the kind of unity it takes to kick 23 million people off their heath care, for example. You need the kind of unity that will allow you pass the budget plan you’ll need to enact tax reform under reconciliation rules.
But worse, they acted like the things that could not rely on procedural gimmicks actually could.
They need to have eight Democratic votes in the Senate to pass their appropriations. They have no plan for getting those votes and Trump will meet with the Democratic leaders this week for the first time since January.
All along, they’ve been operating in an alternative universe, but none of these plans could succeed. And it was very easy to see that they could not succeed and that a time would come when it would all come crashing down on them.
By the end of the month, they will either separate from the far right or the country will cease to function at all.
Ideology isn’t what drove us to this point. What drove us to this point was a failure of basic reasoning combined with cowardice. No one on the right wants to explain the limitations of their power, so they proceed as if they have more power than they do. No one wants to explain that certain arguments are made in bad faith and shouldn’t be taken literally, so we get investigations of Benghazi and voter fraud instead of serious governance. Promises that literally cannot be kept are held aloft until the very last dog dies, and then people wonder why Congress and particularly Republicans in Congress have such low approval numbers.
It’s all destroying the fabric of our country, but it’s been working at the ballot box.
Playtime is finally over. And now we get to pay for their mistakes.