I long ago lost interest in speculation about how Donald Trump’s presidency could have been different or better. The man is fatally flawed and incapable of adaptation. He’s also crazy and never had the slightest interest in governing. At best, he had a genuine desire to fulfill his campaign promises, but he didn’t have any idea how to accomplish this if it involved more than instructing some underling to make it happen. Often, he asked those underlings to violate the law, the Constitution, or their conscience, and many times his directives were simply ignored as a result.
There’s a sense in which he could have been more of a true maverick, taking on his party and seeking out novel coalitions to create bipartisan efforts to address topics like trade, immigration, infrastructure, and entitlement reform. But he was so toxic to Democrats by the time he was inaugurated that this would have been difficult even if he’d been capable of attempting it, which he wasn’t.
I did find it surprising that he adopted a strategy of letting congressional Republicans pursue tax cuts and a conservative federal judiciary, even though that’s exactly what they would have done if Jeb Bush, Ted Cruz or Marco Rubio had been elected. I thought there was a possibility that he’d position himself as more of a cultural moderate and more of a genuine economic populist, but he chose to stay a mainstream conservative troglodyte on economic issues and as a hard-right culture warrior.
I guess the reason this surprised me was because I thought Trump had one obvious skill, which was a keen sense for what people want, and that he’d see the political advantage of keeping some distance from establishment Republicans. He had decimated them in the primaries so I didn’t anticipate that he’d let them drive his agenda in Congress. I see now that this was a result of his laziness and stupidity, and perhaps a need to have them protect him from the Russia investigation, rather than a political decision aimed at helping his reelection.
In the end, his presidency was a just a fat, racist dude spending all day online talking shit about people. Some people liked it, but most people didn’t. The consequences were catastrophic long before the COVID-19 pandemic hit. There was never any chance that Trump would be a good president, or even a competent one.
I think you have deduced the motivation with Trump’s need to have serious Congressional cover for the Russia scandal. Incredibly, he thought ahead on that one. Of course he was aware that his power derived entirely from his control of the braindead white Know Nothings, which are such an enormous component of the base now that their wishes must be catered to if a Repub is to be elected anywhere. The Deplorable vote drives the party from here on out.
So elected Repubs cravenly sat by when Trumpolini early on produced his Muslim ban and Latino immigrant harassment project. As you say, this Know-Nothingism immediately ended any likelihood of bipartisan “solutions”, since Trump was certainly well aware that his spite-filled immigrant hatred “promise” was what got the country’s white identity political minority to “elect” him in the first place. So compromise on something like DACA was out from Day One. Dems were adamant opponents immediately, while Repubs were quickly given their ubiquitous tax cuts, as well as their immediate Federalist Society Justice, Gorsuch, preserving (stolen) “conservative” control of the Court for another 25 years. They were also given the most anti-environment admin since the first Earth Day, which they loved as well.
Remember that by ruining the government’s fiscal position, wrecking the federal courts by packing them with corrupt “conservative” judicial politicians, and destroying the regulatory agencies while abjuring regulation of the economy, Trumpolini did “carry out his promises”. He is ending (hopefully!) his misrule by ensuring that Roe/Casey will be effectively overruled, and sowing the seeds for the Court’s destruction of the New Deal’s regulatory regime. Roe became a certain final target because of Trump’s hatred for uppity college-educated women, a group he despises beyond measure. But Obergefell (gay marriage) is toast too, another demographic that Trump despises. Also doomed are any hopes for reform of the dying democracy, since Roberts’ Repubs will not permit them to stand.
I guess what I’m saying is that Trump’s presidency was actually a huge “success”, according to the metrics of “conservative” policy desires. That this made it an objective catastrophe that took the nation (and earth, for that matter) into its death spiral is irrelevant to the American right. They had to destroy the village in order to save it! The current dystopia is precisely their cherished vision of America (if they were honest), and they have Trumpolini (and Gravedigger McConnell) to thank for it.
Should Mr Trump lose, these right wing “wins” will be demolished. The pendulum swings of karma will continue. (Should he win, the country will collapse from the incompetence or be conquered by some outside power eventually.)
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For a “politician” for whom one could, in a way, have had comparable expectations, I put forward Arnold Schwarzenegger. Like Trump, his win is, in part, attributable purely to name recognition. And like Trump, Schwarzenegger winning was considered very much a long shot. Like Trump, once Schwarzenegger got in, he was clearly clueless and overwhelmed. The hard right knew this, and swooped in to do their part to essentially take on the governorship themselves. Arnold didn’t campaign on a full-blown right-wing program, but that’s just what happened. Unlike Trump, Schwarzenegger slowly seemed to recognize that he was getting rolled over by the Hoover Institute and similar entities; he developed some backbone and eventually freed himself to some extent from the “help” he was getting.
I don’t trust Trump would ever develop that kind of backbone. As you say, he’s just too lazy, doesn’t understand the job, and isn’t morally up to it.
I think that Arnold & Jesse Ventura are real case studies in how hard it is to be an “independent” elected office holder in America. I don’t understand the situation of Angus King very well – wish I did. Neither Ventura nor Arnold ever got anything like a supportive coalition working, either in the public or in the legislatures. My impression was that Ventura eventually got too frustrated with the governor job and sort of abandoned it later. Arnold got rolled by both the left and the right. Without the support of some part of the political ecosystem in America, seems like you’re usually doomed. Mr Trump must’ve learned from their mistakes, because he made a Faustian bargain with the right wingers in the congress & let them have a more or less free hand. It’s odd – none of them are what I would call consensus building pols, but Mr Trump has sure been a lot more successful building his team, or whatever you call it.
Unlike Schwarzenegger and Ventura, King had a lot of political experience. He was a lifelong Democrat who ran for governor as an independent because he likely wouldn’t have won the Democratic primary. King was a lawyer, businessman, and former aide to a US senator.
Maine politics has long had room for centrists identified as “independent”, whether as members of a party (e.g., Sens. Collins, Snowe, Smith) or not (e.g., King, Longley).
Jesse made light rail happen in Minnesota. They’d been talking about it for years but the republicans including smilin’ Norm and T-Paw (Coleman, Pawlenty) tried to stop it. They bought off smilin’ Norm but T-Paw wanted to die on the hill. But Jesse was a big big supporter and where the previous GOP governor had grudgingly approved money as part of a deal at the close of the session Jesse more than doubled the money.
Together he and the dems got it over the line. Since T-Paw followed him, it’s likely that absent Jesse no progress would have been made on the rail line for at least 15 years.
You speak of him in the past tense. Let’s win the election first.
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