âToday, I stand before the United Nations General Assembly to share the extraordinary progress weâve made. In less than two years, my administration has accomplished more than almost any administration in the history of our countryâŚ. So true.â Donald J. Trump address at 73rd Session of the United Nations General Assembly Annual General Debate in New York City, September 25, 2018.
Donald J. Trump has a very high opinion of himself and elicits the most extreme opinions in others. Almost no one is coolly objective on the man or his presidency. Some regard him as a disruptor and outsider who has challenged the cozy status quo of entrenched special interests and a corrupt political system that served the elites not the masses. In this view, he speaks truth to power on behalf of the millions of forgotten, downtrodden and economically insecure Americans whose jobs disappeared or are being threatened by a globalized marketplace in goods, services and the means of production. Trump has also rallied these âleft-behindsâ in the face of an alleged immigrant tide that is submerging traditional American values and culture, proliferating crime and threatening national security. He has, his cheerleaders argue, broken the mold of American politics by constructing a new winning election coalition of God-fearing, culturally conservative, white working-class voters and by remaking the Republican Party in his image. The rock-solid backing of party supporters, and especially its activists, instils fear, respect and discipline in the Republican congressional caucus, which has been harnessed to achieve a string of ground-breaking policy triumphs on the economy , tax cuts , deregulation, immigration, security and more. His challenge to the established order extends beyond Americaâs shores and includes his attacks on globalist international organizations such as the United Nations , NATO and the International Criminal Court as well as hated multinational environmental and trade agreements including the Paris Agreement on Climate Change and the Trans-Pacific Partnership . According to his admirers, he has succeeded in his pledge to Make America Great Again at home and abroad.
To Trumpâs supporters, his outsiderness , populism , nationalism , America First patriotism and rebellious disruption are celebrated in themselves and held up as reasons for his many extraordinary accomplishments. To his detractors, however, these characteristics are precisely what they fear. They see a deeply flawed character wholly unsuited to the job of presidentâmendacious, narcissistic, quickly bored and distracted, misogynistic and ethnocentric, thin skinned and easily provoked, stunningly ill-informed yet utterly convinced of his own brilliance and intelligence. They believe he is incapable of remedying his ignorance in part because he does not recognize it and further because he cannot assimilate new information into his long-fixed worldview. His character flaws interact with his politics in most unappealing ways: An unapologetic racist playing on the base fears of vulnerable citizens, offering simplistic yet dangerous solutions to inordinately complex public policy problems; a bombastic, undiplomatic ignoramus lumbering across the world-stage upending decades-old and even centuries-old alliances and the international organizations that America built and which have sustained its dominance, all while cozying up to dictators and demagogues and affronting supposed friends and allies.
Perhaps even worse, according to critics, is Trumpâs complete disdain for democratic institutions, structures and processes. At stake, they argue, is nothing less than Americaâs constitutional democracy itself. Anyone or anything that threatens, even minimally, Trumpâs status and power is roundly attacked in the most vicious terms. His assaults on an inquisitive and robust media holding power to account are emblematic of the way Trump deals with any democratic opposition: They are belittled and delegitimized. He will trash anything and anyone that stands in his way. He puts his own ends before the democratic health of the United States. This is not an America First presidency, but a Trump First presidency. The media is thus labeled the âenemy of the American peopleâ and the journalists who staff it are âhorrible, horrendous peopleâ promulgating âfake and disgusting newsâ based on âfictionalâ anonymous sources. Investigating the internal deliberations of government is âunpatrioticâ and puts peopleâs lives at risk. The freedom of the press to write whatever it wants is âdisgustingâŚand someone should look into itâ and libel laws need âopening upâ to allow Trump and others to sue more easily. No institution or individual, save his immediate family, seems safe from Trumpâs democracy-threatening invective.
While these two views of Trump are polar opposites, they share a common assumption: that Trumpâs presidency is extraordinary. In the one view, it is extraordinarily good; in the other, extraordinarily bad; in both, extraordinarily different from any previous presidency. This book challenges these assumptions. The argument here and in the following pages is that Trump may well be an extraordinary individual, but that his is nonetheless an ordinary presidency. Before setting out what this seemingly counter-intuitive claim means, it is important to be clear about what it does not mean. This book does not claim that Trump is an ordinary president, but rather that his presidency is ordinary. Indeed, in the history of the United States, it is unlikely that there has been a more unusual, unorthodox, unconventional, unordinary president. On practically every criterion, Trump is an extraordinary man and an extraordinary president. It would be futile to argue otherwise, and readers will not find that argument made here.
To understand how and why Trumpâs presidency is ordinary it is useful to think about the way he approaches and executes this most difficult of jobsâwhat we call the methodology of the presidentâand to contrast this with the outcomes or accomplishments of his presidency. It is common and useful in many walks of life to contrast style and substance, process and policy, words and deeds, rhetoric and action, and promises made and promises kept. It is useful here, too. In each of these binary pairs, it is the former that speaks to Trumpâs methodology and underpins his extraordinariness. In style, process, words, rhetoric and promises made, Trump is a most extraordinary president. But in substance, policy, deeds, action and promises kept, Trumpâs presidency is not extraordinary. Indeed, it is ordinaryâlargely conventional, orthodox and conservative, rather than revolutionary or radical. Consider this assessment by Peter Baker, the New York Times White House correspondent and respected Trump watcher, at the end of the presidentâs first year in office:
[Trump] has spent much of his first year in office defying the conventions and norms established by the previous 44 [presidents], and transforming the presidency in ways that were once unimaginable. Under Mr Trump, it has become a blunt instrument to advance personal, policy and political goals. He has revolutionized the way presidents deal with the world beyond 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, dispensing with the carefully modulated messaging of past chief executives in favor of no-holds-barred, crystal-breaking, us-against-them, damn-the-consequences blasts borne out of gut and grievance. (Baker 2017)
Bakerâs conclusion that Trump has reinvented, even revolutionized the presidency is, however, almost wholly based on an analysis of style, tone and process, on the way that Trump approaches issues and speaks to Washington , America and the world. There is no question that he is extraordinary in these respectsâthat is, in his methodologyâbut they are not good criteria on which to judge a president. All presidents to some extent or other are different in their approach and presentation, and there is no single, accepted best way of being president. What presidents can be judged on and compared on is their record of achievements and outcomes. In judging Trump, therefore, we instead draw on Richard Neustadtâs classic argument that presidential leadership is ultimately a question of how far a president is able to influence or engender the outcomes of government (Neustadt 1990, 4). It is our contention that for all his attempts at shaking up the system and smashing convention, Trumpâs presidency is and will be relatively ordinary in its public policy outputs and their wider consequences.
But what does it mean to say Trumpâs presidency is ordinary in its outputs? How does one know ordinary when one sees it? The term ordinary is used here in two different but related ways. First, Trumpâs presidency is ordinary in that its outcomes are limited in number and scope. Trump simply has not achieved very much in policy terms. He has struggled to pursue his agenda in Congress , even though his party enjoyed unified control of both the executive and legislative branches during the first two years of Trumpâs presidency. His efforts to circumvent the legislative process and effect change via executive orders and other administrative actions have fared little better. The image of Trump penning his signature on a newly minted executive order is a familiar one, but those ordersâat least the important onesâmore often than not have been blocked and overturned in the federal courts . Trumpâs policy achievements look meager compared with the confident promises he made that change would come quickly and easily. They look meager next to his and his aidesâ grandiose claims about their successes once in office: âThe President of the United States has accomplished more in just a few weeks than many Presidents do in an entire administrationâ said special political adviser Stephen Miller , while Trump himself bragged âIâve done more in 500 days than any president has ever done in their first 500 days.â More surprising than the laughter of his fellow leaders at the 2018 UN General Assembly when Trump repeated a version of his standard bragâquoted in the epigraph to this chapterâwas that they did not laugh longer and harder. They also look meager when lined up next to the accomplishments of Americaâs truly great presidencies: Washingtonâs, Jeffersonâs, Lincolnâs, F. D. Rooseveltâs and perhaps Jacksonâs. But these presidencies are outliers. Their successes are not normal. They are the extraordinary presidencies. Meager is normal, meager is ordinary, especially in the post-Watergate era when presidents face additional constraints on their influence. In not achieving much of consequence, Trump falls within the parameters of presidential ordinariness.
If the first way in which Trumpâs presidency is ordinary is that its outputs are meager but average, the second way is that the few policy achievements that Trump can genuinely lay claim to for the most part are pretty mainstream Republican ones rather than the radical departures he promised on the campaign trail. The populist insurgent who hijacked the Republican Party in the primaries has followed a policy agenda in office that is largely in tune with his party colleagues at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue, even though he has frequently attacked their leadership. When Trump pursues policies that can be thought of as outside the Republican mainstream, the initiatives usually end in failure, are reined in by Congress or the courts , or self-adjusted to greater orthodoxy by the administration itself. Tax and immigration reform are exemplars of the two types. The 2017 tax cut is the signature domestic policy achievement of Trumpâs first two years in office. It is not the biggest tax cut in American history, as he has claimed repeatedly. It is more ordinary than that, perhaps scraping into the top ten depending on the economic assumptions underpinning the calculations. More importantly, the biggest winners in terms of dollar reductions in tax are big business and Americaâs richest familiesâpeople like Trump himselfânot the ordinary hardworking Americans of limited and precarious means that Candidate Trump talked about protecting and helping while on the campaign trail. It is the hedge fund managers and Mar-a-Lago members who are smiling most broadly. There is nothing in the legislation to worry the plutocrats and business interests that donate large sums to the Republican Party . Whatâs more, as we will detail in Chapter 4, the American public seem to recognize the true nature of the tax cut since it is approved of by less Americans than any similar tax reduction in the last 40 years and is even less popular than two major tax hikes during that period.
Conversely, when Trump challenged Republican orthodoxy on immigrationâor at least one very influential strand of itâhe failed to make any legislative progress. While it is true that anti-immigration and particularly anti-illegal immigration voices are slowly getting louder in the Republican Party , the pro-immigration chorus still easily out-sings them. The Republican congressional caucus is dominated by a pro-business wing that promotes a flexible and che...