Trump

The First Two Years

Michael Nelson

• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9780813942803
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political History & Theory
• Index: Politics & International Relations

On the first anniversary of Donald Trump's presidency, Michael Nelson, one of our finest and most objective presidential scholars, published Trump's First Year, a nonpartisan assessment that was widely hailed as the best account of one of the most unusual years in presidential history. At the midpoint of Trump's term, Nelson has updated his book to include the second year, which if anything has proven to be even more remarkable.

Beginning with an examination of the dramatic 2016 election, Nelson's book follows Trump as he takes office under mostly favorable conditions, with relative stability at home and abroad and his party in control of both houses of Congress. Trump leveraged this successfully in some ways, from the confirmation of his nominee Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court to the passage of his tax-reform bill. But many more actions were perceived as failures or even threats to a safe, functional democracy, including immigration policies defied by state and local governments, volatile dealings with North Korea, unsuccessful attempts to pass major legislation, and the inability to fill government positions or maintain consistent White House staff.

As Nelson demonstrates in a substantial addition to the original book, Trump's effectiveness, or lack thereof, did not change significantly in his second year in office, but his approach often did. With the Mueller investigation and the midterm elections looming, Trump threw off his advisors' restraints and acted more directly on his impulses, reverting to the instincts and rhetoric that had won him the election. While opposition to Trump remained strong in many quarters, resistance among GOP leaders crumbled as they were confronted with their constituents' support of the president.

Published on the second anniversary of Trump's inauguration, Nelson's book offers the most complete and up-to-date assessment of this still-unfolding story.

Praise for the first edition:

"Measured, scholarly, and always accessible, this is a cogent analysis of the first year of the Trump presidency."--the Independent

" Trump's First Year won't generate the bombshell headlines of more sensationalist and gossipy books, but it provides context and balance for its conclusions, ones that are consistently at odds with Trump's own assessment of his performance."--Kirkus Reviews

"Providing one of the earliest objective evaluations of President Donald J. Trump's administration, Nelson demonstrates why he remains a leading figure in the field of presidency studies."--Choice

1

TRUMP IS ELECTED

Donald Trump won an astonishing victory in the 2016 presidential election. At each turn of the electoral calendar, from June 16, 2015, when Trump announced he was running, until well into the evening of Election Day—November 8, 2016—political analysts of every stripe were confident that he would not be the forty-fifth president of the United States. Trump’s candidacy would not last long enough even to contest the Iowa caucuses and New Hampshire primary, many experts said. The world’s leading political betting firm made him a 100-to-1 long shot on the day of his announcement. The New York Daily News added a red nose and mouth to his photograph on its June 17 front page with the headline, “Clown Runs for Prez.”¹ The Huffington Post refused for months to “report on Trump’s campaign as part of [our] political coverage. Instead we will cover his campaign as part of our entertainment section.”² Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton, who knew Trump from her years representing New York in the Senate and had attended his (third) wedding in 2005, wrote, “When Trump declared his candidacy for real in 2015, I thought it was another joke.”³ Election-eve forecasts placed his chances of victory at 2 percent (HuffPost), 1 percent (the Princeton Election Consortium), or even 0 percent (the celebrated Democratic strategist David Plouffe).⁴ “In a mood of ‘at long last’ and, yes, celebration,” New Yorker editor David Remnick wrote an election-night article on “the first woman president” to be posted on the magazine’s website as soon as Clinton was declared the winner.⁵ One prominent political scientist whose statistical model forecast months before the election that the Republican nominee would win because the economic and political fundamentals were so favorable decided that Trump was such a bad candidate that the model did not apply.⁶

The presidential election was not the only one whose outcome surprised the experts. Most forecast that the results of the Senate elections, in which the Republicans were forced to defend more than twice as many seats as the Democrats, would turn over control of that chamber from the Republican to the Democratic Party. Wrong again. The Democrats gained just two seats, not the five they needed to secure a majority. Senatorial elections were on thirty-four state ballots in 2016, and for the first time in history, the same party whose presidential nominee carried each state also won its Senate contest. As Trump prevailed in all but twelve of these states, so did the Republican candidates for senator. Predictions for the House elections generally were that the Democrats would add fifteen to twenty seats, bringing them within striking distance of a majority. That didn’t happen either. With a near-record 98 percent of House incumbents reelected, Democrats gained a paltry six seats, leaving the Republicans in charge of a united party government—a newly inaugurated president and a majority of both houses of Congress—for the first time since Dwight D. Eisenhower was elected in 1952. Not many Republicans owed their election to Trump. Eighty-six percent of the party’s victorious House candidates ran ahead of him in their districts, and only 8 percent won by less than 10 percentage points. Even the six successful Senate candidates whom Trump outpolled in their states won landslide victories.⁷

Although surprising in its result, the 2016 election was less remarkable in its magnitude. It was not, as Trump claimed, “a massive landslide victory, as you know, in the Electoral College,” much less “the biggest Electoral College win since Ronald Reagan.”⁸ From 1788 to 2012, forty-five of fifty-seven presidential elections were decided by a larger electoral vote majority than Trump’s 306–232 victory over Clinton (304–227 after seven “faithless electors” voted for different candidates than the ones to whom they were pledged).⁹ In the seven elections that followed Reagan’s landslides in 1980 and 1984, the winning candidate outdid Trump in the Electoral College five times. In only four elections in two and a quarter centuries did the winner fail to secure more votes from the people than his opponent. Yet Trump ran a record 2.9 million votes behind Clinton in the national popular tally, and his postelection claim that “between three and five million illegal votes [for Clinton] caused me to lose the popular vote” was completely unsubstantiated by evidence.¹⁰

Similarly, although the election gave Trump a united party government, the Republican majority in both congressional chambers was perilously thin. In the House of Representatives, Republicans outnumbered Democrats by 241 to 194, and in the Senate by 52 to 48. In the face of cohesive Democratic opposition, this meant that any legislative proposal opposed by just 10 percent of Republican House members was unlikely to be enacted. Republican leaders would have to keep the party’s extremely conservative, nearly three dozen–strong, and highly unified Freedom Caucus on board in order to prevail, without alienating Tuesday Group moderate conservatives, greater in number but less disciplined.¹¹ In the filibuster-prone Senate, where it takes sixty votes to pass most legislation, the barrier to passage was yet higher. To enact even those few measures that require only a simple majority, all but two Republican senators would need to vote together.

An additional complication for President Trump arose from the nature of the election campaign waged by Candidate Trump, which was marked by name-calling and extravagant promises. He branded the leading Democratic contenders, Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont and former secretary of state Clinton as “Crazy Bernie” and “Crooked Hillary,” respectively, and led chants of “Lock her up!” at campaign rallies. He challenged President Barack Obama’s bona fides as a natural-born citizen and, when Obama produced proof that he was born in Hawaii, suggested that the “birth certificate is a fraud.”¹² Most astonishing, in a video-recorded 2005 conversation with Access Hollywood host Billy Bush that became public one month before the election, Trump bragged that when he saw beautiful women, “I just start kissing them. . . . And when you’re a star they let you do it. You can do anything. Grab ’em by the pussy.”¹³

Nor did Trump spare Republican rivals Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio, whom he dubbed “Lyin’ Ted” and “Liddle Marco” (Trump’s spelling).¹⁴ He dismissed Republican senator John McCain of Arizona, an authentic hero of the Vietnam War who endured unending torture as a prisoner of war rather than be released before his fellow captives, as “not a war hero. . . . I like people who weren’t captured.”¹⁵ Ignoring aides’ advice to apologize, Trump’s first campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, recalled, “Donald Trump does what Donald Trump always does, which is he doubles down,” calling a press conference to repeat his attack.¹⁶ Neither McCain nor any of the other four living former Republican nominees for president regarded Trump as fit to hold the office. Former president George W. Bush let it be known that he would not vote for Trump, and his father, former president George H. W. Bush, called him a “blowhard” and voted for Clinton.¹⁷ The party’s 2012 nominee, Mitt Romney, publicly excoriated Trump’s bankruptcies in business as well as his “personal qualities, the bullying, the greed, the showing off, the misogyny, the absurd third-grade theatrics.”¹⁸ All of the leading conservative publications actively opposed Trump.¹⁹

The release of the Access Hollywood recording raised the level of intraparty opposition to Trump. Senator McCain, the Republican candidate for president in 2008, called on him to withdraw from the election, as did Republican National Committee (RNC) chair Reince Priebus, Senator John Thune of South Dakota, Senator Kelly Ayotte of New Hampshire, and other party leaders. Trump doubled down once again, dismissing his vile language as “locker room banter” and attacking former president Bill Clinton as “the greatest abuser of women in the history of American politics” and Hillary Clinton as “an enabler” who “attacked the women who Bill Clinton mistreated afterward.”²⁰ Trump even brought four of President Clinton’s accusers to the second presidential debate. He then threatened to sue (but never did) the more than a dozen women—all of whom he said were “horrible, horrible liars”—who came forward to accuse him of grabbing their breasts, putting his hand up their skirt, kissing them aggressively, or other sexual misconduct.²¹ One result of Trump’s tawdry campaign was that he took office with almost no support from his party’s elected leadership that was rooted in anything deeper than short-term political expedience, chiefly their fear of alienating his followers.

Trump’s campaign promises stretched far beyond realism. Concerning the economy, he pledged to create 25 million jobs in ten years and to eliminate the $19 trillion national debt two years sooner than that, historically unprecedented targets that somehow would be reached while reducing taxes, increasing defense spending, and “sav[ing] Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security without cuts.”²² The hourly minimum wage would be raised “to at least $10.”²³ He would not only “build a great, great wall on our southern border,” Trump promised, but also “have Mexico pay for that wall.”²⁴ Of the “at least 11 million people that came in this country illegally,” he said, “they will go out.”²⁵ “We’re going to win so much,” Trump declared, “you’re going to be so sick and tired of winning, you’re going to come to me and go, ‘Please, please, we can’t win any more.’ ”²⁶ Some Democrats were so offended by Trump’s policies and demeanor that they organized a postelection campaign to persuade electors to deny him a majority of electoral votes and throw the election into the House.²⁷

THE REPUBLICAN NOMINATION

The same freewheeling and aggressive style that alienated Democrats during the election solidified Trump’s support among many Republican voters, who regarded his rhetorical excesses as evidence of authenticity, undiluted by the normal social constraints that Trump dismissed as “political correctness.” As the political scientists John Sides, Michael Tesler, and Lynn Vavreck have argued, Trump’s campaign for the Republican nomination “became a vehicle for a different kind of identity politics” than that centered on groups historically oppressed by race, gender, or sexual orientation. It was instead “oriented around white Americans’ feelings of marginalization in an increasingly diverse America.”²⁸ Supporters cheered when Trump said that Mexican immigrants were “bringing drugs, they’re bringing crime[,] they’re rapists”²⁹ and when he called for a “total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States.”³⁰ They nodded approvingly when Trump claimed that former president George W. Bush “lied” about weapons of mass destruction as a pretext for the “big, fat mistake” of waging war against Iraq.³¹ In the global war on terror, Trump declared: “Torture works. . . . Waterboarding is fine, but it’s not nearly tough enough.”³² “We’re gonna be saying ‘Merry Christmas’ at every store,” he offered; “You can leave ‘Happy Holidays’ at the corner.”³³ Trump roared through the Republican primaries, readily disposing of seemingly formidable opponents such as Governor Scott Walker of Wisconsin, Governor Chris Christie of New Jersey, former governor Jeb Bush of Florida, Governor John Kasich of Ohio, and Senators Cruz of Texas and Rubio of Florida. He wrapped up the nomination by handily defeating the last rivals standing, Cruz and Kasich, in the May 3 Indiana primary, five weeks sooner than Clinton was able to defeat Senator Sanders for the Democratic nomination.

In addition to his freewheeling views, Trump’s voters also valued his experience as a businessman rather than a politician. Historically, nearly everyone elected or even nominated by a major political party for president has been a current or former senator, governor, vice president, general, or cabinet member. In the quarter century after World War II, senators and vice presidents (most of whom had been senators) dominated presidential elections because Cold War–era voters trusted the federal government and valued their experience dealing with national security issues. Then, in the aftermath of the Vietnam War and the Watergate scandal, the electorate turned to state governors, who were untainted by the incompetence and corruption now associated with a Washington-based political career: Jimmy Carter of Georgia in 1976, Ronald Reagan of California in 1980, Bill Clinton of Arkansas in 1992, and George W. Bush of Texas in 2000.

The ascendant Tea Party movement that helped the Republican Party win control of the House in 2010 and the Senate in 2014, however, was n...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Trump Is Elected
• 2 A Cycle of Decreasing Influence and Decreasing Effectiveness
• 3 Forming (and Re-Forming) the Administration
• 4 Executive Action
• 5 Loci of Opposition: The Courts and the States and Cities
• 6 Congress and Domestic Policy
• 7 Communications
• 8 Foreign Policy
• 9 Prospects for Removal
• Conclusion
• Epilogue: December 1, 2017
• Trump’s Second Year
• Notes