Trump’s not-normal sound concealed a lot of normalcy beneath. There was a lot of show on the surface about a willingness to buck the establishment, but under the surface, no real stomach to actually do one tenth of what was necessary to buck it.
I would say that it was more of a lack of resources than a lack of stomach. Mr. Trump came to office without a set of acolytes who could make him an effective executive. Instead, he cycled through people in key staff positions. The general pattern was to go from bad to worse (Secretary of State Pompeo was an exception).
His economic advisers were mediocrities. You want more Casey Mulligan, less Peter Navarro.
It was Mr. Trump who elevated Dr. Fauci on the virus. I wrote Fire the Peacetime Bureaucrats on March 19, and unfortunately I feel vindicated.
Mr. Trump arguably survived the Deep State (at least while he was in office), but the Deep State definitely survived Mr. Trump. That which does not kill the arrogant, insular national security establishment only makes it stronger.
Considering what he was working with, it is remarkable that Mr. Trump did as well as he did with judicial appointments, some business deregulation, and a foreign policy that was more constructive than than of his predecessors.
But my overall verdict is close to Handle’s. Because of Mr. Trump’s inability to find effective personnel, as an executive he spoke loudly and carried a weak stick.
Because of Mr. Trump’s inability to find effective personnel, as an executive he spoke loudly and carried a weak stick.—ASK
True, usually…yet Trump changed the whole tone of global conversation on China, and trade, and did erect some modest tariffs.
Navarro, Pompeo and Lighthizer were effective some levels.
Trump did cut corporate income taxes and doubled the standard deduction.
Unfortunately, Trump was like a great home run hitter who couldn’t field, run, struck out a lot, refused to practice and got into constant fights, even with the peanut vendor.
As for wrestling the 17 US intel agencies to the ground, and the US Deep State-Washington establishment…Trump was beaten easily.
Effective personnel are rare to non-existent. One would need to be:
experienced
determined
trumpophilic
willing to suffer career injury
beltway tolerant
known and acceptable to Trump
Arnold, I agree with Handle and you on your assessment of the Trump’s presidency. It was surprising, however, that he survived the initial attacks of rotten and corrupt democrats while the McCains, Romneys, Ryans, and the gang of NeverTrumpers were opposing him. Tell me how do you call the people that tried to destroy Mike Flynn and made impossible for honest and competent people to join the new administration? How do you call the mendacious and hypocrats like James Mattis that joined the new administration? How do you call Robert Mueller who knew from the very beginning that his investigation was never going to find relevant and reliable evidence? and Jeff Sessions who recused himself from appointing Robert Mueller just after he was appointed to Attorney General?
Do you remember what pundits say about Ross Perot becoming president and his ability to put together a honest and competent Administration? Now Americans know why an outsider cannot do it. In addition to the crowds of politicians and advisers living in DC, there are too many Faucis in all federal agencies: malicious, mendacious, hypocrats, and most of them lackeys of rotten and corrupt dems. If that looked impossible for Ross Perot in 1992, it was much harder in 2016 after 8 years of Obama that didn’t require Congress approval to fill the administration with a large number of younger Faucis (maybe you remember the young Americans that joined JFK’s Peace Corps, do you know how many of them later joined the bureaucracy to pursue long-term, “tenured” careers?).
Arnold, reading some articles in the past 24 hours I get the impression that anything that today we can say about Trump’s 2016 election and presidency is marked by the (over)reaction of the rotten and corrupt democrats. [Note: Your mentor Tyler Cowen likes to talk about people’s overreacting to the pandemic but he ignores that fearmongering has been the strategy of rotten and corrupt democrats. People overreacted because of that fearmongering]. Their excuse for that (over)reaction is that they were responding to the radical leftists’ extortion to cancel Trump –before and after November 6, 2016. But that is an excuse because for a long time it has been the standard response to all Republicans –in elections and in selections that required Senate’s confirmation. Indeed, over time their response has been escalating: they still cannot accept that Trump won the 2016 election.
Even today, as they are fighting among themselves for positions within a Biden administration, they are committed to defund and cancel Republicans. Even in California, where they have been able to get total control of the government, they feel threatened by the outcome of the November 3 election –they expected to consolidate their position as the state’s only party. How do you explain the new total lockdown?
You live in Montgomery county (I lived in Bethesda between 1985 and 1993). I understand that its local government today is a good example of what you can expect from rotten and corrupt democrats.
“His economic advisers were mediocrities.”
Yet unemployment kept falling from 5.0% to 3.5% while growth was fairly strong until the pandemic. How could someone truly brilliant like Larry Summers have helped? (I’m not including breaking a 30,000 Dow since that was all Trump – nothing to do with his economic advisers.)
+1
No econ critics have credible alternative policies which would do better for the US on any of these metrics:
lower unemployment
more US manufacturing
more US agriculture markets
more GDP
more stock market gains
more reduction in taxes and tax rates
keeping inflation low (on things people buy)
keeping interest rates low
On the “Free Trade” critique, no other country seems to be actually offering total free trade, which Trump claims to favor – but he’s against accepting a deal where another country, esp. China, gets tariff free access to US markets, while the US exports are constrained.
Huge budget deficits have not resulted in higher interest rates.
[Not yet? and maybe not for many years, as we get rich-asset inflation instead of normal purchase inflation]
Trump’s policies in practice resulted in better short term outcomes than following any econ genius or Nobel winner.
In fairness, I would imagine that a third Obama term would have looked very similar in terms of stock market performance, GDP, unemployment, etc.
Probably a somewhat smaller deficit and somewhat lower stock prices, but otherwise very similar.
Why? Please tell me why you believe that and why Obama couldn’t accelerate the recovery from the 2008 crisis. As background for your explanation please tell me exactly what he did before leaving the WH and could have done to accelerate the recovery if he had had a third term.
I bet you $100 that you don’t have an explanation that any three readers of this blog agree to be reasonable. You can copy from anyone you want.
Just no. This is a terrible example of selectively viewing history to support your theory that the Deep State is evil and to blame for everything. Trump started with mostly OK advisors, but would fire them when they didn’t give in to his bad ideas. Take Faucci as just one example. Maybe Trump elevated him at first (but remember, Faucci had worked closely with at least 3 other presidents), but then he refused to listen to most of what Faucci said, at first giving platitudes but never specifics in supporting his recommendations while modeling from the bully pulpit the exact opposite of what Faucci was asking in terms of distancing and masks. Trump was…and continues to be….a terrible leader, regardless of his staff.
Right so. A president must be a leader of his personnel. He didn’t remove Fauci because though he didn’t like what he prescribed, he knew Covid-19 is a really dangerous disease
Well, that’s your theory, isn’t it? Clearly there was massive interference on all levels by the nice, wholesome and entirely unselfish Deep State, right from the start.
Why are you treating the “lack of resources” as an external factor?
Poor personnel is an endogenous feature of Trump’s management organization. The selective pressure isn’t for competence. It’s for personal loyalty, and an ability and willingness to soothe Trump’s insecurities regardless of whether it makes for good policy. If that’s what you select for, you’ll end up with bad personnel.
There isn’t some alternative universe where there is a Trump administration that isn’t staffed by Trump lackies of this mold. There isn’t some “but-for the bad personnel . . . ” It was always going to be bad personnel.
No doubt there is some truth to this, though somehow Trump was able to find people who helped get him a lot of money and name recognition.
I think chf above was more realistic–though also more boring.
“Effective [Trump in government] personnel are rare to non-existent. One would need to be:
experienced
determined
trumpophilic
willing to suffer career injury
beltway tolerant
known and acceptable to Trump”
Sure, and I don’t really disagree with that list. But isn’t the question why there are so few people that can check the boxes? Doesn’t the lack of qualified people “known and acceptable to Trump” say more about Trump and his requirements than it does about the people? In other words:
Why are there so few people with serious policy chops who are trumpophilic?
Why is it that associating oneself with Trump entails a willingness to suffer career injury?
etc.
There’s a (conspiracy-style) story to tell in which all the great institutional forces of modern American are arrayed against Trump and that but-for their recalcitrance and withholding of resources, Trump would have erected a capable bureaucracy.
But that ignores that Trump has never demonstrated an interest in administration, or policy coherence, and is temperamentally opposed to institution-building inasmuch as that necessarily entails dispersion of power. The fact that Trump showed up with little to no bureaucratic infrastructure isn’t a coincidence or a bug — it is a constituent feature of his management style.
Given that, I think it is fundamentally wrongheaded for Arnold to remark “[c]onsidering what he was working with, it is remarkable that Mr. Trump did as well as he did . . . ” One doesn’t say “if only this magnet had just a south pole…” It never could. It is what it is. Trump’s (in)ability to marshal, direct, and retain competent personnel was part of the package from the jump.
“Why are there so few people with serious policy chops who are trumpophilic?
Why is it that associating oneself with Trump entails a willingness to suffer career injury?”
Because they were worried that the Trump presidency would disappear into the rift like Enterprise C and everything would return to normal and they’d be out of luck. All the Republicans who Trump was working against would be back in power and they’d never work in that town again.
That’s why the nature of Trump’s defeat was so important: he brought in huge numbers of voters and many of them black and Hispanic. He’s the reason the GOP won so well in Congress, although god knows that many conservative intellectuals want to deny it. Conservative politicians won’t, though.
I wrote about this:
Sure, I’d have rather Trump won. But Trump ended his presidency with numbers that force the GOP to accept the reboot. There’s no shoving the voters and Trump into the rift to fix the timeline. Republicans have been worried about their “demographic destiny” for years. Trump’s showed them a way forward. (Something I predicted more than once, incidentally.)
History will, I think, be kinder to Trump than the current moment, but I wonder if they will understand his greatest achievement.
Trump faced down media and elite howls of disapproval and outrage. He didn’t apologize. He ruthlessly attacked anyone who insulted him for his views. By refusing to back down, he showed all Americans how much the media, intellectual class, and even our political parties were throttling American policy by narrowly defining boundaries of acceptable opinions and proposals to their own political demands. He restored balance to American discourse almost singlehandedly. In doing so, Trump gave all Americans a real choice.
Yeah, so some good analysis from Handle and our host. I cannot disagree.
But, can we please add corporate income tax reform to the list of accomplishments? A dollar earned domestically is no longer heavily taxed vs. a dollar earned from a subsidiary based abroad.
“I would say that it was more of a lack of resources than a lack of stomach. Mr. Trump came to office without a set of acolytes who could make him an effective executive.”
This is only half the personnel story. The other half is that for the people he had, he could hardly get anyone installed or confirmed, which made it impossible to govern, because personnel is policy. Keep in mind that you can’t even order around or discipline your own people if you are being blocked from replacing them with who you want. “You can’t fire me, because if you do, a civil servant who hates you is legally next in line.”
This is the same “rolling Constitutional crisis” escalation of hardball that started with Bork, went to the end of the filibuster for judicial nominees and party-line confirmation votes, and will lead to who knows what next.
At the very beginning McConnell told Trump he was unwilling to “go nuclear” and end the filibuster for ordinary political appointments. At that point, “having a stomach” would have realized the completely sabotage of an administration this entailed, and would have been willing to play whatever level of hardball was required to get McConnell into line. For example, if they won’t confirm the secretary of a department, then one could say that the department has no legal right to operate, and the President could order a hard shutdown, with all operations ceasing, and no funds being withdrawn from the treasury. Hypothetically, if the Senate refused to confirm the head of the TSA, the President could say, “Fine, how about nobody flies until there it?”
Who backs down first? Who has the spine and balls? It’s literally the difference between actually being President and being a President-like figurehead. Trump never had the stomach to bring the issue to a head, thus never really had an administration in which it was possible for anyone to actually be in charge of anything.
The other half half of stomach would have been a willingness to simply order the government to ignore at least one national preliminary injunction by the infamous “Hawaiian Judges” out there. That needed to happen, it never happened, and it wasn’t a question of resources or personnel.
It was a matter of guts. Trump talked tough, put Jackson’s portrait up in the Oval Office, but there was never a “John Marshall has made his decision; now let him enforce it!” moment.
These seem like good examples, but I’m not convinced any are realistic. Certainly in the last two years, with a Dem dominated House, had Trump played such hardball he would be impeached and likely ousted with more than a few Rep Senators voting to get rid of him. Even in the first two years, while the Russian Hoax investigation was active, and plenty of Trump-disliking Rep House Reps would be against it.
As I claim below, Trump’s “fight” was more for show, so as to get a better “deal”. Which he did get quite a bit, but virtually no swamp draining.
Only one with a powerful faction inside of DC can do much serious swamp adjustments, and Trump had no such DC support.
I recall reading in Powerline that there were quite a few outside the Beltway Trump supporters, wanting to help him, but not even being able to get on lists of possible appointments because those controlling who got to see Trump made sure he mostly saw only GOPe approved candidates.
This was a YUUUGE Trump failure.
That would have been nice, but wouldn’t it have provoked a mutiny?
This gets into some boring-lawnerd inside baseball, but I think there are ways it could have been approached and explained that would have both (1) not triggered a mutiny, and (2) helped to compensate for the widespread demoralization that is the consequence of a guarantee that some judge somewhere will impose an immediate neutralization of every initiative about everything on the flimsiest grounds.
The question of whether preliminary injunctions issuing from district court judges but with national effect are legitimate and Constitutional is a live controversy. What is not in contention is that these were effective in keeping Trump hemmed in on almost everything. I’d guess that the way to handle it would be to argue that the “rule of law, not rule of men”, does not mean “rule by district judges”, who are routinely abusing the system (and further encouraged and incentivized to do it again and go even further every time they all see it works and is obeyed), acting ultra vires, arrogating excess authorities to themselves, and trespassing over the separation of powers for partisan results.
Another way to deal with it would be to say, “Ok, we will obey a preliminary injunction for thirty days. But if the courts don’t want to issue a final order by then, then we stop, because we aren’t going to let Hawaiian judges play the “run out the clock” game, when they also get to abuse their control the clock.
Now, what might have triggered a mutiny would be taking on SCOTUS itself, for instance, in one of the top five worst decisions in the administration, Chief Justice Roberts’ ridiculous “No DACA rescission” opinion in DHS v UC Regents. Justice Gorsuch’s opinion in Bostock was also ridiculous, but in that particular corner of jurisprudence, just SCOTUS being SCOTUS, about what one would expect. But the DACA holding was just exceptionally absurd and nakedly cynical, even by SCOTUS standards.
It claims that Obama’s executive action was indeed unlawful, but to undue an unlawful order takes extra special double perfect care and consideration (which was done, in fact, but Roberts pretended otherwise) and means that it will nevertheless continue all the way through a whole Trump administration so that Biden can keep it going too, and not a single person was denied the granting or renewal of their employment authorization documents, which Trump’s USCIS continue to issue and renew at a rate of over a thousand per day.
Mutiny or not, there was no stomach to do anything else but let the courts run the game on that matter.
Or what about Trump’s signature program, the border wall? From the very start, Trump had all the legitimacy and political capital of a freshly won election (not to mention GOP majorities in the house and senate) to insist that a 4-year program to build a wall across the whole border was included in the federal budget.
Else, how about an indefinite shutdown until McConnell backs down. And not one of our typical, fake “15% shutdowns” during which 85% of money flows as normal, and furloughed employees get back pay, free time off, and access to free credit to deal with any pressing bills if they have no savings. But a real, hard shutdown, with, e.g., no Social Security checks going out, and turn off the heat in every federal courthouse building. One could use the typical hostage-taker’s playbook, “You have 24 hours to comply. If you don’t, then *don’t even talk to me* for another 48 hours, and every time you fail to present a bill, the delay just doubles again.”
I think that this – if pursued with enough sack to lead to victory and causing the entire rest of the establishment to back down in public humiliation, would have caused the opposite of a mutiny, and instead the boost in morale that goes along with a war footing and #winning something.
Instead, the Trump administration came out with a flurry of Executive Orders telling parts of the government to do things by a certain deadline and, if they found that to be a little stressful, they decided to simply not do them, and nothing even happened to anybody. Why? See the personnel problem above.
The bottom line is that there are about a dozen pillars of authority and capability that are absolutely essential from day one to actually have and use the Executive power in the current regime’s structure, and each and every one of these is simply non-negotiable, at least, if you want to be a real President and not a figure-head.
If the rest of the establishment wants to have a go at taking out any of those pillars, you either have the stomach to go to total political war about it, or you are content with being a Fake President instead of a Real President and blowing a lot of smoke for a big show.
I think your analysis fails to take into account the two main forces that conditioned Trump’s “visible” propensity to get a deal at any price.
The first force has been the (over)reaction of the rotten and corrupt democrats to which I refer to in a previous comment. You are underestimating the rot and corruption of Obama and his lackeys. One important consequence was that Republicans lost the House in the mid-term election.
The second force was the Congressional Republicans that sabotaged Trump in the first two years. McCain and Ryan were losers, terrible and incompetent losers. Worse than Hillary.
Now let me say a few words about Trump’s “visible” propensity to deal at any price. Indeed, that is not true. He proved that with the NK Clown: Trump was willing to pay the price of treating him as a King in exchange for a deal, but never to accept any of the Clown’s substantive conditions (I lived in China during the NK famine of the 1990s that cemented NK dependency on China). The same applies to his dealings with the Chinese government and Arab countries. While the rotten and corrupt democrats and the idiotic Never-Trumpers were pushing for Trump’s failure in foreign policy, he said no rather than accepting deals that meant nothing (like Clinton’s) or worse rewarded foreign enemies (like Obama’s).
And let me add the WSJ reporters to the Never-Trumpers. I canceled my subscription because of their idiocy: the daily emails on Covid-19 that they send always point out how bad the situation is even when they are announcing that the vaccine is coming. Their fight with the WSJ’s Editorial Board is amazing. Today you can get more facts from the opinions than from the news but more adjectives from the reporters than from the columnists.
” more of a lack of resources than a lack of stomach.” Definitely no resources.
The criminal anti-Trump deep state FBI & CIA started sabotaging Trump from before he was sworn in, thru illegal unmaskings, illegal spying, illegal leaking of confidential info, and setting up Gen. Michael Flynn for prosecution thru DOJ misconduct. The ability to illegally destroy the careers of innocent Trump supporters sent a clear message that helping Trump is the final career step one could take – not a good signal for recruiting “the best” among any who look for a career in DC.
Trump fought the deep state, and the deep state won.
Democrats, radical or moderate, are in full control of ALL the bureaucracies. All the top rats know how to slow-walk things they don’t want to do, with full CYA protection, often including “accidently” wiping your phone message records when returning gov’t phones.
Yet also, Trump has more show than really a stomach for a fight – he chose to NOT pursue Hillary’s illegal server and FBI coverup. He was expecting to get a “deal” with the deep state, and mostly did not.
Finally, in Washington, virtually “nobody is innocent” (line from Daredevil’s King Pin). I believe Flynn’s son was not fully innocent, nor are others. Were the FBI to go after any swamp rats, they could find crimes. Once guilty, even of small items, perhaps even just arguable tax issues, if the full investigative power of the US gov’t is used against you AND your family, it’s likely they will find crimes and punish the guilty. Note that all Trump associates tried in the Russian Hoax were innocent of any Russian collusion, but guilty of other stuff.
The huge power of deep state Dept. of Justice to choose NOT to prosecute crimes means it’s easy to give cover to those on the side of the deep state who are guilty. Note the Durham has sent nobody to jail, so far, and even the written evidence of K. Clinesmith’s guilt, with his guilty plea – he’s now asking for no jail time. Far far worse than anything Trump associates did.
This is like Putin vs guilty oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky. ALL the oligarchs are guilty, but Khodorkovsky is punished for being guilty AND being against Putin. The US deep state is moving towards that.
Dictatorship of the Deep State – not so different from commie Dictatorship of the Nomenklatura.
In May of 2016, Charles Murray wrote this at AEI
“Without getting into the comparative defects of Clinton and Trump (disclosure: I’m #NeverTrump), I think it’s useful to remind everyone of the ways in which having a Republican president hasn’t made all that much difference for the last fifty years, with Ronald Reagan as the one exception.”
The efforts are underway, but in the long term, it will be seen that Trump also made a difference. He kept the churn going while foundational work was being done. It will take time for it to be notice with all the sand being kicked over. Most presidents do superficial show pony things. Trump’s real work was below the surface and will require effort to jackhammer out.
I think the reality is that most of Trump’s actions will turn out to have little long-term impact, maybe little blips on the long-term trend lines.
If that’s the right measure of a ‘legacy’, then his will be having served as the fourth leg of a table held up also by (1) A slight Senate Majority post-Harry-Reid-crossing-the-nuclear-option-Rubicon, (2) the Federalist Society, and (3) the Grim Reaper.
This is a scattershot op-ed on a range of issues related to the Trump Presidency. Overall, Kling gives it a big frown which has been his general mood towards the Trump Presidency these past four years.
A few thoughts:
– “bucking the system” sounds like unrealisitcally high expectations. If you expected Trump to deliver some completely different system, you were probably disappointed.
– Most political successes and failures are broad team efforts. Often, the President, not specfically Trump, but any President plays a relatively small role. On judges, Trump joined a well organized winning team that deserves much of the credit. Biden was a very small part of his own successful 2020 Presidential campaign.
– On the COVID response: The vaccine seemed to go well, the federal government seemed to make good moves, Operation Warp Speed seemed good. Kling was understandably outraged at the sticker price on stimulus/relief efforts, which I agree with, however, other typical Presidents wouldn’t have been more frugal.
– On economics, Kling has been particularly unreasonably uncharitable. I’m not an economist, but Trump chose mostly good market-friendly economists that made lots of good changes until the virus pandemic struck in 2020. Casey Mulligan is one of many smart economists on Trump’s staff. I don’t get the vibe that Kling has been willing to give Trump’s economic staffers a fair or even handed evaluation.
– I’m particularly disappointed on K-12 education. Betsy DeVos seems nice, everything she did do was good, but overall the changes were underwhelming. People I know who work in K-12 Administration saw zero difference from the Trump Administration, which seems like a missed opportunity.
– I’m disappointed that no major reform efforts were made in higher education. The Trump Administration missed opportunity here.
– On immigration: I expect the immigration restrictionists to lose in a big way. This is a giant team effort fight and the pro-immigration team is more organized and has better leverage. Trump played his part well, skillfully even, but this issue is bigger than Trump and the restrictionists look to fighting a losing fight.
– Trump was unique, and innovative, and enacted lots of great changes. But he didn’t end the deep state or buck the system or redefine politics; which all strike me as unreasonable expectations.