Donald Trump made news, sort of, on Monday, and for a change it wasn’t about his various indictments. After weeks of teasing the announcement, he finally declared himself in favor of leaving the issue of abortion to the states.
Sort of.
Campaign promises, as Richard Fenno explored in depth in his studies of the US Congress, are absolutely central to representation.1 Politicians spend the campaign making promises to voters; after the election, the winners govern with their interpretation of those promises in mind, and then they go back to their constituents and explain what they’ve done in office in the context of the original promises, and in the next election they make another set of promises by building on the entire process. The result, if done well, is a healthy representational relationship.
That’s sounds straightforward, right? But the Trump abortion example is a good example of promises may not be what they seem.
That’s because promises themselves can be nuanced in all sorts of complex ways, and often are not literally about policy positions at all. Politicians promise all sorts of things: Who they will fight for, what groups they consider themselves part of, even who they will be in office.
When it comes to Trump on most policy questions, it’s clear that he remains both largely ignorant and utterly indifferent. What’s more, and even more unusual, is that he makes little effort to sound informed and interested. On health care, for example, it’s pretty evident from listening to him talk that he not only doesn’t know or care what the Affordable Care Act does, but he may not actually know basic information about health insurance. Or see his willingness to sound “stupid” (per Dan Drezner) on Ukraine. There are policy areas Trump does appear to care about. he’s genuinely against immigration and immigrants, at least from nations he doesn’t approve of. He’s really a protectionist on trade, and he basically doesn’t approve of any alliances with foreign nations.2 But beyond that…there’s not much.
That’s certainly the case with abortion. Despite what’s now almost a decade of running for president (and more if we include his previous half-assed efforts), he hasn’t bothered to learn the vocabulary that politicians use to talk about it. Instead, he shifts back and forth between bragging how loyal he is to the anti-abortion movement to trying out moderate-sounding rhetoric.
What’s he really promising, then?
More broadly: Trump’s record on policy promises wasn’t very impressive overall. He didn’t accomplish nearly as much of his agenda as Biden has. But his most serious promises weren’t policy-oriented anyway, although they did have policy consequences. His main promise is probably best understood as simply being Trump, something he certainly did in office. And the other core promise was basically to be the champion of white Christian nationalism. He may not actually care about all of the specific policies they care about, at least beyond the bigotry that he revels in, but he’s going to be on their side regardless. And when it comes to abortion and other specifics, he’s more than happy to turn things over to extremists and accept whatever they do.
That was most obvious when it came to judicial nominations during his presidency, which he more or less explicitly delegated to the Federalist Society leadership. Any Republican presidential nominee, to be sure, is going to be very careful to avoid crossing Christian conservatives and business conservatives on their judicial selections. But there actually are plenty of possible nominees with solid credentials, and Trump showed little or no interest in avoiding nominees who threatened (by their extremism or limited credentials) to have troubled confirmations. The same tended to be true with White House and executive branch positions. There’s no reason to believe things will be different in a second Trump term.
The president, after all, is only part of the presidency. From Ronald Reagan on, every president has put together a partisan presidency, Trump included. Unlike his predecessors, however, Trump loaded up – especially as his term went along – on just a faction within the party. And in his post-presidency and the current campaign, Trump has moved closer and closer to groups in what was once the fringe of the party, and farther from mainstream conservatives (let alone any remaining moderates), who he is quick to denounce as RINOs. All of which means that a Trump administration will be most likely be chock-full of people with no intention of compromising on abortion. And while Trump isn’t likely to fight hard for their priorities, he’s also not likely to restrain them: Indeed, what he demonstrated while he was in the White House was basically a knee-jerk, open-ended preference for extremism over moderation, regardless of substance.
Given all that, we should heavily discount Trump’s literal policy promises outside of the few issues he seems to care about, and instead think about the ways he’ll likely organize his presidency to let his strongest supporters, many of whom do care quite a bit about various policies, do what they want.3
As for signs of moderation: Wait until Trump shows any hint of reaching out to the rest of the Republican Party (or even more unlikely, anyone else) to take any such signs seriously.4 So far, however, Trump appears to be even more intertwined with fringe elements of the Republican Party than ever, on abortion and everything else. And that, not whatever he might say in any particular speech, is what we really know about how Trump would govern if he’s elected.
Fenno resisted abstract theorizing in favor of additional layers of thick description. His most explicit statement of how representation works is found in the preface to The Emergence of a Senate Leader: Pete Domenici and the Reagan Budget (1991).
To be sure: Trump doesn’t bother mastering the details, or even the basics, of the policy areas he does seem to care about. But he does seem to have real positions on those.
At least to the extent they can! After all, presidents are not dictators - at least so far - and they and their administrations do not necessarily get their way.