One Year of All This
On the corrosive private ambition of Donald Trump.
One year in. Can we make sense of it? I’ll give it a try.
Donald Trump campaigned, most of all, on two promises: That he would govern as an autocrat, and that he would seek revenge on his enemies. Trump isn’t very good at representation, but in this case he’s mostly tried to keep those promises. The big problem? They’re not really representation-type promises between a politician and voters. They’re more like promises to himself.
The puzzle for me, as a student of US police, is that in year one most of his successes and failures are easy to explain through the normal processes of US politics.1 Except for one thing. Normal US politics stuff explains the reaction to Trump pretty well; it doesn’t explain Trump himself very well at all.2
Take, to pick something in the headlines right now, Trump’s Greenland obsession. It’s pretty easy to use normal tools to explain that it’s terrible presidenting, that it won’t work, and that whether or not he gets his way the costs to his presidency are steep and not worth paying. But explaining that obsession and his willingness to act on it? That’s trickier. As Bethany Albertson says, “Presidents don’t float policies that are opposed by the mass public 86 - 9. This is not normal.”
Trump, that is, simply doesn’t respond to the normal incentives embedded in the US government.
The way I’ve put it in the past is that Trump believes that by winning the presidential election Trump believes he won some sort of prize, when in fact he was hired to do a job that has some 330 million bosses. Brendan Nyhan says that “Trump has not been very successful by traditional metrics of the presidency” while at the same time “He’s playing a different game and is trying to consolidate an authoritarian regime.”
I think both of these formulation get at some of how he’s failing badly at the Neustadtian presidency while still getting his way quite a bit. I don’t think either fully captures what’s happening.
I don’t think Trump is trying, exactly, to establish a dictatorship. Someone trying to do that might, to be sure, send thugs to Minneapolis…but he wouldn’t make Greenland a priority. He wouldn’t, I don’t think, expend resources on a bunch of superficial nonsense, whether it’s tearing down part of the White House or interfering with the Kennedy Center or obsessing over Nobel Prizes.
It’s true that some things he does (or at least, what his administration does) look like authoritarian consolidation, and it’s certainly a broad-based attack on the rule of law and democracy. But it’s more a set of whims than anything thought out.3
Or to put it another way: Trump is acting as if the presidency has always been the leader of an autocracy, rather than one piece of a republican government. His whole “deep state” fantasy makes sense if he thinks that presidents are entitled to whatever they want, and some nefarious group somewhere has targeted him as an exception to the rule. Trump wants what he wants (Tariffs, yes! Wind energy, no! A ceremonial arch! Canada!). That those things tie together in some grand overarching scheme? No. It’s just stuff he likes and doesn’t like, and feels that he should get because he won.
Perhaps the key to all of this is that while all presidents are ambitious, Trump is unique in that his ambitious is virtually entirely private.
Madisonian democracy is based on the clash of ambitions (as Federalist 51 explains). But what no one has ever needed to point out is that those ambitions are essentially public – for power, in the first place, but also for public policy, or for advancing the cause of various groups.4 Trump’s ambitions aren’t just private in that he’s out to personally profit from his office, although that is certainly true. Even the things that seem public, such as Greenland, are ultimately personal and private to him; they’re about him in his private capacity as a person, no different than the trophies he wins for cheating at golf at his own private clubs.
Absolute monarchy is terrible in part because one person monopolizes the public sphere and the rest of us cannot participate. Trumpism seems to be about erasing the public sphere entirely. His redecoration (and redesign) of the White House is revealing. It isn’t, as it was with other presidents, about telling a story about themselves and the nation; Trump just wants to colonize his surroundings so that they are his, not ours.5
Which comes back to his promises. It’s not just that Trump ignores (or persecutes) the now-larger half of the nation that doesn’t support him. It’s that he’s really ignoring his supporters, too.6 They’re invited to enjoy the awesomeness that is Donald Trump in his purely personal self-aggrandizement and his pursuit of his personal enemies, but that’s about it.7
Of course, regardless of motive, he’s regularly broken his oath of office and acted in ways that warrant – that demand, really – impeachment and removal. Even though Republicans refuse to do so. Regardless of Trump’s motives, supporters of the republic must work to protect it.
But if you’re seeking to understand what he’s up to and why it’s so corrosive, and why he’s willing to lose and lose and lose again and still keep acting as if he can get whatever he wants? With the result that he manages to both exceed Jimmy Carteresque level of defeat while still achieving things all the time? He’s missing the public ambition that would lead him to respond to the incentives of the system, while also believing he’s entitled to having everything he wants. And yes, that’s incredibly dangerous.
That’s not to say that I’ve never thought that students of authoritarianism had nothing to add to what I know as a boring old student of US institutions; they have, and I’ve certainly learned from their contributions over the last year.
Indeed, I think the first two things I wrote after the election hold up well in terms of the ways he would succeed and fail, as well as how dangerous he would be to the republic. But I don’t think I did a good job of capturing the flavor of what he would try to do. (I was correct, at least, in predicting he would be unpopular).
To be sure: Whatever Trump is thinking, others in the administration may be deliberately trying to build and consolidate authoritarian government. And that matters, but Trump matters more.
Even for fame, understood as the framers understood it as public renown and public reputation.
In that sense, I think what I’m saying here may go very well with Julia’s terrific item about how Trump has, perhaps, ended the presidency.
In Richard Fenno’s terms, normal politicians think of their constituencies in terms of concentric circles, from their closest supporters to those who vote for them to the entire district, and they need to simultaneously represent them all; Trump’s “constituency” is basically just his own impulses.
For those for whom he does feel the need to deliver, the payoffs are clumsy and ugly — the pardons, the obvious kickbacks and special favors, the ceding of chunks of the government to his allies. Real presidents help their allies and supporters, of course, but they do it while maintaining the full pretense and quite a bit of reality that it’s all about the public’s interest.
If I ruled the world — Trump-style.