Young Man Trump: Or the Portrait of a President as a Young Man

Effective presidencies are all alike; ineffective presidencies are ineffective in their own ways. Recounting and explaining why the Trump presidency is ineffective has become a cottage industry.  Two recent books, John Bolton’s The Room Where It Happened and Mary Trump’s  Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man  are the latest of a collection of expose books on Donald Trump that describe a dysfunctional presidency and why. While Bolton describes the ways the Trump presidency is ineffective dysfunctional, Mary Trump offers the reader a psychological portrait of a president as a young person, locating the roots of a troubled presidency in a troubled upbringing where the worst of Donald Trump’s behavior which is presently reinforced by his staff was originally imprinted upon him by his family, and especially his complicated relationship with his father

            Biographies of effective presidents tell the same story.  James MacGregor Burns, perhaps the best scholar on presidents ever tells in Leadership that the mark of all great leaders is a set of skills that include selflessness, an ethical vision, and an understanding of needs and beliefs of their followers.  Simply put:  Leaders put themselves second, the people they serve first, and they exercise power guided by principle.  Others, such as Richard Neustadt’s Presidential Power, locate the core of presidential authority in the power to persuade, with a cluster of similar factors determining effectiveness and greatness in a presidency.  Stephen Skowronek echoes  much of what Burns and Neustadt argue, while also emphasizing historical context  as key to what makes for a great president.  The lessons of history tell us what matters in determining what are the attributes and traits of an effective presidency.

            Yet while effective presidencies share common traits, as Leo Tolstoy nicely stated in Anna Karenina’s opening line “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Among the worst presidents, James Buchannan, Andrew Johnson, and Richard Nixon there was a unique Hamlet like fatal flaw that doomed them, with the source of their problems located in their personalities and characters.  Erik Erickson’s Young Man Luther was the first in a line of powerful psychobiographies that located adult behavior and struggles in family upbringing  and lessons learned as adolescents.  James David Barber’s Presidential Character applies psychobiography to the study of upbringing to explain presidential behavior.  All presidents have the same constitutional powers, yet some perform better than others and we can locate in family upbringing the source of  why some do what they do and whether they learn the skills needed to be good leaders.

            This is potentially why Mary Trump’s book is so interesting.  She is the president’s niece but she is also a Ph.D. in psychology.   Her book is part psychoanalysis, biography, and yes even self-revelatory.  There is no question she has issues with her uncle and she is part of the larger dysfunctional family she describes in her book.  Her uncle is not her patient and therefore American Psychological Association ethics rules preclude her from offering a diagnosis of him and, even if she did, it would be colored by the conflicts of interest of being related to him.  Yet nonetheless her book offers a psychological and biographical context for understanding the Trump presidency.

            John Bolton is  not the first to tell us that Donald Trump is a self-absorbed narcissist. Trump does not read his intelligence briefings, he makes hasty emotional judgments, ignores advice, and simply is lazy and disinclined to accept advice, criticism, or lean anything about what his job entails.  Had he any work ethic his presidency would have lived up to what his supporters wished and his distractors feared.    Bolton’s book offers no new accounts of the problems within the Trump presidency.

            Mary Trump tells us why.  Reading her book,  we learn two major points.  One,  as quoted numerous times in this essay, Leo Tolstoy’s comment about unhappy families is true—they are unhappy in unique ways. The Trump family into which Donald was born was  unhappy and dysfunctional.  It was a family with an overbearing father Fred who coddled Donald.  It was Donald who learned quickly how to play off people’s weaknesses, how to self-promote and self-indulge, and  lie to achieve what he wanted.  His family reinforced this.  As did first the New York City social and financial circles.  Then  the national media, then the cult he created with the Apprentice.  The message of her book is that father son and sibling rivalries  of Donald Trump’s youth produced the person he is today.  Trump is narcissistic and insecure because of his family.  Had Mary Trump been a Freudian, she could have located Donald’s neurosis in some masculine  competition and insecurity regarding penis size, as evidenced by his famous 2016 debate statement  about his private parts and his need to conquer women.    Stormy Daniels’ calling Donald Trump “tiny” was the comment that most got the president’s goat in the last four years.

            The other major point we learn about Donald Trump is inspired by a quote by F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Rich Boy where he said “Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me.”    To which the critic Mary Colum said yes, they are different, “they have more money.”  Mary Trump’s book describes a family of privilege.  Donald, or rather his father Fred, buys his way into schools by hiring exam takers.  He buys his way out of the draft with questionable bone spurs. His father buys chips to buoy Donald’s sinking casinos.  Trump uses money—rarely his own—to buy access, image, and anything else he wants.  Combine a dysfunctional family with economic privilege and what do you get?  As Mary Trump stated in a recent interview, the dysfunctionalism of the Trump presidency is an  outgrowth of the same in the Trump family.   

What Bolton and others describe in the White House is  explained by  Mary Trump’s book.  Donald Trump is James Joyce’s  Stephen Dedalus  or J.D. Salinger’s Holden Caulfield gone malignant  and elected to the presidency.

 

Trump Meets Reality: Why his presidency will be weaker than many hoped or feared

            One of the ironies of American politics is that while the US presidency is arguably the most powerful elected position in the world, the office is also surprisingly weak.  As Donald Trump prepares to take office he may be surprised that for all that he says he wants to do, he may be less power to accomplish them than he and his supporters hoped, or his detractors feared.    The truth is that there are many constraints on US presidential power, dictated by the Constitution and the reality of American politics, international relations, and the precedents set by his predecessors.

            Richard Neustadt’s 1960 Presidential Power arguably endures as the single best book every written on the American presidency.  It opens with a quote from Harry Truman in 1952, offering advice to the incoming president and former general Dwight Eisenhower: “He’ll sit here, and he’ll say, ‘Do this! Do that!’ And nothing will happen. Poor Ike—it won’t be a bit like the Army. He’ll find it very frustrating.”  Neustadt’s use of the Truman quote was to underscore a reality of the American president who cannot simply order people about like kings or business CEOs.  Instead the power of the presidency is the power to persuade.

            Article II of the US Constitution defines the formal constitutional powers of the president that have not changed since George Washington.  But as Neustadt and James David Barber in his President Character contend, it the personality or character of the person who is president, along with a host of other factors that define the ability of presidents to persuade Congress, the media, foreign countries, and the American people to follow them.    These factors include rhetorical and media skills, margins of political victory, knowledge and experience of government, public support, the strength of political opposition, and perhaps the overall likeablity of the persons.  Presidential power is to the power to persuade, but that persuasive power is a form of bargaining power.  Some presidents such as Franklin Roosevelt, Lyndon Johnson, and Ronald Reagan were powerful because of these factors.

            From the New Deal until perhaps recently there was a fear of what Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., termed the “imperial presidency.”  Born of the New Deal regulatory state and the reality of the Cold War and Vietnam, presidents were viewed as dangerously powerful and prone to abuse their authority, as did Richard Nixon.  But we are a long way from days of the imperial presidency and as Stephen Skowronek points out in Presidential Leadership in Political Time: Reprise and Reappraisal, context too demarcates the limits of presidential power.  Today, as a result of Supreme Court decisions–many of which clipped Obama’s power when it came to executive orders and Bill Clinton when it came to issues about legal accountability for personal behavior–Trump inherits a far weaker office than it was a generation ago.

            Soon if not already Trump is about to confront this reality.  He and his supporters and his detractors seem to have forgotten that there is this thing called the Constitution and the Bill of Rights which defines the power of the presidency.  Both contain concepts such as separation of powers, checks and balances, federalism, and the basic rights and liberties which presidents cannot violate.  There are some things President Trump cannot do alone with executive orders or even with legislation. He cannot order states and cities around, he cannot order citizens to do things that are illegal.  And even though Congress is of the same party as he is and he will get to appoint federal judges and a new Supreme Court justice, the logic of the political system that the American constitutional framers designed is one that is resistant to sudden and dramatic change.  Congress and the Supreme Court will have their own institutional identities and interests that will make them resistant to being ordered around by President Trump.

            Moreover, while the attraction of many to Trump was him being an outsider, yet unskilled in Washington politics will make it hard to govern.  President Jimmy Carter was an outsider whose presidency was compromised by his lack of Washington skills even though he was a governor.  Trump does not even have that and many of his senior appointees lack that too. They will soon find themselves out maneuvered by the federal bureaucracy, the senior executive service, and all the others who really run the government and know how to make it work.

            So long as Trump continues to fight the reality of American politics he will get nowhere.  Conversely, as the confirmation hearings are starting to show, in areas such as foreign affairs and intelligence gathering there is a powerful establishment and bureaucracy that will crush Trump if he does not learn how to work with them.  Presidents really have little freedom to change the course of American foreign affairs, with the best predictor of what a new president will do is to look at the previous one.  Besides the constraints of domestic politics, international contexts such as real politics and the support or opposition of allies and enemies dictate narrow courses of action for any president.

            All of the above suggests that Trump is about ready to be inaugurated and confront reality.  He will have to operate in a context that would limit any president.  But now also consider that he is a minority president who did not win the popular vote and had one of the narrowest electoral college victories in history.  He was never popular as a candidate with nearly 60% disapproving of him, and recent polls suggest an approval rating of 37%.  Presidents normally are sworn in with lots of good will, Trump will not have that. He enters a weakened office as a weakened president, lacking the traits that Neustadt, Barber, and Skowronek describe as key to presidential success.   It is not an imperial presidency located in Trump Tower that Trump inherits, but a weak office that can do far less to produce jobs, force Mexico to build a wall and pay for it, and abrogate unilaterally trade agreements without facing political and legal problems.    

            He’ll sit here, and he’ll say, ‘Do this! Do that!’ And nothing will happen. Poor Donald—it won’t be a bit like The Apprentice. He’ll find it very frustrating.”  

Obama's Paradoxical Presidency

Note:  This blog was originally published in the August 8, 2013 edition of Politics in Minnesota.

Barack Obama’s presidency is a paradox.  At no point has a president been so powerful yet so weak.  He is a brilliant orator, capable of inspiring millions, but horrible at influencing Congress. His first term legislative record was a laundry list of major accomplishments, his second term is already over.  He wanted to be a post-partisan, post-racial president, but all the polls suggest he is one of the most polarizing modern presidents.  How do we explain the president that Barack Obama became, and understand the one that many hoped he would be but failed to achieve?

            First, consider the president that everyone thought Obama would be.  He was to be the candidate of change.  He was to be the president of peace, the anti-Bush who would end the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.  He would end torture, close Guantanamo Bay, and bring peace to the Middle East.  He would do that while consulting with allies and not going it alone.  He was also to be the president of universal health care, more alternative energies, and fixing the economy in a way that would produce more good paying jobs in the green economy of the future. 

            Obama promised a lot, and he delivered, sort of.  We sort of have universal health care with Obamacare, yet it is not clear how well it will work, whether it will save money, or really lead to a change in American health.  The economy is sort of on the mends.  Millions of new jobs have been created, but we are still years from recovering all the losses from 2008.  Wall Street has rebounded, but the gap between the rich and is at record levels.  Home values have returned for many, but for millions others their mortgages are still underwater.  Corporations have record profits, but salaries and family incomes  are flat or lower than they were before he became president.  We are officially out of Iraq and close to the same with Afghanistan, but one can hardly say that mission was really accomplished with either.  The list could go on.  Obama’s accomplishments are significant, but so many of them since incomplete or fragile.

            Conversely, who would have ever thought Obama would have been the president to deport more individuals than any other president in history.  He has prosecuted more leaks than any other president. He asserted the right to use drones to kill Americans, and he vigorously defends a vast network of NSA spying on Americans.  He bailed out the banks but did little for homeowners.  Dodd-Frank restructured Wall Street but not a lot for Main Street. His green energy economy went nowhere and most people expect will he endorse the Keystone Pipeline.  This is on the heels of him wanting to push more nuclear and “clean coal” technology.  It now even looks like he will place Larry Summers instead of Janet Yellen at the head of the Federal Reserve Board.

            To his defenders many argue that Obama is still cleaning up Bush’s mess.  To liberals he has done no more than warm over Bush era policies.  To conservatives, he is a detested socialist.  To watch Obama now one gets the sense that he has given up on his presidency and that his second term is already over.  He still offers lofty rhetoric about the economy and jobs but no one thinks he can deliver because of Republicans in Congress.  True they have fought him all the way but Obama has yet to learn how to negotiate with them.  He does not scare them and he cannot seem to beat a dysfunctional and unpopular Republican Party that has fallen out of the ideological mainstream for most Americans.  And now it is also clear that eight months into his second term, he has lost the support of his own party.  Democrats want Yellen not Summers, they are critical of the NSA but Obama will not budge.  His party does not want to negotiate away Social Security and other entitlement programs, Obama seems almost eager to put them on the table to get a grand budget deal. Obama looks increasingly irrelevant politically. 

            So how did it all happen? Why has Obama always cast his eyes to the side when he looks history or destiny in the eye?  Richard Neustadt once said that the power of the presidency is the power to persuade.  This power is a combination of many things, including party support, electoral  majorities, public opinion, and a host of other factors.  But the presidency is more than the formal powers of Article II of the Constitution.  It is also a product of the person who is he president.  More particularly, presidencies are defined in part by the character of the person who is president.

            In  Presidential Character, political scientist James David Barber sought to construct a means to describe and categorize presidents.  The basic problem we all face is to make an accurate guess to what type of president a candidate will be.  According to Barber, a person's personality, psychology, or "character" shapes performance and thus knowing something about a president's character will tell us about possible future performance.  In effect, the psychological character of the president melds with the formal office of the presidency to determine governing style.

            What types of presidential characters are there?  Barber thinks we can make that assessment along two dimensions.  There is activity-passivity:  How much energy will a person invest in the Presidency?  Second there is a positive-negative affect:  How does one feel about what one does? Thus, these two dimensions allow for four different types of presidents each having specific examples.   Early in his presidency Obama was an active-positive.  This is the type of president John Kennedy, Franklin Roosevelt, and Thomas Jefferson were. These are presidents as doers–they are results-orientated, flexible, and demonstrate a sense of growth and happiness in their job.  This is less the Obama we now see.  He displays more the rigidity of active-negative presidents such as Richard Nixon, or the withdrawn passive-negative dimension of Calvin Coolidge, or maybe even the passive-positive of Warren Harding, a president unwilling or unable to act or make decisions.

            It is not clear how to classify the current Obama as president but he certainly is not the active-positive one he once was.  Moreover, his lack of legislative and administrative experience prior to being president is showing, and his refusal to consult but a handful or close advisors has prevented him from changing his governing style.  Whatever energy or character he does have, the clock of his presidency continues to tick, pushing him further and further into a second term lame duck status.  Obama’s legacy now is almost beyond his control and absent a surprise, he will leave office a paradox for what he did, could have done, and what he became as president.