What I learned about the Trump Administration from reading Fire and Fury

Not much.  If one is expecting new insights into the Trump administration packed into an exciting book, Michael Wolff will disappoint.  I finished reading it today and my conclusion is that if you
have already been following the news for the last year, skip the book, you will not learn anything new.  In fact, you will be bored.
Even without reading Fire and Fury what I knew about Donald Trump and his administration was that it was largely a confederacy of dunces, beset by tribal and rival factions, and headed up by a narcissistic, hot-headed, egomaniac, paranoid, who does not read, think critically, or even have a command or clue of what government does or what it means to be president.  This is the story that Michael Wolff tells. We learn of how in many ways the Trump presidential campaign was a publicity and media stunt where no one seriously thought he was going to win and that instead it was viewed as a way to line the pocket books of the candidate when he returned to his businesses and self-promoting.  Thus, why worry about releasing taxes or conflicts of interest.
Trump himself is almost an afterthought or irrelevant as president in this book.  Trump is described as the person who cares little about policy,  retreats to his resorts to play golf or to his bedroom at night to watch television, eat McDonald’s cheeseburgers, and call his friends and complain about how no one likes him or how the world it out to get him.  The White House was divided by three factions–Bannon, Priebus, and Ivanka and Jared–all with their own agendas and an understanding on how to manipulate the president who seems never to remember what he promised or pledged to do.  Sincerity and commitment seem absent to the world of Donald Trump.  Between Trump’s own thin grasp of news and facts, his impulsiveness to act without thinking, and these tribal factions, Fire and Fury describes a presidency as largely divided, immobilized, and simply in capable of acting.
The book also describes a White House full of rookies, none of whom seem to have loyalty  to anyone including necessarily the president (who also seems not to have much loyalty to anyone  either).  No one seems to work together as a team, ready at a moments notice to act on grudge against someone else, whether perceived as a rival or not.  People latch on to the president simply hoping for a job or a career boast, fabricating their skills or resume to obtain favors, and when they do not suit the whims of the president, they are expendable.
The book also does not provide any new insights into the Trump world view, especially as it applies to the Comey firing and the Mueller investigation into the Russian connection.  We do not learn much more about foreign policy decision making, or health care policy, or anything else of substance.  At best the book gives us some gossipy lines which will be mocked in the New Yorker  or quoted cable talk shows.  But even without this book, we were already hearing all of these rumors.
Is the book a pack of lies and why is Trump so made about the book?  The book tells us nothing new so on one level Trump’s anger cannot be about the fact that new dirt has been revealed.  The content here is largely derivative.   The Trump anger is simply typical, his thin-skinned lashing out at any criticism.  But we already knew this was who Trump was.  In terms of whether this book is truthful, the Wolff acknowledges at the beginning of the book that he questioned some of the statements by those he interviewed.  Each interviewee had their own perspective and story to tell.  But second, since the book has come out no one quoted in the book has said their were misquoted  or denied what they said, or–with the exception of Trump–contended that the book mischaracterizes  Trump or his administration.  Silene often speaks volumes.
Save yourself some money and time–don’t buy or read Fire and Fury.  It is a vastly overrated book, marketed well, and written to appease the egos of the Washington insiders who seem to believe that telling this story reveals real dirt about Donald Trump and his minions.   In reality, the book simply tells the story of what we already know about Trump, and there are no surprises there.

A Tale of Two Senate Seats: What We Learned from Alabama and Minnesota

Doug Jones defeats Roy Moore in Alabama and Mark Dayton picks his Lieutenant Governor Tina Smith to replace Al Franken in Minnesota.  What should we infer or conclude from both?  Far less than the national and local media and most pundits will assert.

Alabama
On one level Roy Moore’s loss is about one seat in one state.  It is about a twice-removed state Supreme Court Justice accused of child molestation, repudiated by much of the Republican
establishment including Richard Shelby, losing to a moderate Democrat in a close special election.  The Democratic Party and then media will proclaim this is a repudiation of Donald Trump and Steve Bannon, and that it is a referendum on both that portends well for the Democrats in 2018.  Don’t bet on it.  Every time there is a special election everyone wants to generalize or argue that it has broader significance.  Remember at the end of the day Tip O’Neill was right–“all politics is local.”
In so many ways the Jones-Moore race was atypical.  There are not too many times Democrats are going to run in 2018 against an accused child molester with crank views about religion and the Bill of Rights.  Given all his liabilities, the race should have been a blow out.  It took such a horrible candidate repudiated by his own state Republican Party for a Democrat to win barely.  Take little solace in that. 
Next year there will be 35 senate races when Democrats having to defend  25 seats and the GOP nine.  Democrats will need to hold all their seats and win two Republican ones to control the seat.  They also need a perfect storm to win back a gerrymandered controlled House and to make significant inroads into recapturing the governorships and state legislatures lost over the last few years.  Yes opinion polls favor generic Democrats for Congress, Trump’s approvals are low, and the opposition party to the president in off-year elections historically does badly.  But Democrats often  do not show up in midterm elections and as of yet the Democratic Party has not constructed an alternative narrative to Trump’s to why they should be elected.  In defeating Moore their rationale for winning is that he is a creep.  Hardly a winning message for 2018 even against Trump.
Potentially what is significant is that the Democrats did crack the solid Republican South and elected their first Alabama senator in 25 years.  Maybe–just maybe–Jones offers the type of candidate that Democrats can win in the South.  Maybe we saw with Black turnout what the Voting Rights Act can really do.  Maybe the South, especially the urban areas and the changing demographics, suggest  changes that a longer term and more structural.  But determining all that is too soon to tell and Democrats should not get their hopes up too soon.  Demographics are not destiny, and local races against bad candidates cannot be exemplars for other local races across the country.

Minnesota
After a week of drama Dayton selects Tina Smith to replace Al Franken.  Dayton could have done something bold and build for the future of the Democratic Party in Minnesota but he opted for predictability and loyalty in selecting Smith.  This is who he was rumored to want a week ago,
perhaps or not turning his back on pressures from various constituencies both local and national to  select someone else.
But besides picking Smith out of predictability and loyalty, perhaps he also selected her for another value–competence.  Rarely do we discuss competence as a trait among candidates for office, but in Smith we get someone who is a real public policy person.  She is less about politics, campaigns, and elections, and more about tax policy, governance, and legislation.  She is all that Hillary Clinton was without the baggage.  Whether in a Trump era competence is the type of trait that is electable in 2018 is a matter of speculation and one will see if she faces challenges from within the DFL.  But even if she does not, her 2018 special election will attract millions of dollars and outside national interest.  It would be nice if she could simply run on being competent and smart but too few candidates–and especially women–can do that.  Our pop culture dislikes intellectualism–historian Richard Hofstadter told us that years ago–and smart women are threatening to many.  Smith in running for reelection will need to figure out how to run without making the mistakes Clinton made, simply being competent and smart it not enough, and she will also need to provide a narrative why she deserves to fill out the remaining two years of Franken’s term.
Finally, she needs to address a growing parochialism setting in among many Minnesotans and especially DFLers.  There is a growing resentment that Chuck Schumer told Minnesotans that Franken had to go and therefore they were telling the state who our senator should be.  There is some truth to that, but in the end, Franken had to go.  Six to eight allegations of sexual impropriety, collapsing poll numbers for his support in the state, his inability even in his resignation speech to appreciate what he might have done all suggest that Franken had lost the ability to legislate.  We should worry about how “accusation equals guilt” is creating a new Salem witch hunt, and yes what he was accused of doing is different from that of what brought Roy Moore down. 
But character does matter and Franken’s brought him down, for good or for bad.  The issue is not a lack of due process, the issue was his inability to provide a reasonable accuse or account for his behavior. The court of public opinion is not a real court. For those who said he deserved his day in court (or before the Senate Ethics Committee), the same could have been said about Roy Moore.  Insisting on full due process for Franken would have required the same for Moore and everyone else  charged with anything else on the campaign trail. 
         Good or bad, in a representative democracy voters and public opinion rule.  Elected officials compete in the marketplace of ideas for vote and it should not usually if at all be that courts and trials decide the truth or veracity of claims.  Maybe that is the lesson that should be generalized from Minnesota and perhaps Alabama.

What is Orthodox Republicanism?

What does Republicanism mean?  This is the burning question for the Republican Party today with
Steve Bannon declaring war on his party enemies and the likes of Senators Flake and Corker opting to resign because they are outcasts likely unable to win their nominations in the party that Donald Trump remade.  And the answer will have fateful consequences not only for the GOP but the health of the American Democracy.  Contrary to the hopes of Democrats, there needs to be a responsible Republican Party that has a soul.
The Republican Party today is not the party of Lincoln and civil rights.  It is not the environmental party of Teddy Roosevelt, and it is not the party of Nelson Rockefeller and Jacob Javits from New York where I grew up.  Back then it would not have been farfetched to argue of the two New York senators–Republican Javits and Democrat Bobby Kennedy–the former was more liberal.  Nor is this the Republican Party of Ronald Reagan that worked across the aisle with Tip O’Neill, or the Party of George H.W. Bush who signed the American with Disabilities Act,  supported tax increases because it was in interest of the nation, and forged international alliances to  liberate Kuwait.  And it is not the Party of George W. Bush who supported immigration reform.
The Republican Party today is an ugly, selfish, and mean party.  It is a Party premised on the  anger, resentment, intolerance, and nastiness.  It is a party that does not want government to work, one that tolerates a president referring to women as pussy, immigrants as rapists, Muslims as terrorists.  It is a party that looks at someone like Jeff Flake–a pro free trade, internationalist who believes in a strong US international presence while also endorsing tax cuts and small government –as a RINO (Republican in Name Only). 
The same is true of Bob Corker, Susan Collins, and John McCain.  All traditional Republicans, but none of them find a place in the Party of Bannon and Trump.  It is not enough to support some principles of Republicanism, it is an ideological purity test demanding 100% loyalty. Bannon and Trump have become the Grand Inquisitor and Joe McCarthy of the Republican Party, and when Flake or Corker step into the role of Joseph Welch, asking of them “Have You No Sense of Decency,?" few within the Republican Party are willing to support them.  The new orthodoxy overrides principle, integrity, and what is right for the party and the county.
George Washington warned in his farewell address of the dangers of parties, seeing in them how they encouraged “the community with ill-founded jealousies and false alarms, [and] kindles the animosity of one part against another.  He thought we would be better as a nation without them.  Perhaps, but they day is long since past.  Parties are a reality and the task as political scientists such as E.E. Schattschneider said, is to make them responsible.  Parties make governance possible, they make American democracy possible by mobilizing voters, checking the opposition, and articulating a vision for the public good.
The Republican Party of Bannon and Trump does not do that.  It is a party of nihilism, consuming itself and American democracy with it.  There is a need for a Republican Party to speak for the Constitution, Bill of Rights, free speech, and freedom of religion.  It is a party that needs to respect the right of people to kneel at football games, to acknowledge that scientific facts and that alternative facts are not facts but lies.  It needs to say that conspiring with a foreign government to  influence an election is treason, that conflating personal wealth and self-interest with the public good is wrong, and that remaining silent in the hope that it will advance a party agenda is wrong. 
There was time in my lifetime during Watergate when the likes of Howard Baker, William Ruckelhaus, and Elliot Richardson put the good of the nation ahead of party and did the right thing in opposing  Richard Nixon.  They were heroes, and Republicans, and no one tried to oust or outcast them.  The Republican Party needs people like this, as does the country, and we need a Republican Party and an American public that will support people like this.  This is what orthodox Republicanism once was, and it needs to be that again.

The Education of Donald Trump

Slowly but surely the presidency of Donald Trump is being normalized.  By normalized it is

meant that the Trump presidency is increasingly being captured and confined by the institutional powers and realities of American and world politics.  This is something that Steve Bannon feared, and which both Trump’s supporters and distractors should recognize.

There is an old political science and political adage that declares that presidents have more authority and freedom to act internationally than they do domestically.  This is because while the structures of the Constitution–such as checks and balances and separation of powers–limit the domestic power of presidents, they are more free to act internationally, especially with either congressional acquiescence or affirmative grants of power.  This recognition that presidents have more autonomy internationally is rooted in famous Justice Robert Jackson concurrence in the 1952 Supreme Court case Youngstown Sheet & Tube v. Sawyer.  Yes, in many ways this dicta is correct constitutionally, but it misses something far more powerful when it comes to defining presidential authority; specifically the political and institutional constraints on presidents and how, as Stephen Skowronek argues in Presidential Leadership in Political Time, how history and context defines presidential power.

Back in 2008 during the US presidential elections when lecturing in Europe I was asked how the presidency of Barack Obama would differ from that of George Bush in the area of foreign policy.  I argued that the best predictor of a new president’s foreign policy was to look to his predecessor’s.  Presidents really have far less freedom to depart from the past than many think.  The foreign policy establishment is big and powerful in the US and it largely bipartisan.  Geo-political forces such as  the state of the world economy, the political interests of other nations, and the overall limits on US power and reach too further define what presidents can do.  Yes some may claim some presidents made major shifts–Nixon and China–but the changing geo-political role of China in the world made such a choice inevitable.

Obama proved that.  After making numerous promises, the Obama foreign policy was defined by choices made by Bush. The war on terror continued, troops remained in Afghanistan and Iraq, Gitmo was not closed, drone attacks persisted, and the US did not fundamentally change Middle East politics even after the Arab Spring opening because entrenched support for Israel did not change.  Even Obama’s effort to make an Asian pivot has had mixed results, and he was unsuccessful in making many changes in how to handle Syria and North Korea.  Yes Obama did make some marginal changes, but fundamentally more continuity with Bush than a break.

The same is now true with Trump.   Candidate Trump disagreed with almost all things Obama.  The Iran nuclear deal would be torn up.  Trump pledged a Mexican wall, declare China a currency manipulator and impose tariffs on their products.  NATO was obsolete, the Syrian policy wrong, Putin and Russia a friend,  and global engagement must be retracted to put America first.  Great rhetoric, but the reality is tht slowly the forces that constrained Obama are constraining Trump.  

One now sees a new Trump.  The bombing of Syria, while a departure perhaps from what Obama did, is something that Hillary Clinton and most Republicans and Democrats in Congress support.  It produced a rift with Russia that now leads Trump to muse that perhaps our relations with that country are the worst ever (they are not).    Moreover, despite tough talk, trump’s options with Syria are limited, as they are throughout the Middle East.  Expect no major change in politics toward Egypt and Israel, and do not expect any major break in addressing the Palestinian quest for a homeland.

NATO is good, and China will not be declared a currency manipulator, and, in fact, if they help Trump to contain North Korea’s nuclear program, he will give them a great trade deal.  This statement is recognition that despite the show of force the US is demonstrating in sending ships to North Korea, there is little he can do along to change the politics in that country.  Gitmo will not be closed, the policy toward Cuba not reversed, and even the dropping of MOAB–the mother of all bombs–on Afghanistan–it was a policy in the works under the Obama administration.    Trump’s enhanced deportation policy and extreme vetting looks more and more like a variation of what Obama did–partly courtesy of the federal courts–and there will be no shift in the drone war

Nearly 90 days into the Trump presidency one can already seen more continuity with Obama than breaks.  Yes there are still rough edges, yes there appears to be no Trump grand strategy, but that lives a void to be filled by the bureaucracy and foreign policy establishment.  All this is exacerbated by the fact that Trump has not filled many key State and foreign policy positions, but that only means that the weight of the status quois filling the void.

The real sign of Donald Trump’s education or normalizing was the removal of Steve Bannon from the National Security Council.  Bannon saw the power of the bureaucracy and wanted to smash it.  Instead it smashed him and may soon lead to his ouster from the Trump administration in total.  That was a Trump presidency turning point.

It seemed just a few weeks ago people were talking of a failed Trump presidency, impeachment, or a major international crisis.   Yet increasingly likely is that an incompetent Trump will create the space for the bureaucracy to take over in the realm of foreign policy, for good or bad, and to the fear of delight of his supporters and detractors.

It Sucks Being In Charge: The Lessons of Trumpcare

It’s hard to be in charge of the government.  It comes with responsibility, much like being an adult.
 Taking care of the government comes with a fiduciary responsibility to act with care for the public good, much like being a parent comes with it responsibility to look after children.
This is just one of the many lessons that will not be learned by Trump and the Republicans as a result of their failure to repeal Obamacare.  It was so easy to vote 50+ times repeal it when it did not matter, but once the reality of owning the issue and having to be accountable for it was here, the Republicans simply failed.  They failed in part because they had become the party with a negative narrative.  By that, Trump and Republicans ran successfully in their opposition to the status quo, except they had no alternative vision of how they wanted to govern.
Part of the problem is that many of the Republicans along with Steve Bannon  have a negative theory of the state.  Their’s is not the night watchman state of minimalism, it is even more profound in terms of see the state as the enemy.  It is kind of hard to govern and be in charge when you actually do not like the machinery of power that you are holding and your aim is to dismantle it.    Another problem with the failure to repeal the Affordable Care Act with a Republican alternative is that the Affordable Care Act already was the Republican alternative.  How do you out-Republican the Republican alternative?
But the failure to repeal the ACA goes deeper than health care.  Political power and influence is not stagnant; it either increases or decreases but it never stays the same.  Richard Neustadt’s the power of the presidency is the power to persuade was on full display in the health care fiasco.  Any president, including Trump, should be at the strongest in the first 100 days.  Securing their first legislative victory is important for so many reasons, including showing the political capital one has.  Herr Trump and even Speaker Ryan expended enormous political capital and failed.  Next to immigration, repealing the ACA was the signature theme of Trump and the GOP.  If there was anything they should have been able to do it should have been this.  Yet the failure here was multifold.
For all who elected Trump because he was a total outsider to Washington, guest what?  It takes insiders to govern and to know how to move legislation.  Trump had none of the requisite skills to move legislation.  He also showed the limits of his ability to negotiate when in fact, he did not negotiate. He threatened Republicans legislators and failed.  He is weaker because of that because they are no longer afraid of him.  Presidents, as I have argued, cannot simply order people around and think they will obey.  This is especially true of Congress.  Moreover, as any good negotiator will tell you, real bargaining is a non-zero sum game, it is not about bullying people around.  Trump had nothing to offer anyone to vote for the bill except his wrath and that was not enough.  The art of a deal requires dealing and Trump did not do that.
Trump and the Republicans also seemed to think that a bill that originally took over one year to pass and which had six years of implementation history could easily be replaced in two weeks. This brief time frame was not enough to vet the bill, to build coalitions, to flesh out the unanticipated consequences.  In so many ways it failed to learn the lessons of why health care reform failed under Clinton and succeeded under Obama.
Moving forward Trump seems already bored with health care reform and plans to move on.  He has said the Obamacare will die of its own accord and will do nothing to fix it.  Guess who is most hurt but Obamacare’s failures?  The rural and working class who voted for Trump and the Republicans.  Doing nothing hurts his supporters the most, but had his reforms passed they too would have hurt his supporters the most.
It seems unlikely that Trump has learned anything from his failures here.  Back in 2016 when asked what would happen if Trump or Clinton were elected, I said no matter who would be elected it would produce gridlock and produce no major change from what was happening between Democrat Obama and the Republican Congress..  Here the gridlock is intra-party, because the Republicans really are not a party united by a common vision for government and society.  Instead, they are profoundly divided by their hatred of the status quo and lack a realistic vision of what it means to be in charge and responsible.  It really sucks being an adult.

The Trump Presidency versus the Deep State

The Trump presidency is fraught with contradictions.  Among the most notable is the degree to which
the Steve Bannon war on the “deep administrative state” is at odds with a presidency aimed at making America great again.  To achieve that goal–whatever it means–it requires the Trump administration to take control of the political machinery of the state to secure policy goals, not seek to destroy it as Bannon and many Republicans aspire.
There is an old adage that the skills need to become president are different from those to be president. Presidential campaigns depend on media skills, crafting narratives and messages, and on fund raising among other things.  While some of these skills might also apply to being president, campaigning is different from governing.  Governance is more than words and rhetoric; it is formulating public policies and setting agendas.  It requires the coordination of multiple agencies and officials, working with Congress, proper use of discretion, implementation, and the oversight of programs.
Campaigning is easy, but governing is hard.  Fortunately there are careerists and a civil service in Washington that transcends presidents to maintain institutional knowledge about how to run things.  There are the 3,000 or so members of the Senior Executive Service–the most senior careerists who  run the major government agencies and programs.  There is the foreign policy establishment that generally directs the US national security and diplomatic functions of the country.   All of this is what makes the federal government work and gets things done.   It assures stability, consistency, competence.  This is the real  deep state–not the deep state of those conspiracists who still think there was a second shooter in Dallas in 1963 or who think there is a CIA coverup over area 51 in New Mexico.   Or the deep state of anti-Semites, racists, misogynists,  and homophobes who see CNN and the NY Times in a plot to oppress white Christian men.  Trump needs the real deep state–the administrative state– but he is at war with it.
Trump’s presidential campaign as an outsider was not atypical of many recent candidates.  He ran as the outsider, as someone who would “drain the swamp” of Washington.  Yet the Trump candidacy and now the Trump presidency went further.  It saw a virtue in no government knowledge or experience.  It naively believed that a bunch of real outsiders with no government experience could simply come in and get things done, such as building a Mexican wall, crushing Isis, imposing tariffs, forcing renegotiation of trade agreements, and demanding changes to health care.   To accomplish any of these tasks a president and his staff have to have a plane, and people who can execute it.  So far it does not appear Trump has either.  He is literally a man without a plan–except for one–to also destroy the current administrative state, if Steve Bannon is to be so understood.
The entire foundation of anything the Trump wants to do rests upon the deep or the administrative state.  Executive orders in part get their power from administrative law and regulations.  The ability to move on any of the issues that Trump says he cares about requires there to be a strong and viable administrative state.  Yet this is the very state Bannon wants to see wither away.  Take away the administrative state and Trump will be weak, ineffective president.  That appears where the Trump presidency is now.
The efforts to destabilize the government only weaken it.  The failure to get hi appointments named and confirmed weaken the state.   The failure to listen to those who know better or how to get things done weakens the state.  Trump may simply not realize that his tactics are at odds with policy views.  Or perhaps what Trump wants and what Bannon wants are two different things.  Trump may want to build, Bannon wants to destroy.
Back in the 1960s when people were still waiting for the revolution to occur political scientist Robert Dahl wrote a book called After the Revolution?  He pointed out that after the revolution someone would still have to pick up the garbage, make sure the streets are paved, that sewage goes down sewers, and that all the other functions that we cherish as part of civilization would go on.     Revolutions to improve the quality of life still require authority, structure, and organization, unless of course you are a complete anarchist and either don’t want that or think that a modern society can spontaneously govern and structure itself.  Maybe that is what Bannon thinks.  However the track record of complex systems simply self-ordering themselves in ways that are beneficial to all is not very good.  Free markets and capitalism are the most notable failures in that aspect.
The point here is that contrary to the simplistic view that the state is going to wither away and  allow Trump to be a strong and effective president, the two cannot stand together.  The Trump presidency is actually pursuing policies that will largely make it less effective and competent than many hoped or feared.  The contradictions of the Trump style of anti-governance doom his presidency, and perhaps setting it up to be crushed by the deep state that it resents but needs.