Donald Trump is the biggest unknown ever to take control of the White House. What’s the worst-case scenario? The best? As the country waits to find out, Politico Magazine asked 17 experts to game out a Trump presidency.
On one hand, Trump is a pragmatic businessman with a very flexible ideology and a desire to be seen in a positive light; on the other, he’s a ruthless and often improvisational dealmaker with no allegiance to the norms and institutions that set the boundaries for traditional political power.
.. Though he was elected in the end, he did not pursue this goal rationally but rather spent time attacking Miss Universe, the Khan family, etc. To get to the best-case scenario you have to take away his Twitter and force him not to chase his various demons, as was evidently done in the last week of the campaign. And then persuade him that allies are actually useful. This will require having a staff that understands the realities of the exercise of American power internationally, and rebuilding bridges to the foreign policy experts that were so alienated by his pronouncements during the campaign.
.. Worst case: President Trump encounters a foreign policy crisis. Lacking experience, he relies on his gut and makes a bad situation worse. His ego gets involved; he doubles down. The crisis escalates, leading to war (with Russia over the Baltics? China over Taiwan? North Korea? Iran?)
.. The chances of Trump avoiding major errors in security policy would be enhanced if the Congress, and especially the Senate, more effectively played its constitutional role as a check against excessive presidential power, in addition to challenging foolish ideas.
.. The worst-case scenario is that Republicans keep campaigning against real and imagined failures of the Democrats, and Democrats respond in kind. If the Trump administration leads with policies only Republicans can support, excludes Democrats from crafting proposals, and rams them through with gimmicky rule changes, we will be in for more Washington dysfunction and justifiable voter disgust.
.. Leading with hot button issues like defunding Planned Parenthood or rolling back environmental regulations would be a tactical mistake. Proposing big cuts in individual income taxes designed to benefit the wealthy would be a very bad start—not only because it would be fiscally irresponsible, but because it would betray Trump’s repeated promise to be the voice of those left behind.
.. The Department of Justice and FBI become Trump’s Federal’naya sluzhba bezopasnosti Rossiyskoy Federatsii (FSB). In short, America’s 70 year run as the world’s leader effectively ends.
.. The best-case scenario is that Trump’s zeal to “win” trumps ideology, and he governs only looking to cut deals where he can declare victory.
.. The best-case scenario is that he decides—correctly—that the best and probably only way to create lots of jobs in the industrial Midwest where he won his election is to build huge quantities of solar panels and wind turbines.
.. With a united Republican government, the worst-case scenario no longer comes from ongoing gridlock but from unrestrained power. The protective hand of the federal government has already been withdrawn from voting rights; without checks, that hand could become an iron fist, actively assaulting the civil rights of minorities, from immigration bans to mass deportations to the expansion of stop-and-frisk.
.. Democrats cannot be expected to partner with an administration that continues to target vulnerable groups or disrespects the constitutional structures of the American government.
.. It also requires legislators to think beyond partisan and ideological lines: the end of the Hastert rule, the end of power-enhancing but nation-damaging standoffs over fiscal cliffs and debt ceilings.
.. The problem won’t be if Donald J. Trump turns out to be a dissembler as president. It will be if he is not. The best modern presidents have been ones like Franklin D. Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan who made an ostentatious show of ideological fidelity to their followers and then promptly zigged and zagged whenever it was necessary. The worst presidents have been fellows like Woodrow Wilson or Jimmy Carter who tried to live up to their principles.
.. If Trump sticks with the unilateralist militarists that attached themselves to his campaign—New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, Rudolph Giuliani, retired General Michael Flynn and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich—alarm bells should start ringing. And if he adds the likes of John Bolton, Michele Bachmann and Sarah Palin to his cabinet, the rumbustious New York mogul could end up making Warren Harding look as though he were a paragon of statesmanship.
.. Trump also shows that he is a master of the art of the deal who deals artfully with America’s adversaries. He builds up the American military, but also engages in arms-control talks with China and Russia, thereby establishing newly cooperative relationships. Ukraine is Finlandized, becoming a united and neutral country. After lengthy and secret negotiations, Trump ends up opening an American embassy in Tehran. Any wars are kept to quick affairs along the lines of Grenada in 1983.
.. The worst-case: Trump tries to keep his promises, but discovers that many are illegal or impossible to implement. He really does ignite a trade war with China, try to deport huge numbers of illegal immigrants, tells Japan, South Korea and Saudi Arabia to get nuclear weapons, undermines all confidence in the U.S. commitment to NATO at a time when America needs as many allies as possible. He faces pushback even from Republicans. He gets angry. He listens only to slavish loyalists. He looks to protect himself and vindicate his position with public messages that further divide an already divided country. He responds to a terrorist attack on Americans with a series of measures that exacerbate some problems without solving others.
.. How best to get to the best-case scenario: Top talent in the GOP (and maybe Democrats) honor Trump’s victory by pledging to work in his administration, and they work to ensure that Trump doesn’t become isolated or isolate himself.
.. A worst-case scenario is if: Trump runs a divisive administrative. He appoints an independent prosecutor to investigate the Clintons. He gets into a “war of words” with Fed Chair Janet Yellen, undermining international confidence in the integrity of the U.S. financial system. His administration abolishes Obamacare, but can’t agree on any replacement. He starts building the border wall without negotiating with Mexico or other Latin American countries on immigration. There is no effort at immigration reform. The Trump administration begins deporting illegals. Latino families are torn apart with parents having to leave their American-born children here. Trump doesn’t try to work with Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell. The corporate tax rate is lowered and firms repatriate their profits, but don’t invest because of a lack of confidence in Trump’s management of the economy. Consequently, the U.S. economy is thrown into a recession.
.. How to get to the best-case scenario: The key will be if he works with Congress and seeks to negotiate—rather than take unilateral steps—with allies and partners as well as China and Russia. In taking over the governing, he needs to avoid the erratic behavior that characterized some of his campaigning. He has a real opportunity to break the logjam in Congress and enact reform but will have to quickly switch out of campaign mode and use his businessman skills at negotiating deals.
.. The worst-case scenario for a Trump presidency involves ratcheting up domestic turmoil at home and international crises abroad. Domestically, Trump’s rhetoric of racial division, xenophobia—anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim, and anti-women—can stoke further divisions, especially if he fulfills his pledge to repeal Obamacare. Trump has made explicit and implicit promises to white males, who overwhelmingly voted for him with an understanding that his presidency would be tantamount to a restoration of lost economic privileges and racial identity of the Eisenhower era.
.. The Republican Party’s Tea Party wing fails to comprehend compromises made by Reagan, settling into a winner takes all governing strategy that has caused the decaying of longstanding institutions, including the Supreme Court, which through GOP obstruction has become a naked site of partisanship.
.. External pressure from massive demonstrations could encourage a President Trump to rethink his rhetoric of division, but more likely would trigger his authoritarian tendencies and propel him to unleash further repression among already marginalized constituencies. Perhaps the best check on President Trump will be an organized Left, one capable of enough unity to prevent what could not be stopped on Election Day.
.. The point of this free-wheeling counterfactual is to suggest that the American creed of how “one man can make a difference” cuts both ways: This dark side of what is sometimes called American Exceptionalism suggests that if that one man who makes a difference these days were to be our new President-Elect Donald Trump, perhaps two years from now we‘ll find him shoring up shaky approval ratings by exacerbating tensions with China. The resulting shooting war could then rally frightened Americans, recalcitrant allies, as well as arms manufacturers and other business interests to his side.
.. After winning a second term by stimulating the economy with hugely inflated military budgets, President Trump might then initiate and support other boots-on-the-ground counterinsurgencies in an open-ended war on terror, leading to a spiral of domestic terrorist attacks and correspondingly violent reprisals, as well as ever-increasing curtailments of civil liberties at home, including rights of assembly, press, and use of social media. Taking a page from President Nixon’s playbook, an increasingly lengthy list of Trump “enemies” would find themselves under surveillance, under audit and harassed in other ways.
.. A truly worst-case scenario might be that in the aftermath of a limited nuclear exchange with China, Trump suspends various provisions of the Constitution, perhaps indefinitely. He would then use the state of perpetual emergency he had created as justifying a third and even a fourth term, citing FDR as a precedent.
.. It’s still hard to fathom the costs to humanity that George W. Bush incurred by triggering a civil war in Iraq. What other U.S. president can be held responsible for so many deaths in a wholly unnecessary conflict? Donald Trump may fall to the same depths if he follows through on his trigger-happy rhetoric. But he could easily cause as many deaths and inflict as much hardship—perhaps not as visibly, but nonetheless—by reversing the world’s progress to combat climate change.
.. The way we focus on the better-case scenario is to not overreact.
The Avalanche of Distrust
Both ultimately hew to a distrustful, stark, combative, zero-sum view of life — the idea that making it in this world is an unforgiving slog and that, given other people’s selfish natures, vulnerability is dangerous.
.. Trump’s convention speech was the perfect embodiment of the politics of distrust. American families, he argued, are under threat from foreigners who are as violent and menacing as they are insidious. Clinton’s “Basket of Deplorables” riff comes from the same spiritual place. We have in our country, she jibed, millions of bigots, racists, xenophobes and haters — people who are so blackhearted that they are, as she put it, “irredeemable.”
.. Young people are the most distrustful of all; only about 19 percent of millennials believe other people can be trusted.
But across all age groups there is a rising culture of paranoia and conspiracy-mongering.
.. The true thing about distrust, in politics and in life generally, is that it is self-destructive. Distrustful people end up isolating themselves, alienating others and corroding their inner natures.
.. In 1985, 10 percent of Americans said they had no close friend with whom they could discuss important matters. By 2004, 25 percent had no such friend.
.. Only 52 percent of adults say they are extremely proud to be Americans, down from 70 percent in 2003.
.. But the pervasive atmosphere of distrust undermines actual intimacy, which involves progressive self-disclosure, vulnerability, emotional risk and spontaneous and unpredictable face-to-face conversations.
.. Instead, what you see in social media is often the illusion of intimacy. The sharing is tightly curated — in a way carefully designed to mitigate unpredictability, danger, vulnerability and actual intimacy. There is, as Stephen Marche once put it, “a phony nonchalance.”
2014 Commencement address by Bill and Melinda Gates
Ten years ago, I traveled to India with friends. On the last day there, I spent some time meeting with prostitutes. I expected to talk to them about the risk of AIDS, but they wanted to talk about stigma. Most of these women had been abandoned by their husbands, and that’s why they’d gone into prostitution. They were trying to make enough money to feed their kids. They were so low in the eyes of society that they could be raped and robbed and beaten by anybody – even by police – and nobody cared.
.. Talking to them about their lives was so moving to me. But what I remember most is how much they wanted to touch me and be touched. It was as if physical contact somehow proved their worth. As I was leaving, we took a photo of all of us with our arms linked together.
.. The stigma of AIDS is vicious – especially for women – and the punishment is abandonment.
.. The community they formed became a platform for everything. They were able to set up speed-dial networks to respond to violent attacks. Police and others who raped and robbed them couldn’t get away with it anymore. The women set up systems to encourage savings. They used financial services that helped some of them start businesses and get out of sex work. This was all done by people society considered the lowliest of the low.
.. The pessimists are wrong in my view, but they’re not crazy. If technology is purely market-driven and we don’t focus innovation on the big inequities, then we could have amazing inventions that leave the world even more divided.