most of the Republican leadership in Congress is opposed to Trumpism, preferring some shriveled thing called “the Ryan agenda” that nobody other than a few thousand of his constituents in a corner of Wisconsin can be plausibly said to have voted for. Worse, significant figures in his Cabinet, and even more in the second and third tiers of his Administration, also reject Trumpism – including, one notes, members of his own family
.. What if, just what if, the fact that Trump has surrounded himself with people (cabinet members and family members alike) who don’t believe in Trumpism, the fact that he has gone along with budgets and health care bills and foreign policy moves that are not obviously congruent with Trumpism, the fact that he generally seems to lack any zeal for a fight when his campaign promises collide with Republican and/or center-left establishment opposition … what if all of this means that he never really believed in Trumpism himself? Or that he never believed in it to the extent required to govern on it, as opposed to just sloganeering on the stump? Or – my basic view at present — that he has a vague but consistent-over-the-years belief that America is getting taken advantage of on trade and defense spending (a theme he apparently returned to today on the European leg of his grand tour), but that he lacks the
- mixture of intellectual curiosity,
- mental creativity,
- seriousness of purpose and
- personal discipline
required to actually make any set of policy ideas his own in the way that a successful populist president would need to do?
.. A talented mountebank with zero policy knowledge who exploited a set of ideas with underappreciated appeal but lacks the aptitude or zeal to implement them, preferring to rage against his cable-news coverage while House backbenchers write “his” budget and the Pentagon conducts “his” foreign policy and the Freedom Caucus amends “his” health care bill to make it still more politically toxic.
.. If this is the case then it’s correct but also a little beside the point to complain about how the wreckers and establishment types and Ryanists are all betraying the voters by submarining Trumpism. The betrayal starts at the top, with a president who doesn’t care enough and probably never really did.
.. But Trump himself is likely to be the primary teacher of that lesson here, and it should have been entirely predictable, from watching the man on the campaign trail and pondering his history, that he was likely to leave many of his supporters more disillusioned than he found them
.. insisting that conservatives or populists must stick with this president no matter his incompetence, lest the establishment prevail and Trumpism go down, becomes a horribly self-defeating sort of loyalty – because it only proves to future politicians, future demagogues, that they too can promise you revolution, deliver only politics-as-usual, and still keep your support.
.. That Trump has any “core principles” beyond self-interest and a certain instinct that America is getting a raw deal is a claim with no foundation in Trump’s business record, personal life or political career.
.. And the idea that the issues Zmirak cares most about – abortion, religious liberty and the persecution of Christians overseas – are also sincerely Trump’s own seems completely implausible, not least because the president himself barely even pretends to fervor on any religious-conservative cause, offering instead a transactionalism that’s almost admirable in its cynicism.
.. it’s striking to me that a writer who has been so cold-eyed and unsentimental about so many institutions that others drape in piety – including his own conservative Catholic subculture — could be so trusting about Trump’s stated commitments and in his celebrity businessman’s capacities.
Steve Bannon believed in Trumpism. Donald Trump doesn’t.
Trump is losing control of his administration, and he likes it that way.
As a presidential candidate, Donald Trump praised autocrats and exhibited strongman tendencies. But as president of the United States, Trump is proving to be one of the weakest, most disinterested executives in memory. He seems happy — even eager — to be both operationally and ideologically marginalized inside his own administration.
.. White House staff, congressional Republicans, military leaders, and executive branch officials are increasingly confident simply ignoring President Trump.
- After Trump tweeted that he wanted the military to ban transgender service members from serving, for instance, the Pentagon quickly said that it had not received an official order and was going to carry on with business as usual until it did.
- .. Similarly, after Trump tweeted his threats at North Korea, the key organs of American foreign policymaking — the State Department, the Defense Department, and so on — were quick to declare that nothing had changed, there was no military buildup or new red lines, and everyone should just ignore the commander in chief’s morning outburst.
- Senate Republicans are ignoring the president’s demand to keep holding votes on health reform.
- The National Economic Council, the Office of Management and Budget, the Treasury Department, and the Department of Health and Human Services are ignoring Trump’s campaign promises to raise taxes on the rich and protect Social Security and Medicaid from cuts.
- Attorney General Jeff Sessions — one of the few executive branch officials who seems to ideologically align with Trump — is ignoring Trump’s clear desire that he resign, or at least take a more aggressive hand overseeing Bob Mueller.
As CNBC’s John Harwood concluded in a recent overview, “fresh evidence arrives every day of the government treating the man elected to lead it as someone talking mostly to himself.”
Trump could react to all this with fury. He could elevate aides, like Bannon, who are committed to his ideological agenda and invested in reshaping the federal government around his vision, and fire Cabinet officials and top staffers who seem to be using his administration to drive their agendas. But he isn’t.
MSNBC’s Chris Hayes outlined a theory as to why. He argued that it’s wrong to see this as the government defying the president. This, he thinks, is exactly how Trump wants it:
I don’t think the president wants to be in charge. I think he wants to sit on his couch and yell at his TV screen and tweet things, but he’s almost happy to be able to kind of get it out of his system and not have anyone listen to him. I think his optimal equilibrium is hectoring Jeff Sessions but Jeff Sessions not quitting, or tweeting out the thing about transgender service members and the military ignoring him, or tweeting out threats to North Korea and not actually changing American posture.
I think that that we have arrived at a new equilibrium in which both
- the interior members of his staff,
- the actual federal bureaucracy,
- the US Congress,
- the US public,
- the global public, and
- global leaders
all basically understand the president is fundamentally a bullshit artist and you just shouldn’t listen to what he says.
There are two ways a president can make sure the federal policy roughly tracks his wishes. One way is to insist on it himself, but Trump has no interest in doing that. Another way is to outsource ideological enforcement to committed, empowered lieutenants.
.. Bannon was the closest thing Trump had to a lieutenant like that: He was the true believer running around the federal government trying to force various agencies and officials to align their work with Trump’s campaign promises
.. The problem is that Bannon could only win those fights if Trump wanted him to win those fights — and now we see Trump didn’t.
.. Instead, Trump has systematically elevated outsiders to his campaign and operation like John Kelly and Gary Cohn while alienating or firing allies like Bannon and Reince Priebus.
.. we’re watching a president who wants to comment on his own presidency without actually driving its agenda or being held accountable for anything he says.
.. The presidency Trump wants is one in which he can say whatever he likes but other people do the work and ignore him when necessary. Chief of Staff John Kelly seems to understand that:
.. The president of the United States is clearly unfit for the job, but the good news, to the extent that there is good news, is that everyone around him knows it, and he is willing to be sidelined as long as no one takes away his phone. Whether he is being marginalized by his own administration or choosing to marginalize himself I don’t know, but Bannon’s ouster is another piece of evidence that Trump is interested in Twitter, not Trumpism.
Jonah Goldberg: The ‘Last Straw’?
This is the moment when Trumpism hits the fan.
Of course, it has felt like this to one extent or another before:
- when Trump denigrated John McCain’s military service,
- when he compared Ben Carson to a pedophile,
- when he smeared Ted Cruz’s father,
- when the Access Hollywood tape came out, after the various idiotic tweets,
- after he fired Comey
- when he divulged intelligence sources and methods, etc.
.. Lingering on for three-plus more years as a failed president is a kind of survival. The question is, is this presidency salvageable?
.. A piece of straw alone is not a burden for a camel. But if you pile on one burden after another, you reach “the last straw.” This is one of the — if not the — most important dynamics in politics. If you go back and look at any number of “spontaneous” political outbursts, you’ll discover that the actual people doing the, uh, out-bursting are actually responding to a long list of grievances and that the precipitating event was only the last straw.
.. For instance, the Arab Spring was ignited by the abuse of a street vendor in Tunisia, but the kindling for the region-wide political conflagration to come had accumulated over decades.
.. I have always believed that the Trump presidency would end badly because I believe character is destiny. There is no reasonable or morally sound definition of good character that Donald Trump can meet. That’s why we learned nothing new about Donald Trump this week. He can’t change. Some good, decent, and smart people couldn’t or wouldn’t see this. But every day, more people see this.
Julius Krein, the founder of the pro-Trump egghead journal American Affairs, reached his tipping point this week:
Critics of the pro-Trump blog and then the nonprofit journal that I founded accused us of attempting to “understand Trump better than he understands himself.” I hoped that was the case. I saw the decline in this country — its weak economy and frayed social fabric — and I thought Mr. Trump’s willingness to move past partisan stalemates could begin a process of renewal. It is now clear that my optimism was unfounded. I can’t stand by this disgraceful administration any longer, and I would urge anyone who once supported him as I did to stop defending the 45th president.
.. Some of the smartest people I know voted for him, for defensible reasons. Krein and his fellow Trumpist intellectuals weren’t dumb, they were just wrong. And while I think the conservative movement would probably be in better shape if Hillary Clinton had won last November, I don’t think it’s nearly so obvious that America would be.
.. Is there a means by which the White House could entice all of the CEOs quitting these stupid councils and commissions to come back?
.. You might call it “Manichean Hegelianism.” In this binary formulation, the world is divided between the forces of Light and Darkness, Good and Evil — and evil cannot fight evil and good cannot fight good.
.. Let’s stipulate that Adolf Hitler was the most evil person ever. On the scale of evil, he scores 100 percent. Fine. What score should we ascribe to Stalin or Mao? Let’s say they score 90 percent.
Who gives a rat’s ass? Certainly not the millions they murdered. If you watched your wife get raped by prison guards in the Gulag and then die in the snow, how much solace would you take from the fact that Hitler was “worse” on some asinine abstract metric of evil? If you want to argue that no one was worse than Hitler, have at it. But if you’re going to then argue that because someone wasn’t as bad as Hitler — or because someone fought Hitler — that they are somehow absolved of their own evil deeds, then you’re a fool. To do so is to render complex moral and historical questions into a pass/fail system. Suddenly, “not as bad as Hitler” becomes a passing grade.
.. If you think racism is the most evil thing ever, you’re going to say the KKK is worse than antifa. That’s fine by me. But who cares? Is there a fainter praise imaginable than “He’s better than a Klansman?”
.. The simple truth is that history isn’t simple: The universe isn’t divided into the Forces of Goodness and the Forces of Evil. That divide runs through every human heart and, therefore, every human institution. Recognizing this fact is the first step toward humility and decency in politics and life. But we live in a tribal moment where people ascribe good and evil to vast swaths of humanity based upon the jerseys they wear. Sometimes, the jerseys do make the case. Wear a Klan hood or a swastika and I will judge the book by the cover. But just because you think you’re morally justified to punch a Nazi, don’t expect me to assume you’re one of the good guys.
What the Next Round of Alt-Right Rallies Will Reveal
White nationalists all generally agree white people should be in charge, but they have many different competing beliefs about why that is the case, and how white rule should be implemented. These differences are not trivial, and for decades they have prevented a broadly concerted campaign of action by white nationalists in America.
.. Prior to Fields’s attack, Charlottesville was on track to be a clear victory for the alt-right. While attendance of 500 people is a pittance compared to most mainstream political events, it represents a marked upswing from 2016. Simply turning out that many people in one place was an unqualified win.
The fact that few participants sought to conceal their identities was a bold statement about the mainstreaming of white nationalism, which did not go unnoticed during an ominous torch-wielding event the night before the formal rally. Even after the “Unite the Right” rally itself was shut down by authorities as an unlawful assembly in the face of escalating violence, the event was seen as a show of strength.
.. When “Unite the Right” organizer Jason Kessler attempted to hold a press conference on Sunday in Charlottesville, he was chased away by a crowd of people shouting “murderer” and “shame.”
.. The question now is how the alt-right will process the backlash, and an early indicator will be seen in Saturday’s marches and rallies.Terrorism is a double-edged sword. While it can help mobilize the most radical segments of an extremist movement, it simultaneously alienates the least radical, including people who are loosely supportive of an extremist movement, or tolerant or dismissive of its rhetorical excesses... it is unclear how those within the alt-right will process its meaning. In the first 24 hours, online adherents responded predictably, with a mix of
- denialism,
- whataboutism,
- victim-blaming,
- disavowals of Fields, and
- the advancement of conspiracy theories to explain the problem away.
.. If attendance is high and the participants include more of the same Klansmen, neo-Nazis, and other white supremacists in garish costumes and armed to the teeth, it would be hard to interpret that as anything less than extremely alarming.
.. An aggressive showing by antifa groups looking to meet violence with violence could lead to further escalation
.. Some portion of the alt-right is more enamored of Trumpism than of white nationalism.
.. The only certainty is that the week ahead is bound to be interesting and consequential. By the time we reach the other side, Americans will likely have a much clearer picture of the shape and direction of white-nationalist extremism in America.