Fluent Essays

How should we understand the Trump Administration? The readings this week reflect different aspects of his administration and also connect back to different views on the presidency that we have been exploring. Feel free to be speculative in your analysis, since our understanding is still evolving (partly as we see what happens with Biden now in the White House). And while many of us have strong feelings about Trump, the aim here is to try to make sense of what has happened rather than simply expressing those feelings. Clearly these pieces raise critiques of Trump, but hopefully from different analytical angles that shed light on how to understand his presidency, whatever we think of any particular critique.   4. Looking at the reading on Bidens executive actions right after he took office, what does this reveal about presidential power? How does it contribute to our understanding of the Trump presidency? 5. How should we understand Bidens progress in promoting infrastructure legislation compared to Trumps lack of success on this? (Not that Bidens success is yet guaranteed, but the process so far is illuminating and raises interesting comparisons with Trump.) Factbox: With strokes of pen, Biden overturns Trump policies and fights COVID-19 By Reuters Staff (January 29, 2021) 8 MIN READ NEW YORK (Reuters) - In his first days in office, U.S. President Joe Biden issued a wave of executive orders and proclamations aimed at dismantling some of former President Donald Trump’s agenda and bolstering the nation’s COVID-19 response. FILE PHOTO: U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris watches as President Joe Biden signs executive orders on his racial equity agenda at the White House in Washington, U.S., January 26, 2021. REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque/File Photo Biden also ordered the establishment a variety of environmental protections and changes to immigration policy. Here is a list of the moves. TRUMP RULES All new and pending rules passed in the last days of Trump’s tenure will be reviewed by department and agency heads. CLIMATE CHANGE Reverses Trump’s decision to withdraw from the Paris agreement, an international pact aimed at curbing emissions that cause global warming. CLIMATE CHANGE DOMESTIC POLICIES Directs agencies to purchase American-made, zero-emission vehicles in an effort to create union jobs, suspends new oil and natural gas leases on public lands and conserves at least 30 percent of federal lands and waters by 2030. TRAVEL BAN Reverse Trump policy that barred entry to the U.S. for refugees and residents from seven predominantly Muslim countries and orders plans within 45 days for resuming visa processing. MASK WEARING Mandated mask-wearing and social distancing on all federal properties. GOVERNMENT-WIDE COVID-19 RESPONSE Creates a position of COVID-19 response coordinator, who will advise the president and oversee the distribution of vaccines, tests and other supplies. IMMIGRATION ENFORCEMENT Reverses a Trump policy that cracked down on communities shielding undocumented immigrants from deportation. RACIAL EQUITY Direct all federal agencies to conduct equity assessments and reallocate resources to advance equity for all, including people of color and others who have been historically undeserved and marginalized. UNDOCUMENTED IMMIGRANTS Overturned Trump’s attempt to exclude undocumented immigrants during the 2020 census. KEYSTONE Revoke the permit for the Keystone XL pipeline, a 1,200-mile pipeline system projected to carry crude oil from Canada to the United States. DISCRIMINATION OVER GENDER, SEXUAL ORIENTATION Extends federal non-discrimination protections to members of the LGBTQ community, building off the landmark Supreme Court decision in Bostock v. Clayton County, Georgia. ETHICS PLEDGE Requires all government appointees to sign an ethics pledge prohibiting the acceptance of gifts from registered lobbyists and lobbying for at least two years after exiting the government. BORDER WALL Halts the construction and funding of the wall at U.S. southern border. STUDENT LOANS Extends the freeze on federal student loan payments. DACA Reaffirms an Obama-era program known as DACA that Trump had sought to dismantle that shielded undocumented immigrants who arrived in the United States as children from deportation. TRANSGENDER MILITARY BAN Repeals the ban on transgender people serving openly in the military. ‘BUY AMERICAN’ Directs agencies to strengthen requirements about purchasing products and services from U.S. workers and businesses and to “close loopholes that allow companies to offshore production and jobs while still qualifying for domestic preferences.” REGULATIONS Scrapped a batch of Trump-era executive actions that restricted how federal agencies make regulatory changes, including one measure requiring agencies to discard two regulations for every one proposed. REGULATORY REVIEW Directs the head of the Office of Budget and Management to oversee an effort to “modernize and improve” the regulatory review process. COVID TRAVEL RESTRICTIONS Reinstates travel restrictions affecting non-U.S. citizens traveling from Brazil and much of Europe, which Trump had scrapped days before his term ended. COVID TRAVEL SAFETY Mandates mask-wearing on all forms of public transportation, including in airports, airplanes and buses. COVID TREATMENTS Directs the secretary of health to support research on COVID-19 treatments and increase support for critical care and long-term care facilities like nursing homes. COVID DATA Directs all department and agency heads to facilitate the gathering, sharing and publication of COVID data. NATIONAL GUARD COVID RESPONSE Directs the secretaries of defense and homeland security to support governors’ deployment of the National Guard in efforts to prevent the spread of the COVID-19 and provides federal funding. DEFENSE PRODUCTION ACT Invokes the Defense Production Act to ramp up supplies for the pandemic response and requested the heads of various departments to assess the nationwide availability of personal protective equipment. HEALTH EQUITY TASK FORCE Creates the COVID-19 Health Equity Task Force, which will provide recommendations on the allocation of resources and funding in light of “disparities in COVID-19 outcomes by race, ethnicity and other factors. SCHOOL REOPENINGS Directs the Department of Education to develop guidance for elementary and secondary schools in deciding when and how to reopen. PANDEMIC WORKPLACE SAFETY Directs the Department of Labor to revise and issue new guidance for employers to promote the health and safety of their workers, such as mask-wearing in the workplace. COVID TESTING BOARD Creates a pandemic testing board that will coordinate national efforts to promote COVID diagnostic, screening and surveillance testing. FOOD ASSISTANCE Extends the 15\% increase in Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits and allow states to increase SNAP emergency allotments. VETERANS WITH DEBT Asks the Department of Veterans Affairs to consider freeze on federal debt and overpayment collection from about 2 million veterans. COVID WORK SAFETY Requests the Department of Labor to consider clarifying its rules to establish that workers have a federally guaranteed right to refuse employment that will jeopardize their health and that workers who do so will still qualify for unemployment insurance. “BENEFIT DELIVERY TEAMS” Establishes “a network of benefit delivery teams,” which will coordinate with state and federal agencies to facilitate the distribution of federal aid amid the pandemic. DELIVERY OF STIMULUS PAYMENTS Directs the Treasury Department to consider taking a series of actions to expand and improve delivery of direct stimulus payments, including the creation of online tools for recipients to claim their checks. COVID ECONOMIC RELIEF Directs all government departments and agencies to identify actions they can take within existing authorities to address the current economic crisis resulting from the pandemic. FEDERAL WORKS, CONTRACTORS Reverses Trump-era regulations that rolled back protections for federal employees, including a rule that made it easier to hire and fire civil servants in policy-making positions. LIBERIAN DEPORTATIONS Blocks the deportation of Liberian refugees living in the United States, reinstating the deferment of their enforced departure granted by the presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama. TRUMP HOUSING POLICIES Directs the Department of Housing and Urban Development to examine the effects of the previous administration’s regulatory actions. PRIVATE PRISONS Directs the attorney general not to renew Department of Justice contracts with private prisons. TRIBAL SOVEREIGNTY Emphasizing the administration’s commitment to respecting the sovereignty of American Indian and Alaska Native tribes. ANTI-ASIAN DISCRIMINATION Urges the Department of Health and Human Services to consider issuing guidance on cultural competency and sensitivity toward Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders as part of the nation’s COVID response SCIENTIFIC INTEGRITY Directs the director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy to review agency policies on scientific integrity. PRESIDENTIAL COUNCIL ON SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY The president will solicit input from a council of advisors on science and technology, which will advise Biden on scientific and technical information. MEDICAID, AFFORDABLE CARE ACT Directs agencies to re-examine policies that could have undermined protections for people with pre-existing conditions, complicated the process of enrolling in Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act and reduced coverage and affordability of the programs. REPRODUCTIVE HEALTH CARE Revokes the “Mexico City policy,” also known as the global gag rule, a Reagan-era policy renewed by Trump that blocks federal funding to foreign organizations that perform abortions or provide abortion counseling or referrals. Also rescinds Trump regulations under the Title X family planning program that pulled funding from hundreds of women’s health clinics across the country in 2019. Reporting By Jarrett Renshaw; Editing by Alistair Bell 71 DOI: 10.1111/psq.12702 © 2021 Center for the Study of the Presidency and Congress Presidential Studies Quarterly Vol. 51, No. 1, March 2021, 71–95 ARTICLE The Random Walk Presidency KENNETH R. MAYER Donald Trump’s erratic and unpredictable behavior as president was, metaphorically at least, a Random Walk. Combined with an inexperienced White House staff and a near total absence of any meaningful decision- making processes, the result was, routinely, unforced errors that both impeded the president’s ability to see his policy goals implemented effectively, led to poor congressional relations and, in several key cases, failures of leadership that played a role in his defeat in the 2020 election. The worst policy outcome was his catastrophic response to the COVID- 19 pandemic, which laid bare the pathologies of poor decision- making processes. As president, Trump’s record exposed institutional weaknesses that a more skilled populist or authoritarian successor may be able to exploit. Keywords: Donald Trump, Executive Office of the President, norms, presidency It is a cliché to note that Donald Trump’s presidency was unique: unprecedented in his disdain for the expectations of presidential behavior (Azari 2019), the many norms bro- ken (Siegel 2018), the refusal to recognize the authority of the other coequal branches of government (Crouch, Rozell, and Sollenberger 2017), his unconventional communica- tion style (Hart 2020), attacks on the press (Meeks 2020), obliteration of barriers between government functions and his personal and political interests (Bauer and Goldsmith 2020), and the number of misleading statements, lies, and outright whoppers he told throughout his tenure (Pfiffner 2020).1 My focus is on a more specific characteristic of his presidency: his erratic and unpre- dictable behavior, especially his inconsistent policy positions that often changed from one day to the next without any reason or explanation, and a lack of any meaningful process or coordination within the White House. The conventional wisdom about what presi- dents should do to succeed in office has become so conventional as to be obvious: establish priorities, create an effective White House staff structure, stay on message, cultivate 1. The Washington Post fact checker identified 22,510 “false or misleading” claims through September 3, 2020, an average of about 17 per day. https://www.washi ngton post.com/graph ics/polit ics/trump - claim s- datab ase/?utm_term=.27bab cd5e5 8c&itid=lk_inline_manual_2&itid=lk_inline_manual_2. Kenneth R. Mayer is professor of Political Science at the University of Wisconsin- Madison. He is the author of With the Stroke of a Pen: Executive Orders and Presidential Power and coauthor of Presidential Leadership: Politics and Policymaking. mailto: https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/politics/trump-claims-database/?utm_term=.27babcd5e58c&itid=lk_inline_manual_2&itid=lk_inline_manual_2 https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/politics/trump-claims-database/?utm_term=.27babcd5e58c&itid=lk_inline_manual_2&itid=lk_inline_manual_2 http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi=10.1111\%2Fpsq.12702&domain=pdf&date_stamp=2021-02-15 72 | MAYER credibility, and devote time to follow- through and implementation. Trump has adhered to none of them. Trump did show consistency in some policy realms, such as hostility to immigration2 and support for deregulation (Belton and Graham 2020; Brookings Institution 2020). But even here, poor staff work and a lack of coordination and process produced unforced errors that impeded his ability to institute his policy preferences. The expectations of presidential behavior, the conventional wisdom about how presidents should operate, and the presidential institution exist for a reason: adhering to those expectations and processes gives the president the best chance of succeeding in of- fice. Being “presidential” is no guarantee of success, of course, and some presidents inten- tionally redefined the meaning of that term. But Trump’s radical departure from what presidents have typically done undermined his ability to accomplish many of his policy goals, and his reliance on unilateral action produced an unusually high loss rate in federal courts and a record of few legislative accomplishments. He could not stay “on message” and continually diverted attention from the policy successes he achieved. He repeatedly made public statements or gave interviews that blindsided his staff, and pushed out 2. Trump issued 9 executive orders and 18 proclamations on immigration or border security: 13767, “Border Security and Immigration Enforcement Improvements,” 82 Federal Register 8793 (January 30, 2017); 13768, “Enhancing Public Safety in the Interior of the United States”; 82 Federal Register 1799 (January 30, 2017); 13769, “Protecting the Nation from Foreign Terrorist Entry Into the United States,” 82 Federal Register 8977 (February 1, 2017); 13780, “Protecting the Nation from Foreign Terrorist Entry Into the United States”; 82 Federal Register 13209 (March 9, 2017); 13815, “Resuming the United States Refugee Admissions Program with Enhanced Vetting Capabilities,” 82 Federal Register 5055 (October 27, 2017); 13867, “Issuance of Permits with Respect to Facilities and Land Transportation Crossings at the International Boundaries of the United States,” 84 Federal Register 15491 (April 15, 2019); 13882, “Blocking Property and Suspending Entry of Certain Persons Contributing to the Situation in Mali,” 84 Federal Register 37055; 13888, “Enhancing State and Local Involvement in Refugee Resettlement,” 84 Federal Register 52355 (October 1, 2019); 13894, “Blocking Property and Suspending Entry of Certain Persons Contributing to the Situation in Syria,” 84 Federal Register 55851 (October 17, 2019); Proclamation 9645, “Enhancing Vetting Capabilities and Processes for Detecting Attempted Entry into the United States by Terrorists or Other Public- Safety Threats,” 82 Federal Register 45161; 9822, “Addressing the Mass Migration through the Southern Border of the United States,” 83 Federal Register 57661 (October 15, 2018); 9842, “Addressing Mass Migration through the Southern Border of the United States,” 84 Federal Register 3655 (February 12, 2019); 9844, “Declaring a National Emergency Concerning the Southern Border of the United States,” 84 Federal Register 44 (February 20, 2019); 9880, “Addressing Mass Migration through the Southern Border of the United States,” 84 Federal Register 21229 (May 8, 2019); 9931, “Suspension of Entry as Immigrants and Nonimmigrants of Persons Responsible for Policies or Actions That Threaten Venezuela’s Democratic Institutions,” 84 Federal Register 51931 (September 30, 2019); 9932, “Suspension of Entry as Immigrants and Nonimmigrants of Senior Officials of the Government of Iran,” 84 Federal Register 51395 (September 30, 2019); 9945, “Suspension of Entry of Immigrants Who Will Financially Burden the United States Healthcare System, in Order to Protect the Availability of Healthcare Benefits for Americans,” 84 Federal Register 53991 (October 9, 2019); 9983, “Improving Enhanced Vetting Capabilities and Processes for Detecting Attempted Entry Into the United States by Terrorists or Other Public- Safety Threats,” 85 Federal Register 6699 (February 5, 2020); 9984, “Suspension of Entry as Immigrants and Nonimmigrants of Persons Who Pose a Risk of Transmitting 2019 Novel Coronavirus and Other Appropriate Measures to Address This Risk,” 85 Federal Register 6709 (February 5, 2020); 9992, 9993, 9996, and 10041, “Suspension of Entry as Immigrants and Nonimmigrants of Certain Additional Persons Who Pose a Risk of Transmitting 2019 Novel Coronavirus,” 85 Federal Register 12855 (March 4, 2020), 85 Federal Register 15045 (October 16, 2020), 85 Federal Register 15341 (March 18, 2020), and 85 Federal Register 32291 (May 25, 2020); 10014 and 10052, “Suspension of Entry of Immigrants Who Present a Risk to the United States Labor Market during the Recovery Following the 2019 Novel Coronavirus Outbreak,” 85 Federal Register 23441 (April 27, 2020) and 85 Federal Register 38263 (June 25, 2020); and 10043, “Suspension of Entry as Nonimmigrants of Certain Students and Researchers from the People’s Republic of China,” 85 Federal Register 34353 (June 4, 2020). RANDOM WALK PRESIDENCY | 73 anyone who attempted to impose structure or discipline within the White House.3 More importantly, this style led to multiple failures, culminating in what can only be described as a catastrophically inept response to the COVID- 19 pandemic, a failure that resulted in hundreds of thousands of deaths and the worst economic performance since the Great Depression. It almost certainly was a major factor in his loss to Joe Biden in the 2020 presidential election (Parker et al. 2020). Donald Trump presided over a random walk presidency. Formally, a random walk is a stochastic process consisting of a series of random moves across some defined space, where a “step” in that space between time t and time t + 1 is a function of some transition (often a random distribution with a specified mean and variance).4 More simply, a random walk describes a process where the state of nature at time t time does not tell you much about what is going to happen at time t  +  1. Metaphorically, it describes how Donald Trump has behaved as president and captures the unpredictability and inconsistency of his policies, White House organization, and bar- gaining style. An important mathematical and metaphorical property of random walks is that they can progress to a specific point or region in space, though nobody can be quite sure where that will be or how long it will take to get there. Here, I use it to capture both Trump’s unpredictability as president as well as the general chaos and disorganization of his approach to the office. Chaos as an Operating Principle During the 2016 primaries, former Florida Governor Jeb Bush said Trump was a “chaos candidate. And he’d be a chaos president” (Smith 2015). One analysis of his cam- paign rhetoric identified nearly 150 contradictory positions Trump had taken on dozens of high- profile issues, including 23 different positions on immigration enforcement, 15 differ- ent positions on banning Muslim entry into the United States, eight different positions on raising the minimum wage, eight different positions on the deficit and national debt, and so on (Timm 2016). Mixed in with these contradictory statements were claims of campaign officials who insisted, blithely and falsely, that Trump’s positions had never wavered (even as they offered different explanations about what those positions actually were). This behavior continued into the transition, when only days after the election he summarily tossed out months of work by Chris Christie and turned the transition over to son- in- law Jared Kushner and Vice President Mike Pence (Lewis, Bernhard, and You 3. A canonical example is the recorded interviews Trump did with Bob Woodward, which were re- leased in September 2020. Although the president had repeatedly declared that COVID- 19 was under con- trol, was not dangerous, and would soon go away “like a miracle” (Paz 2020), he told Woodward in April that he knew it was far deadlier than the flu and spread through the air and that he was deliberately “playing it down” (Woodward 2020, 285– 86). White House staff had discouraged the president from agreeing to inter- views with Woodward, and the book’s publication (along with recordings of the president’s interviews) “sent the White House scrambling, with aides blaming each other for the predictable fallout” (Cook and Thompson 2020). 4. A famous example is Malkel (2012, 142– 43), who generated fictitious graphs of stock prices by increasing or decreasing a hypothetical stock’s value by a set amount up or down, depending on a series of coin flips. 74 | MAYER 2018, 485). The transition team did not engage with the outgoing administration, often not even sending anyone to meet with agency personnel who had prepared extensive briefing material (Lewis 2018). Trump’s original West Wing arrangements— rival power centers, no clear organiza- tional structures or lines of authority, reliance on family as advisors, demanding absolute loyalty over even minimal competence, inexperienced high- level staff— proved ineffec- tive, an entirely predictable result (Warshaw 2017). Many of Trump’s most influential aides quite clearly had no idea what they were doing, and the new staff was immediately overwhelmed and “served the president poorly … illustrated by the president’s bizarre speeches to the Central Intelligence Agency and the Boy Scouts, rollout of the travel ban, and the unparalleled leaks and infighting” (Lewis, Bernhard, and You 2018, 486). In failing to create “an internal structural capacity inside the White House to eval- uate and craft coherent policy,” which is “what all modern presidents have done (Howell and Moe 2020, 86), Trump ensured that his presidency would not be governed by any process. “The result,” they continue, is an organizational disaster. The Trump White House lacks the capacity for marshalling information, resources, and expertise to promote the president’s policy objectives in an ef- fective way. Worse, it is filled with people who cannot keep their jobs unless they act as sycophants, put a positive spin on Trump’s every failure, tell him how wonderful he is, and affirm and justify his blatant lying on important issues as they go about their work. (2020, 88) A few years into his administration, Noonan (2018) observed, “[he] loves chaos— he brags about this— but it isn’t strategic chaos in pursuit of ends, it’s purposeless disorder for the fun of it. We are not talking about being colorfully, craftily unpredictable, as political masters like FDR and Ronald Reagan sometimes were, but something more unfortunate, an unhinged or not- fully hinged quality that feels like screwball tragedy.” Both a cause and consequence of Trump’s chaotic management style was record White House staff turnover, with 91\% of his “A- Team” (defined as the most influential positions within the Executive Office of the President) turning over at least once, and nearly 40\% of key positions cycling through multiple replacements: Trump had four chiefs of staff, five deputy chiefs of staff, four press secretaries; six communications direc- tors, four national security advisors, six deputy national security advisors, five national security senior directors for Europe and Russia, and five directors of national intelligence (Tenpas 2020). Dickenson and Tenpas noted that “[r]apid staff turnover leads to a loss of institutional memory within the presidential branch, and makes it more difficult for presidential aides to communicate with their senior counterparts in federal departments and agencies” (2002, 445). I take as a given that, other things being equal, policy consistency is an import- ant component of competent and effective government. In the ideal, consistency and predictability enhance the credibility of government action and commitments, provide the public with vital information about government performance, and make it possible to understand what the government is actually trying to do. Presidents have long made efforts to be consistent in their positions and statements. The reason is obvious enough: RANDOM WALK PRESIDENCY | 75 consistency leads to credibility, confidence among those bargaining with the president that commitments will be honored, and better opportunities to craft public narratives in support of the president’s positions. Abrupt reversals, or failure to follow through on expressed commitments, often lead to bad outcomes, particularly internationally, as for- eign adversaries may seek leverage or exploit opportunities resulting from uncertainty. The costs of the president’s inconsistent statements on foreign policy are apparent: “Even if American foreign policy during the Trump administration remains consistent and co- herent in action, if not in rhetoric, the United States has already paid a significant price for Trump’s behavior: the president is no longer considered the ultimate voice on foreign policy. Foreign leaders are turning elsewhere to gauge American intentions” (Yahri- Milo 2018, 77). Staying “on message” explicitly denotes a continuity of communications revolving around a focused narrative. A president will not always act in a completely consistent way or have fixed policy preferences that never change. But there is an underlying assumption that changes, when they occur, will result from an intentional act based on new informa- tion, a strategic decision based on what is feasible, anticipated reactions among other key actors, an attempt to reach a compromise, or an attempt to reconcile contradictory goals (see Neustadt 1990; Peterson 1990). Neustadt devotes much of his analysis of presidential reputation to a months long sequence of Eisenhower administration inconsistencies over the course of developing the 1958 budget— lurching from one emphasis to another, changing positions on key issues, conflicting public statements, uncoordinated explanations from different cabinet offi- cials— to the point that when a budget official testifying before Congress referred to “the program of the President,” everyone in the room laughed (Neustadt 1990, 68). Lewis describes the effect of reversals and inconsistencies: “When the national gov- ernment reverses course, particularly when it does so in a punitive way (i.e., targeting specific partners using administrative power) as it has done with sanctuary cities and di- saster relief, it demonstrates a harmful inconstancy that makes essential stakeholders re- luctant to follow a national lead or cooperate on important shared goals” (2019, 783). Similarly, when official pronouncements and presidential statements are untethered to any ground truth, the only real possibilities are either (a) the public quickly learns that such statements are not to be trusted, leaving a leadership vacuum in which other officials must compete for credibility, or (b) the public accepts the lies as true, setting up a poten- tially dangerous situation when the lies collide with reality (if they actually do).5 For Trump, careening wildly has been the order of the day. One need not look far for examples. He publicly criticized intelligence legislation that his congressional liaison office was trying to push through Congress (only to walk back his criticism a few hours later), and expressed support for immigration legislation in meetings with congressional leaders, only to have House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R- CA) gently remind the president that what he just said contradicted his public position (Graham 2018). He expressed support for strong gun control regulations, only to reverse himself days later 5. It is not accidental that trust in government institutions began its slow but steady decline after Watergate and the realities of the Vietnam War. See Arendt (1971) and Lipset and Schneider (1983). 76 | MAYER (Dawsey 2019). He vacillated from threatening Kim Jong Un with “fire and fury and frankly power, the likes of which this world has never seen before” (Wagner and Johnson 2017) to declaring that the two of them “fell in love” (Rucker and Dawsey 2019). The president’s priorities often depended more on what he saw any given morning on Fox and Friends than on long- term goals (Gertz 2018), to the point that staff and even Cabinet officials arranged appearances on the network to try to influence the president’s thinking (Gearan and Ellison 2018). Consider the following instances, which I present as illustrative of an overall pattern of unpredictability and incoherence. First, in October 2020, at a crucial time in his reelection campaign, the president was trying to push a second economic stimulus package through Congress. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D- CA) and Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin, the latter acting as the president’s agent, were negotiating the terms of legislation. They faced the compli- cated task of threading a needle between Democrats, who wanted a large bill, conserva- tive House Republicans, who wanted a small package, and Senate Republicans, many of whom were open to something close to what the Democrats had passed in the House, but differed on key components, such as how much financial assistance the federal govern- ment would offer to state and local governments. The Pelosi– Mnuchin talks began after House and Senate negotiators could not reach agreement over the summer. The two sides were about $600 billion apart, after House Democrats passed a $2.2 trillion bill (scaled back from a $3.4 trillion bill passed in the House in May), and the White House had proposed $1.6 trillion (Werner and Stein 2020a). This was a strategic situation that would have typically called for aggressive presi- dential legislative engagement. Instead, what happened was the following: 1. On October 3, the president tweeted, “OUR GREAT USA WANTS & NEEDS STIMULUS, WORK TOGETHER AND GET IT DONE. Thank You.”6 Pelosi expressed confidence that a deal was near, in part because administration officials were supportive (Werner and Stein 2020b). 2. Three days later (October 6), the president broke off the talks, tweeting that he had “instructed my representatives to stop negotiating until after the election” (Werner and Stein 2020c). Within minutes, the S&P 500 index dropped by 2\%. The decision, baf- fling as it was, seemed to make his goal even less likely by preventing even a short- term economic boost. 3. A few hours later, the president reversed course again, tweeting that he supported a relief bill with $1,200 stimulus checks, airline relief aid, and additional funding for the Paycheck Protection Program. “I am ready to sign right now. Are you listening Nancy?”7 4. Two days later (October 9), the president’s position changed again. In the morning, he tweeted, “Covid Relief Negotiations are moving along. Go Big!”8 A few hours later, he told Rush Limbaugh on- air that “I would like to see a bigger stimulus package, frankly, than either the Democrats or the Republicans are offering” (Stein, Werner, and Dawsey 6. https://twitt er.com/realD onald Trump/ statu s/13124 49034 15450 4192. 7. https://twitt er.com/realD onald Trump/ statu s/13135 51794 62312 7552; https://twitt er.com/realD onald Trump/ statu s/13136 58825 04037 1712; https://twitt er.com/realD onald Trump/ statu s/13136 64886 64858 2144. 8. https://twitt er.com/realD onald Trump/ statu s/13145 93632 73384 7552. https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1312449034154504192 https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1313551794623127552 https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1313658825040371712 https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1313658825040371712 https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1313664886648582144 https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1313664886648582144 https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1314593632733847552 RANDOM WALK PRESIDENCY | 77 2020). The White House communications director immediately contradicted the presi- dent’s statement to Limbaugh, telling reporters than any deal had to be below $2 trillion (Wasson and Jacobs 2020). 5. Later in the day on October 9, Mnuchin proposed a $1.8 trillion package, in between the initial $1.6 trillion Republican proposal and the $2.2 trillion plan the Democratic House had passed. Democrats panned the White House offer as too small, while many Senate Republicans opposed it as extravagant (Cochrane 2020). 6. A day later, the White House changed positions again, suggesting legislation allowing the president to use $130 billion in leftover Paycheck Protection Program money “while negotiations continue on a broader relief effort” (Stein and Werner 2020). Within a week, the president’s public position on stimulus negotiations went from insist- ing on a bill, ending negotiations, support for a narrow bill, support for something bigger than either Democrats or Republicans had proposed, support for something in between what Democrats and Republicans had proposed, and then a narrow stand- alone bill with continued negotiations. The inconsistencies continued throughout October. Even though the House ad- journed on October 2 until after the election, Mnuchin and Pelosi continued to negotiate in the face of Republican objections that the treasury secretary was caving to Democratic demands (Werner and Stein 2020d). On October 21, a Pelosi spokesperson said the two were “close to putting ‘pen to paper’ on legislation” (Werner and Kim 2020). Less than 90  minutes later, the president tweeted that Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer were focused on “BAILING OUT poorly run (and high crime) Democrat cities and states” rather than “doing what is right for our great American workers, or our won- derful USA itself, on Stimulus.”9 In late October the president pivoted again, promising “the best stimulus pack- age you’ve ever seen” after the election (Werner 2020). Two days after that, the Pelosi– Mnuchin talks ended altogether, but Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell had already warned against reaching any agreement with House Democrats, as consider- ation of stimulus legislation would interfere with confirmation hearings for Amy Coney Barrett, Trump’s nomination for the Supreme Court seat left when Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died (Stein and Werner 2020). While the sequence could easily be chalked up to the president’s well- known pen- chant for inchoate operating strategies (if it could even be called that), the result was a substantive failure of presidential leadership. The rapidly changing and contradictory positions, and what appeared to be a complete lack of coordination with either Senate Republicans or the person negotiating on the president’s behalf, were not based on any strategy, and the result was simultaneously no deal, economic uncertainty, and open Republican exasperation with the president at a critical time in his campaign. Turning down the opportunity to enact a new stimulus package “may go down as the single great- est political blunder in the history of presidential elections” (Chait 2020). Second, the ill- fated government shutdown from December 22, 2018, to January 25, 2019, played out in a similar fashion. The president was adamant that the fiscal year 9. https://twitt er.com/realD onald Trump/ statu s/13190 28569 15094 3232. https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1319028569150943232 78 | MAYER 2019 budget include funding for wall construction on the U.S.– Mexican border (Cochrane and Davis 2018). It was a tenuous situation, as Congress had already relied on two con- tinuing resolutions (CRs) to fund most federal government activities, first through December 7, 2018,10 and again through December 21, 2018.11 None of the enacted ap- propriations acts or CRs funded the border wall, and because Democratic senators could filibuster continuing resolutions, Republicans could not enact one over unanimous Democratic opposition. A series of meetings between the president and legislators failed to produce a deal, with conservative House Republicans pressing Trump to not give in on his demand for at least $5 billion in border wall funding even as Senate Republicans were pressing for a compromise (Everett and Breshanan 2018). Negotiations were more difficult because the president would not specify what he would accept, despite the pleas of Republican senators for clarity. In meetings, the president was more interested in eliminating the filibuster than in finding a workable position (Davis and Cochrane 2018). Once the shut- down began on December 22, the president focused on placing blame on congressional Democrats. On January 4, 2019, Trump told congressional Democrats that he would keep the government closed “for a very long period of time— months or even years,” though his support in Congress was weakening and more Republican legislators were looking for a way out (Stolberg and Tackett 2019). Polls showed that the public placed more blame on Republicans than on Democrats.12 A poorly received Oval Office address on January 8 did nothing to improve his public standing, and his approval ratings dropped to a net −16 points.13 Trump eventually agreed to sign spending bills with the … NEWS ANALYSIS How Biden Got the Infrastructure Deal Trump Couldn’t The early success of the deal vindicated the president’s faith in bipartisanship. If he can keep it on track, it will help affirm the rationale for his presidency. President Biden had to manage competing interests to reach a deal on the infrastructure bill.Credit...Sarahbeth Maney/The New York Times By  Jim Tankersley (New York Times) July 29, 2021 WASHINGTON — President Biden’s success at propelling an infrastructure deal past its first major hurdle this week was a vindication of his faith in bipartisanship and a repudiation of the slash-and-burn politics of his immediate predecessor, President Donald J. Trump, who tried and failed to block it. Having campaigned as the anti-Trump — an insider who regarded compromise as a virtue, rather than a missed opportunity to crush a rival — Mr. Biden has held up the promise of a broad infrastructure accord not just as a policy priority but as a test of the fundamental rationale for his presidency. His success or failure at keeping the bill on track will go a long way to determining his legacy, and it could be the president’s best chance to deliver on his bet that he can unite lawmakers across the political aisle to solve big problems, even at a time of intense polarization. “President Biden ran on the message that we need to bring people together to meet the challenges facing our country and deliver results for working families,” Mike Donilon, a senior adviser to the president, wrote in a memo the White House released on Thursday, as senior officials crowed about the significance of the accord. “And the American people embraced that message. While a lot of pundits have doubted bipartisanship was even possible, the American people have been very clear it is what they want.” That may be the case, but the vote on Wednesday that  paved the way for the Senate to consider the bipartisan infrastructure plan  was no guarantee that the effort would succeed. The measure still has several hurdles to clear, including anger from progressives in the House who are upset at the concessions Mr. Biden made to court Republicans, and skepticism from G.O.P. lawmakers who could still balk at a bill Mr. Trump has repeatedly panned. For now, though, Mr. Biden has managed to do what Mr. Trump repeatedly promised but never could pull off: move forward on a  big-spending, bipartisan deal  to rebuild American roads, bridges, water pipes and more. He did so with the support of 17 Republicans during a week marked by bitter partisan disputes in Congress over mask-wearing and the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. Mr. Biden had pursued centrist Republicans and Democrats for months in hopes of forging an agreement to lift federal spending on roads, bridges, water pipes, broadband internet and other physical infrastructure. In recent weeks, aides said, he requested multiple daily briefings on negotiations, personally directed administration strategy on policy trade-offs and frequently phoned moderates from both parties to keep the pressure on for a final deal. The resulting agreement, which would pour $550 billion in new funding into physical infrastructure projects, is another step toward securing the next plank of Mr. Biden’s $4 trillion economic agenda. The White House has called it the largest infrastructure investment since the creation of the interstate highway system in the 1950s, and Democrats hope it comes with a much larger bill to invest in child care, affordable housing, higher education, programs to tackle climate change and more. Comparing the infrastructure plan President Biden proposed in March with the one the Senate may take up soon. Three major areas of President Biden’s original proposal were not included in the bipartisan deal: buildings, in-home care and innovation. The bipartisan plan also left out $363 billion in clean energy tax credits. Some of what the bipartisan plan leaves out: In-home care: This focused on raising wages for workers who provide health care for older adults and people with disabilities. They are predominantly women of color and are among the lowest-paid workers, the White House said. Buildings: This included funding public housing — an area that would “disproportionately benefit women, people of color and people with disabilities,” according to the White House. It also included investing in child care centers and community colleges; modernizing public schools; and upgrading federal hospitals and buildings. Innovation: This included investing in U.S.-based manufacturing; funding research on climate change and energy; and providing research grants to historically Black colleges and universities. Some of what shrank: Transportation funding fell by $263 billion compared with the original proposal. The largest change was in the area of electric vehicle adoption, which shrank by $142 billion, or 90 percent. Utilities funding fell by $463 billion, including a $363 billion cut in clean energy tax credits. The budget for water infrastructure (which includes the president’s plan to replace all of the nation’s lead pipes) was cut in half, to $55 billion from $111 billion. Whether the president can see the deal all the way through could determine how much of his agenda to  overhaul American capitalism  and rebuild the middle class actually becomes law. Some moderate Democrats in the Senate have conditioned their support for any larger, partisan legislation on first completing a bipartisan infrastructure bill. The bipartisan agreement is loaded with the first tranche of Mr. Biden’s policy priorities. Administration officials say the deal, if signed into law, would replace every lead drinking water pipe in the country, repair potholed roads and crumbling bridges, further build out a national network of charging stations for electric vehicles and give every American access to high-speed internet. Mr. Biden would have liked to go much further in all those areas. But he trimmed his ambitions to win Republican support, keep centrist Democrats happy and practice the sort of compromise he has long preached on the campaign trail. Mr. Biden was motivated to run for president, in part, by a belief that Washington had lost its ability to find common ground and faith that it was possible to revive the spirit of bipartisanship that he cherished in his 36-year Senate career. That belief was tested in recent weeks, after Mr. Biden announced the framework of an agreement on infrastructure with a bipartisan group of senators at the White House in June. Lawmakers struggled to fill in the policy details. Interest groups pressured Democrats to spend more and Republicans to drop a large revenue source for the original deal, a plan to step up I.R.S. enforcement to catch tax cheats. An early test vote on the measure failed in the Senate. In the waning moments, another source of pressure emerged: Mr. Trump, who continues to push the lie that the election was stolen from him, and to influence many Republican members of Congress. As a candidate in 2016, Mr. Trump had promised to push a large infrastructure bill —  larger, he claimed , than his Democratic rival Hillary Clinton. He doubled down on that promise as president-elect and talked it up often as president. But he never came close to delivering on it, and  “Infrastructure Week” became a running joke in Washington , encapsulating the Trump administration’s penchant for veering off message and how a goal both parties ostensibly agreed upon could never seem to be reached. As Mr. Biden pushed toward a deal in recent weeks with a group of Republican and Democratic negotiators in the Senate — including Senator Mitt Romney, Republican of Utah, a longtime foil of Mr. Trump’s — the former president blasted out news releases, urging his party to walk away. “Hard to believe our Senate Republicans are dealing with the radical left Democrats in making a so-called bipartisan bill on ‘infrastructure,’ with our negotiators headed up by super RINO Mitt Romney,” Mr. Trump wrote in a Wednesday statement, referring to the Utah senator with the acronym for Republican in name only. “This will be a victory for the Biden administration and Democrats, and will be heavily used in the 2022 election. It is a loser for the U.S.A., a terrible deal, and makes the Republicans look weak, foolish and dumb.” Soon after, the agreement moved forward in the Senate. Seventeen Republicans voted to take it up, including the Republican leader, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, who has taken pains to distance himself from Mr. Trump in recent months. It was not clear whether the minority leader, who has previously said he was “100 percent focused” on stopping Mr. Biden’s agenda, would ultimately support the bill. Still, Mr. Biden —  who once brokered deals with Mr. McConnell  — was personally invested in pursuing a compromise, administration officials said, calling upon his experience as a deal-maker in the Senate. “Biden and his team was willing to patiently work together with Republicans, and Trump and his team were not willing to do that with Democrats,” said Senator Tim Kaine, Democrat of Virginia. He added, “I give tremendous credit to the senators who’ve done this, but I will have to say, an ingredient that is necessary is a White House that really wants to do it, that will reach out across the aisle and will stay at the table.” Mr. Biden also dispatched top legislative aides and members of his Cabinet to reach out to lawmakers in both parties. Senator Kevin Cramer, Republican of North Dakota, said he received repeated calls from Jennifer Granholm, the secretary of energy, and legislative staff members — “always very gently and respectfully” — to discuss the emerging deal and “take my temperature” before he voted to advance the measure. Multiple senators said the president and his team spent hours with them in person on Capitol Hill and on the phone hashing out the details of the legislation, including thorny disagreements over how to finance billions of dollars in new spending. “Joe’s experience in the Senate paid dividends in the presidency,” said Senator Jon Tester, Democrat of Montana, one of the 10 Senate negotiators. “Joe’s willingness to compromise made a huge difference.” Mr. Trump and his team never put in a similar effort. They waited a year into his presidency to  release an infrastructure plan,  which many lawmakers quickly dismissed as unserious. As talks were about to get underway,  he blew them up in a blast of anger at Democrats . His legislative team never put real muscle into finding a deal on the issue, or even into trying to ram through a partisan plan, as it did with his signature tax cuts in 2017. The former president was similarly disengaged in his effort to stop Mr. Biden’s bipartisan agreement. While Mr. Trump fired off news releases grousing about the talks, Mr. Biden hosted members of Congress in the Oval Office more than a dozen times in recent weeks. Home in Delaware last weekend, he repeatedly dialed up negotiators to talk on the phone. Even in a gridlocked Washington, that sort of effort can still be the art of the deal. 2 The Politics Trump Makes Is Trump, like Carter, a disjunctive President? By Corey Robin January 11, 2017 (Taken from N+1, see nplusonemag.com) Tags d Bottom of Form THE INTERREGNUM BETWEEN Trump’s election and his inauguration has occasioned a fever dream of authoritarianism—a procession of nightmares from faraway lands and distant times, from Hitler and Mussolini to Putin and Erdogan. But what if Trump’s antecedents are more prosaic, the historical analogies nearer to hand? What if the best clues to the Trump presidency are to be found in that most un-Trump-like of figures: Jimmy Carter? Journalists and pundits often fixate on a President’s personality and psychology, as if the office were born anew with each election. They ignore the structural factors that shape the Presidency. Yet every President is elected to represent a combination of ideologies, policies, and coalitions. That is the President’s political identity: Lincoln brought to power a Republican Party committed to free labor ideals and the overthrow of the slavocracy; Reagan, a Republican Party committed to aggressive free-market capitalism and the overthrow of the New Deal. Every President also inherits a political situation in which certain ideologies and interests dominate. That situation, or regime, shapes a President’s exercise of power, forcing some to do less, empowering others to do more. Richard Nixon was not a New Deal Democrat, but he was constrained by the political common sense of his time to govern like one, just as Bill Clinton had to bow to the hegemony of Reaganism. Regimes are deep and intractable structures of interest and belief, setting out the boundaries of action, shaping our sense of the possible, over a period of decades. Every President is aligned with or opposed to the regime. Every regime is weak or strong. These two vectors—the political affiliation of the President, the vitality of the regime—shape “the politics Presidents make.” That phrase is the title of Yale political scientist Stephen Skowronek’s classic study of the presidency, which, when it appeared in 1993, completely altered how political scientists understand the institution and its possibilities. In Skowronek’s account, FDR ran against the Republicans’ sclerotic Gilded Age regime. The combination of the President’s opposition and the regime’s weakness enabled FDR to launch a radical transformation of American politics. Presidents like FDR—Jefferson, Jackson, Lincoln, and Reagan—are “reconstructive” leaders. They are revolutionaries and founders, creating the terms and conditions of politics for decades to come. Lyndon Johnson was elected to deepen and extend a still vital New Deal regime, making his role one of “articulation,” which is also a potent position. (George W. Bush was another articulation President.) Nixon, by contrast, was elected to oppose the New Deal regime, but the regime was not ready for overthrow. This put him in a position of weakness: unable to overthrow the regime, he pushed and prodded where he could (shoring up opposition to desegregation via the Southern Strategy) and placated and pandered when he had to (instituting wage and price controls, creating the EPA). Presidents like Nixon engage in a politics of “preemption.” Andrew Johnson was a preemptive President, as were Clinton and Obama. Preemptive Presidents tend to get impeached. At the end of each regime—after it has completed its three-quarter orbit of reconstruction, articulation, and preemption—comes the politics of “disjunction.” Jimmy Carter is the most recent case; before him, there was Herbert Hoover and Franklin Pierce. Disjunctive Presidents are affiliated with a tottering regime. They sense its weaknesses, and in a desperate bid to save the regime try to transform its basic premises and commitments. Unlike reconstructive Presidents, these figures are too indebted to the regime to break with it. But the regime is too dissonant and fragmented to offer the resources these Presidents need to transform it. They find themselves in the most perilous position of all—hated by all, loved by none—and their administrations often occasion a new round of reconstruction. John Adams gives way to Thomas Jefferson, John Quincy Adams to Andrew Jackson, Carter to Reagan. Many fear that Trump will follow the path of FDR and Reagan, combining Republican majorities in the House and Senate with his proven skill at demagoguery to launch a reconstructive presidency. Such a move would shift American politics even further to the right. It’s possible. And worrisome. Yet when Carter won the presidency in 1976 in the aftermath of Watergate, with congressional majorities far greater than Trump’s, many also believed that he might save his party by renovating it from within. Carter expertly set the scene during the campaign, repeatedly declaring himself an “outsider” who would take on the established interests of not only the GOP but his own party as well. “They want to preserve the status quo,” he said of Democratic leaders. They want “to preserve politics as usual, to maintain at all costs their own entrenched, unresponsive, bankrupt, irresponsible political power.” This wasn’t just posture; it was also policy. Carter railed against the “horrible, bloated, confused . . . bureaucratic mess” that was the New Deal state, “the layers of administration, the plethora of agencies, the proliferation of paperwork.” With almost Trumpian crudity, he decried the liberal tax system as “a disgrace to the human race” and wrote off Congress as “disgusting.” In a frontal assault on the legacy of FDR and LBJ, he declared welfare a “failure” in “urgent need of a complete overhaul.” We remember Carter as an extraordinarily hapless President, but for a time he was remarkably effective at scrambling the political map. (Both Tip O’Neill and Robert Byrd marveled at his success.) Delivering on his promise to abandon old ways of doing things, Carter deregulated the banking and transportation industries. He distanced the Democratic Party from its Cold War liberalism by negotiating a nuclear arms treaty with the Soviet Union, recognizing China, and criticizing anticommunist dictatorships. But he also signaled his fidelity to traditional liberal ideals by creating a Department of Education and Department of Energy, pursuing aggressive conservation policies, and pressing for a consumer protection agency, a subtle but supple nod to the consumer republic of the late New Deal. For all the innovations of his presidency and the considerable power he wielded, Carter found himself undone, not just by the crises with which his name is associated today—oil, inflation, and hostage-taking—but also by the very innovations he pursued and the power he exercised. Standing atop a party increasingly divided over the New Deal—one faction, based in organized labor, demanded the old regime’s extension; another, based in the professional classes and younger voters, thrilled to the new currents of the free market and deregulation—Carter made no one happy. In the fading shadow of the New Deal, his meager liberalism seemed both too much to the right and too little to the left. His reconstructive achievements—particularly toward the end of his Presidency, when he elevated Paul Volcker to the Fed, slashed social spending, and increased the military budget—became the signs of his disjunction. Like Herbert Hoover a half-century before him, he was the last man standing, the poor schmuck who came into office to nudge his party away from its commitment to a weak regime, only to be deserted by his party and tarred by his opponents as that regime’s most orthodox defender. THE DIFFERENCES BETWEEN CARTER and Trump are many and obvious: Carter shyly confessed to having “committed adultery in my heart”; Trump brags about grabbing women. Carter was a moralist and a technocrat; Trump, an immoralist and a demagogue. Carter was a state senator and a governor; Trump has no political experience. Carter wouldn’t hurt a fly (or a rabbit). Trump takes pleasure in humiliating others, particularly women and people of color. The parallels between Carter and Trump are also many, if less obvious. Like Carter, Trump ran hard against his party, decrying its most basic orthodoxies on trade, immigration, and entitlements. Throughout the campaign, Trump proudly and repeatedly declared his refusal to cut Social Security and Medicare. Like no other Republican in modern memory, Trump railed against the plutocratic union of money and state power. Carter declared, “My positions are not predictable.” Trump, too, has occupied an ambiguous ideological space of ever-changing policies and commitments. And like Carter—who anointed himself the sole vehicle of reform, cultivating, in his words, “the lonely, independent candidate image depending on the voter only”—Trump has declared himself the single, solitary voice of renovation: “I alone can fix it,” as he said at the Republican National Convention. Since his election, Trump has opened an even wider breach with his party, waging an astonishing war against the nation’s security establishment. After the media reported CIA claims that Trump was elected to office with help from the Russians, and Republican Senate leaders announced their intentions to open hearings on the topic, Trump began tweeting on a semi-regular basis about the CIA’s incompetence and buffoonery. This unprecedented attack by a President-elect on the CIA prompted another first: the Senate Minority Leader musing on national television that an elected President should be careful about what he says, because the CIA has “six ways from Sunday at getting back at you.” 1 Both Trump and Carter failed to get a majority of the party’s vote during the primary before winning the presidency. Both Trump and Carter, in other words, were nominated to lead parties that tried bitterly to resist their rise. Just as Trump provoked a variety of last-ditch attempts to stop him, so was there an abortive “Anybody But Carter” movement late in the 1976 primaries. Trump will enter the White House with an even greater liability: the loss of the popular vote. And while Trump’s unfavorable ratings have declined since his election—every President-elect enjoys a honeymoon—they still remain, as of early January, unprecedentedly high. As the authors of a recent Gallup poll put it: Trump still has time to turn the tide and avoid starting his presidency with the lowest public support in Gallup’s polling history, but that would largely entail gaining the support of independents and, in particular, Democrats—most of whom appear reluctant to back him. However tempting it may be to ascribe these phenomena to Trump alone, some part of the specter of illegitimacy and disapproval that has enveloped him is due to the increasingly fragile nature of the Republican regime itself. In the same way that Carter was saddled with a debilitated New Deal regime, so has Trump, despite his moves toward heterodoxy throughout the campaign, hitched himself to Reagan’s free-market regime, with its worship of the man of the market and the man of money, and concomitant commitments to tax cuts and deregulation. That regime has been in a slow free-fall for several years. The declining trajectory of support for Republican Presidents—from Nixon’s 60.7 percent of the vote in 1972 to Reagan’s 58.8 percent in 1984 to Bush’s 50.7 percent in 2004 to Trump’s 46 percent—is one measure. The steady diminution of voters identifying as Republicans—Gallup polls consistently put Republicans behind Democrats and independents—is another. And while Presidents winning without the popular vote was unheard of throughout the 20th century, that has now occurred twice in the 21st, both times with a Republican. As multiple media outlets have reported over this past year, younger voters consistently voice a preference for socialist or anti-capitalist politics. The breakout support for Bernie Sanders offers an additional measure of dissatisfaction with the reigning neoliberal regime, as do Trump’s erratic jabs at crony capitalism and fitful defenses of Medicare and Social Security. Under George W. Bush, the Republicans were undone by Iraq, Bush’s failed effort to privatize Social Security, and the financial crisis of 2008. Trump—elected with far less support than Bush and without, at least not yet, the ballast of a popular war—is the inheritor of this uneasy, increasingly fractious coalition. AMERICAN HISTORY HAS SEEN six regimes. Some have persisted for decades: Lincoln’s Republican regime lasted from 1860 to 1932 (though scholars still argue over whether the election of 1896 inaugurated a new regime). FDR’s New Deal regime lasted nearly a half-century, from 1932 to 1980. Others, like the Federalist regime of 1789-1800, were short-lived. Jefferson’s Democratic-Republican regime lasted from 1800 to 1828; Jackson’s Democratic regime, from 1828 to 1860. We are now reaching the end of the fourth decade of the Reagan regime. Whether Trump will prove to be a reconstructive, articulating, or disjunctive President—that is, whether we are nearing the end, entering the middle, or about to double down on the Reagan regime—remains to be seen. Skowronek’s model is not predictive; it sets out possibilities rather than prophesies. Trump may launch a reconstruction or founder in disjunction, and over time the distinction between reconstruction and disjunction can begin to blur. The outcome will depend on Trump, his party, international events, the economy, and his opposition, both inside and outside the Democratic Party. But there are signs of a possible disjunction, which we would be foolish to ignore. As was true of Carter, the tensions within Trump’s party may prove to be a challenge beyond his talents. Of all the heterodoxies Trump campaigned on none was more salient than trade. Within weeks of the election, Trump was stacking his transition team with hardliners from the steel industry, who had long struggled with China over imports and exports, and promising to impose a 35 percent tariff on companies that moved jobs out of the US. Congressional Republicans—including the House Speaker and Majority Leader—were horrified, quickly and loudly voicing their opposition. Trump’s appointments also may become a flashpoint. Where strong majorities of voters approved of Obama’s and Bush’s appointments, only 41 percent approve of Trump’s, with 41 percent disapproving. The Wall Street Journal reports that the Trump transition team engaged in little to no vetting, leaving the job of scrutinizing the speeches, transcripts, tax returns, and other records of his nominees—the kind of thing that has sunk or threatened presidential appointments in the past—to ambitious Senate staffers with no loyalty to Trump. Key Republicans, like John McCain and Lindsay Graham, have signaled their intention to rake Rex Tillerson, Trump’s nominee for Secretary of State, whose record of lubricious dealings with Putin has raised alarms, over the coals. John Bolton, Trump’s possible nomination to be the second-in-command at State and a favorite of the pro-Israel, neocon wing of the GOP, is also expected to come in for stiff opposition from Republicans: Rand Paul, a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, has announced his intention to block Bolton. The jostling over foreign-policy appointments only points to deeper cleavages in the party between an ascendant Christian nationalist wing that is warm to Putin and Russia and a residual neoconservative wing that is fearful of what such a direction might mean for Israel and other US interests. Whether Trump chooses Bolton or not, whether Tillerson is confirmed or not, the conflicts between these two factions suggest that the administration may be in for trouble. Russia’s Foreign Ministry recently announced, for example, that it would be “unforgivable” for the US to scrap the nuclear treaty with Iran, which was one of Trump’s major campaign promises. In the same way that Carter promised a break with Cold War liberalism, only to disappoint his allies when he spiked the military budget in response to the rise of the Sandinistas and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, so, too, might the tensions between Trump’s promises and the reality of international politics create conflict within his party. Trump also may discover, as Carter did early on in his presidency when he launched his failed plan to reform welfare, that agreement with one’s party can quickly turn into disagreement. Trump and the GOP seem to agree that most of Obamacare should go but that its no-preexisting-conditions provision should stay. That agreement is the problem: no one knows how to scrap the mandate and the subsidies and retain the policy on pre-existing conditions. One large part of the GOP wants to simply repeal the law now, while stipulating that the repeal won’t go into effect until later when a replacement will be found. A smaller but influential faction, including, at last count, five Republican senators as well as the American Medical Association and the hospital lobby, has firmly declared there must be no repeal without replacement. (That both sides agree that replacement must follow repeal is another testament to the weakening of Reaganite ideology; an earlier generation of Republicans would have slashed the program, confident that hosannas to the free market and the ingenuity of the American people would take care of things.) Even if the first faction wins, the electoral costs of skyrocketing premiums, which would begin rising far in advance of the actual repeal, will weigh heavily on Trump, who will have less leverage in the Senate than Obama had when he passed Obamacare. One of the signature promises of the Trump campaign is already turning into a curse. Where all this will lead is anyone’s guess, but the most likely outcome is that Trump and the GOP will fall back on what Republicans know how to do best: tax cuts and deregulation. At moments of articulation, holding fast to the regime’s orthodoxies can be intoxicating sources of power, as Lyndon Johnson and George W. Bush learned. At moments of disjunction, that kind of steadfastness can lead to disaster. Jimmy Carter, like Herbert Hoover before him, tried to resolve similar challenges through his mastery of the bureaucracy. Carter was trained as a scientist, and technocracy was his métier. No one understood the various bills and policies that went in and out of the White House better than he. What he lacked in political standing he tried to make up with technique, and by appointing experienced Washington bureaucrats to flesh out the more important positions in his Cabinet. So far, the most, perhaps only, seasoned administrative operative in Trump’s cabinet is Secretary of Transportation Elaine Chao. Most of Trump’s other appointments are a random assortment of frustrated generals and cronies, capitalists and congressmen. For all the disapproval and illegitimacy Trump is entering office with, polls do show that a strong majority of voters expect him to deliver change. Given his administrative and political inexperience—and the inexperience of the people around him—that may be the one thing he will be unable to do. “Nothing exposes a hollow consensus faster than the exercise of presidential power,” Skowronek writes. In the coming days, we’ll see if he’s right. But lest Trump’s opponents on the left draw too rosy a conclusion from Skowronek’s analysis, The Politics Presidents Make suggests a worrying word of qualification. Though disjunctive Presidents like Carter—and, maybe, Trump—are politically weak, they are Presidents, with considerable resources and powers—some quite violent and coercive—at their disposal. Constrained politically, they are prone to rely on the tools of their office and the executive branch. They compensate for their political weaknesses with robust exercises of state power. If Trump manages to put into effect much of his agenda despite the disjunctive political moment, it may be through the raw force of the executive branch rather than the alliance with the Republican Congress being tested out now. 1. Lost in the spectral lunacy of this back-and-forth is the fact that the Republican Party rode into power in 1980 with the help of a much quieter revolt of the security bureaucracy against a sitting President. In 1975, the CIA commissioned a study of US intelligence—the so-called Team B report—that found that the US had systemically underestimated Soviet military capabilities. While Team B was initially directed against the détente of Kissinger and Ford, conservative hardliners used it against Carter and his dovish liberalism; in 1980, Reagan ran against the “window of vulnerability” on security supposedly opened by the Democrats. However ironic it may be for a Republican President-elect to come under attack from the very security establishment that once spirited his party into power, the political significance of the leader of the Republican Party declaring war on one of the foundations of modern Republican hegemony should not be overlooked.  1