Reagan-era protest is an interesting comparison because the president then, as now, styled himself as a radical, yet he didn't have a great depth of policy knowledge. But the difference between Reagan and Trump is that Reagan's people were generally pros who know how to stay on a course once it was set. Trump doesn't have a lot of appointees in place, and the advisers he's chosen are clearly at odds with one another on a lot of issues. They don't seem to know how presidenting works. For Trump's first full day as president, they watched him go to CIA headquarters and deliver a bizarre and inappropriate speech. In the press secretary's first interaction with the press, he lied about Trump's inaugural crowd size. Reagan's people, by contrast, were masters at crafting lines of the day and experts at pressuring the media to portray Reagan in just the way that was most advantageous to him.
I don't want to be overconfident. I assume the Trumpers will get better at this, and they have the power of unified GOP government. But this New York Times story suggests not that the wheels are coming off the bus, but that they haven't even found a bus with all its wheels, or decided who'll drive it once it's ready, or even settled on the use of a bus at all:
President Trump plans to take executive action on a nearly daily basis for a month to unravel his predecessor’s legacy and begin enacting his own agenda, his aides say....I continue to think that there's a battle for Trump's brain, and it's being fought between the GOP establishmentarians (Reince Priebus, Mike Pence) and the populist/nationalist bomb-throwers (Steve Bannon, Stephen Miler), with Kellyanne Conway and Jared Kushner moving between the two camps as it suits them. This Politico story, which I've cited before, is a guide to the internal battles.
But in a reflection of the improvisational style that helped fuel his rise, he has made few, if any, firm decisions about which orders he wants to make, or in which order. That is a striking break from past presidents, who have entered office with detailed plans for rolling out a series of executive actions that set a tone for their presidencies and send a clear message about their agendas.
It was plain that Mr. Trump had devised no such strategy by his first day in office, as advisers expressed doubt until the last moments about whether he would issue any directives on Friday. “It’s going to be a game-day decision,” Sean Spicer, the White House press secretary, told reporters that afternoon.
Then, around 7 p.m., reporters were suddenly summoned to the Oval Office. After sprinting from the briefing room, they watched Mr. Trump sign a directive to federal agencies to begin scaling back parts of the Affordable Care Act.
“There are a number that are being looked at, but it’s just a question of which ones he feels like doing, and when,” Mr. Spicer had said of executive orders earlier on Friday. In recent days, he had said that Mr. Trump’s top aides were still deciding on the “sequencing” of the unilateral actions.
Yesterday I mocked James Hohmann of The Washington Post for asserting that the inaugural address suggested that Trump will challenge Republicans as well as Democrats. I now see that this is conventional wisdom -- Hohmann's colleague Dan Balz wrote something very similar, as did Jonathan Martin of the Times. Martin writes:
One topic has dominated conversations among elected Republicans since President Trump’s stunning victory: Will he actually pursue his campaign agenda of big-government nationalism, all but obliterating the liberal-conservative distinctions that have defined America’s political parties for a century?But Martin, to his credit, recognizes the pull of the establishmentarians, although I think he underestimates it:
... some of his advisers suggested that he would slip back into a more conventional Republican approach....I suspect that the establishment cabal is in charge, mostly because they actually know how to knuckle down and get to work. They know how to sweat the details. I don't just think Trump is incapable of that, I think Bannon is, too.
As in his campaign, he faces an array of obstacles {including] advisers who hope to nudge him back toward conventional Republicanism....
The executive orders we've had so far -- raising the price of a home purchase, attacking but not gutting Obamacare, freezing regulations -- are pure GOP establishmentarianism. If, like most insider journalists, you think Trump's popular appeal comes from his deviations from GOP orthodoxy, you should be wondering why there's been no grand gesture toward building the wall or getting a massive infrastructure plan under way. This, for instance, has a lot more Paul Ryan than Donald Trump in it:
This morning Kellyanne Conway said they'll get rid of the individual mandate, block grant Medicaid, sell across state lines, & promote HSAs.
— TC (@tchopstl_) January 22, 2017
So there's an internal battle that's making the administration seem halting and indecisive. No one is stepping in to prevent Trump or one of his subordinates from looking like an idiot. (Also on TV this morning, Conway described Spicer's lies about the inaugural crowd size as "alternative facts," an Orwellianism that's already leading the trends on Twitter.) And as advisers fight among themselves, the non-populists seem to be winning.
We might beat these bastards, or it might be that they'll just beat themselves.
