Understanding a New Presidency in the Age of Trump. Joseph A. Pika

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СКАЧАТЬ style and management decisions compounded the challenges presidents normally face by creating a variety of ongoing self-inflicted wounds. For example, his previously mentioned failure to nominate sub-Cabinet officials in a timely manner left hundreds of vacancies throughout the executive branch. And while Trump aide Bannon’s pledge to “deconstruct” the administrative state had great rhetorical appeal, the effort to carry out the pledge actually harmed the president’s ability to implement his policy preferences.⁶⁶ (More discussion of the administrative presidency follows later in this section.) Most immediately, it prevented the president from taking advantage of departmental expertise in drafting legislative proposals. Since many of the government outsiders Trump selected for top White House posts did not possess such expertise, either, they were not in a position to pick up the slack. Damage also arose from the chaos generated by Trump’s “team of rivals” approach. Multiple competing power centers in the White House, with no one charged to mediate, exacerbated the consequences of the president’s own lack of government experience and apparent disinterest in the nuances of policymaking. Trump’s penchant for provocative off-message Tweets, abrupt policy reversals, and rash decisions compounded the disorder.

      Further, despite Trump’s disingenuous claim to have won a “massive landslide victory” in the Electoral College,⁶⁷ and his groundless assertion that he would have decisively won the popular vote were it not for three million to five million illegal votes,⁶⁸ Trump entered office with no clear electoral mandate. Administration spin about the size of Trump’s victory notwithstanding (“Landslide. Blowout. Historic,” Kellyanne Conway tweeted),⁶⁹ his winning margin in the Electoral College, where he received 57 percent of the vote, ranked forty-sixth out of fifty-eight U.S. presidential elections, while his popular vote share was forty-seventh out of the forty-nine winning candidates since 1824.⁷⁰ This gave Trump minimal leverage over members of Congress, who in most cases were more popular with their constituents than the president (some 90 percent of Republican representatives had outpolled the president in their district). Thus, Trump did not enjoy much of a honeymoon. Most new presidents find it difficult to win support in Congress; political scientists John Sides and Lynn Vavreck caution against “assuming that [an election] constitutes a mandate for the winner’s policy agenda,” and a systematic study of congressional voting identifies only three elections over fifty years—1964, 1980, and 1994—with a clear causal effect on legislative behavior. The chaotic opening round of the Trump administration precluded any possibility that 2016 might join that list.⁷¹

      And then there were the lingering questions about links between the Trump campaign and the Russian government that implicated several high-ranking administration officials and prompted several congressional investigations. Even before Trump took office, the Intelligence Community had released its verdict that Russia had sought to affect the outcome of the 2016 election.⁷² This prompted the Senate Intelligence Committee to begin investigating Russian meddling. Then, on February 13, 2017, Trump’s national security adviser, Michael Flynn, resigned after less than a month on the job. He did so amid revelations that he had lied to Vice President Pence about conversations he had with the Russian ambassador to the United States in December 2016—before Trump entered office—about U.S. sanctions against Russia imposed by the Obama administration.⁷³

      The next day, White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer revealed that the president had known for more than two weeks that Flynn had lied about his contact with the Russians, and the New York Times reported that Trump campaign aides and other associates “had repeated contacts with senior Russian intelligence officials in the year before the election.”⁷⁴ The controversy went on to implicate Attorney General Jeff Sessions. After Sessions denied under oath during his confirmation hearings that he had communications with the Russians while working for the Trump campaign, the Washington Post revealed on March 1, 2017, that Sessions had, in fact, twice met with the Russian ambassador during that period of time (though while still a U.S. senator).⁷⁵ That led many leading Democrats to accuse Sessions of perjury, and call for his resignation; the controversy prompted Sessions to recuse himself from any investigation of Russian intervention in the 2016 presidential election.⁷⁶

      President Trump tried to deflect coverage of his campaign’s ties to Russia by accusing the media at a press conference on February 16 of disseminating “fake news”⁷⁷ and describing the media as “the enemy of the people” in a February 24 speech—a charge that prompted Republican senator John McCain to retort, “That’s how dictators get started.”⁷⁸ Trump doubled down, tweeting unfounded claims on March 5 that President Obama (whom Trump described as a “Bad (or sick) guy!”) had wiretapped his phones during the election.⁷⁹ But such efforts to deflect attention from the Russia allegations did nothing to impede the investigations. By March 22—Day 62 of the Trump administration—there were already four congressional committees investigating not only Russian meddling in the 2016 election but the ties of Flynn and other Trump associates to Russian officials: The Senate Intelligence Committee, the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime and Terrorism, the House Intelligence Committee, and the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee.⁸⁰

      Nor was that all. On March 20, FBI director James Comey confirmed in testimony before the House Intelligence Committee that the FBI was investigating the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia and said that there was “no information” to support Trump’s claim that Obama wiretapped his phones.⁸¹ The independent, nonpartisan Government Accountability Office (GAO)—a government agency that monitors the accountability of government through audits and other forms of oversight—also announced an investigation on April 5 of Trump’s transition operation, including its spending, fundraising, and communications with foreign governments.⁸² Thus, even before the end of the first hundred days, an unprecedented range of divergent investigations—congressional and otherwise—distracted attention from the president’s legislative agenda.

      In short, Trump did little to heal the wounds of the campaign during the first hundred days, and he suffered a series of self-inflicted wounds that undermined his chances for legislative success. Given the stark polarization between the parties mentioned previously and the divisions within the majority Republicans, building legislative majorities would have been difficult even for a president with extensive Washington experience, deep policy expertise, and longstanding relationships within his party. Trump, with none of that, allowed his frustrations with the lack of legislative success to boil over in a string of tweets attacking the right-wing Freedom Caucus (“we must fight them, and Dems, in 2018!”), the congressional opposition (“Democrats jeopardizing the safety of our troops to bail out their donors”), and Senate rules allowing legislation to be delayed indefinitely unless sixty senators agreed to end a filibuster (“… change the rules now to 51%”).⁸³

      The Administrative Presidency

      Presidents are not limited to taking action exclusively by working through Congress. From the first days of his administration, President Trump embraced a unilateral exercise of executive power through the use of executive orders and other administrative directives, СКАЧАТЬ