The Whiplash President

Over the past couple of years, I've generated a lot of hot air about American politics; I've given more than a dozen public talks, done lots of radio shows, and had a few things to say on this blog. I do my best to offer something meaningful along with the odd insight into what's going on. It's getting tougher and tougher.

In fact, it's only August and I'm completely exhausted! Trump exhausts me! When I reflect on what has transpired in just the first 6 months of this Administration, I need to stop and catch my breath. There's a daily diet of outrage, incompetence, and mean-spritedness that leaves me feeling dirty for having watched.

Every other day, I find myself saying "he did what?" As I shake my head over yesterday's development, my head snaps in the other direction as the next one hits. I've developed a number of the signs of whiplash.

However, as the Whiplash President wreaks havoc, I have also frequently felt some combination of despair, frustration, anger, and resignation-- sometimes all within the space of about 15 minutes. I am old enough to have appreciated Cold War tensions (I remember watching The Day After with my parents), worried about domestic terrorism in the mid-1990s, lived in some state of anxiety in Washington after 9/11, and agonized over the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

Yet, I've spent a lot more time worrying about Donald Trump.
Anyone reading the pages of this blog over the last couple of years knows I am no fan of President Trump. In truth, I was disappointed with everyone running for president in 2016 and was hoping someone good would emerge. I fretted about the impact of Trump's brand of economic, populist nationalism and the erosion of the broad postwar consensus (in the US and EU) on a whole range of issues. I wasn't as convinced as people like filmmaker Michael Moore that Trump had a shot, but the June 2016 Brexit vote suggested his chances weren't zero.

However much I disagreed with Trump (or the other presidential candidates) on policy, once in office I did want him to succeed; by succeed, I mean I wanted him to rise to the occasion and be as competent in implementing change (even if I didn't like the change) as he had promised to be on the campaign trail. The only thing worse than bad policy positions are bad policy positions implemented badly. The results so far? To call it all a Gong Show is to be uncharitable to that hilarious 1970s game show. 

Poor Romney

One of the first things that comes to mind with every new Trump outrage is how depressingly far we've descended in our politics. Every time Trump opens his mouth, goes off script, and engages in the sort of divisive, demeaning rhetoric that we've now come to expect of him, I think of Mitt Romney. In the 2012 Presidential Election campaign, two "gaffes" torpedoed his electoral prospects; 1) a surreptitiously recorded video of Romney at a fundraiser derisively saying that "47 percent of Americans pay no income tax"; 2) Romney's "binders full of women" comment at the October 2012 debate.

Both were terrible moments for Romney, indicative of his weakness as a candidate. However, when contrast with the almost-daily vitriol of anger, sexism, and racism-- to say nothing of incompetence and megalomania-- sown by Donald Trump since he announced his candidacy in June 2015, the 2012 campaign looks pretty tame.

Donald Trump's candidacy for president should have ended the day it started. Yet here we are.

Tapped Out (rage)

One of the things Trump is exploiting to great effect is our increasingly limited attention spans. We are all busy and have only so many hours in a day to absorb what's going on around us. Sadly, we are becoming more and more myopic about, and disconnected from, our politics. The advent of 24 hour news in the late 1980s has been both a blessing and a curse. On the one hand, there's never been more news and information thrown at us. On the other, there's so much of it, frequently over-hyped for ratings, that we find it difficult to process or contextualize. It all taps our mental bandwidth. Trump has been especially taxing, especially for those actively trying to follow what's going on. Every new outrage seemingly turns the page on the last by bouncing it from the headlines and from our short-term memories.

Social Media

A major source of our attention deficit is, in my view, social media. Call me a Luddite if you wish. But in my mind, social media has unquestionably impoverished our politics. Politics and policy are extremely complicated. There are painful trade offs with nearly every decision we task our leadership with making; healthcare, national security, regulation, the law, climate change, trade, etc. I've yet to see a policy matter than can be usefully debated in exchanges of 140 characters or less on Twitter.
Indeed, apart from being huge time-sinks, I am not sure

what utility these platforms have done for our politics. We mostly "follow" or "friend" people we know, whose views we agree with, or whose celebrity morbidly draws us in. In other words, we increasingly operate in these little ideological thought-silos filled mostly with like-minded people. Cable news has a role here too-- after all, Fox News, MSNBC, and CNN seem to be operating in completely divergent realities most of the time, appealing to the herds of viewers who pay their bills by watching adverts. Listening to MSNBC's commentators is to hear how the sky is falling and Trump's impeachment is imminent. According to Fox News, Trump's main problems are intransigent Democrats and negative coverage by the mainstream media.

But social media has exacerbated it all by becoming a forum for the expression of enhanced vitriol directed at those you disagree with. I would be the first to say that the best way to combat speech you don't like is to engage it with more speech. But I don't think the market place of ideas has been enhanced by debates on social media. Instead, social media has given people a strange sense of complacency how they express themselves and on what issues. Expressions of anger and frustration in the way we debate one another don't trouble me. There are plenty of reasons to be upset with what's going on. Moreover, I am fond of the confrontational, bare knuckle qualities of the U.S. political system. I'd rather know what people really think. But I am routinely shocked at the lack of civility between people online. There's a strange sense of invulnerability people feel behind their smart phone app.

Of course, all of this is taking place at a time when the news media is in the midst of an existential crisis. The Internet has exploded the traditional newspaper business-- many print publications are gone, there's very little local reporting, and no one wants to pay for investigative journalism anymore. The days of hungry, green reporters like Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein being indulged by patient newspaper editors as they chip away on a dead-end story like Watergate are over. Yet, at the very same time the news media is seeking a new business model, there have never been more sources of news. Armed with a smart phone, blog site (like this one), or Twitter account (I've got one of those too), everyone is now a reporter.

This, however, is part of the problem. With more sources, more information, less and less time to digest it, or a lack of frameworks with which to interpret it, our political discourse is suffering. I'm not arguing for intellectual gatekeepers who tell us what we should think. Rather, I worry that our sources of information are so diverse and chaotic that we are limiting our intake of information-- if we bother to tune in at all-- to those we agree with most or to that which is most salacious. We have no Walter Cronkite, Edward R. Murrow, or Tim Russert to help us separate the wheat from the chafe. Again, we only have so much bandwidth to contribute.

Trump has jumped into this chaotic void with both feet and exploited it to great (dangerous) effect. Trump regularly attacks the "mainstream media" (what ever that is), making it a virtual enemy of the state. Moreover, he has taken a page out of contemporary academia and challenged the veracity of nearly everything he doesn't like. Indeed, Trump may be the first postmodern president.

America was founded on a healthy dose of skepticism about the concentration of power. But we find ourselves in the midst of a vicious cycle of indifference, anger, disillusionment, disrespect, and skepticism about our political institutions that isn't healthy. 

Switch Flip?

For months, I have been telling myself that the U.S. political system is resilient enough to survive this and that we've seen worse (see 1968 below). In recent years, there's been a lot of frustration about the slow pace of change in the American political system. Things either don't get done, or they get done very, very slowly. I've explained that this sort of paralysis isn't something new-- James Madison and Alexander Hamilton intentionally designed it that way.

In recent months, my sincere hope has been that Madison and Hamilton designed things well-enough that they will indeed thwart the concentration of power. One read of Trump's inability to get anything done-- even with Republicans in control of the House and Senate-- is that Madison and Hamilton were as brilliant as advertised. Under this view, Trump can cause a lot of havoc from the Oval Office, but to get anything really big done, he needs legislation. Thus far, Trump has come up empty.

However, in my darker moments, I recognize the U.S. political system doesn't function exactly as Madison and Hamilton laid it out. Indeed, with just a few exceptions (aftermath of Watergate, for example), the practical levers of power have increasingly concentrated themselves in the Executive Branch, and in the Presidency in particular (historian Arthur Schlesinger aptly coined the phrase Imperial Presidency in 1973). I am worried about the mixture of this long-term concentration of power and Trump's own impulsiveness. Trump's access to the nuclear codes is one thing, but I also worry about other manifestations of his demeanour affecting everything from immigration to trade. It's alarming to me that I'm cheering for the former-generals that now surround Trump as a kind of last-line-of-defense between us and Trump's impulsiveness. In a lot of places, we would call this a "junta."

So, when does the switch flip on President Trump? Where is the line Trump crosses that prompts Republicans to turn on their RINO President? At what point has enough damage been done to the Party, to the country, and to America's standing in the world that they turn on him? For those of you hoping for impeachment, I think you'll be waiting a while. Impeachment is a traumatic political process that would undoubtedly further divide the country, and the Republican Party itself. Although Trump's nation-wide job approval ratings are falling like a rock, polling from July shows that Republicans are still getting some electoral juice from Donald Trump.

If these were normal times, Trump would never have been elected in the first place. It's possible that if a smoking gun emerges from any of the Russia probes taking place on Capitol Hill or by Robert Mueller, things could change rapidly and we'll see more Republicans willing to openly break ranks with the President. But that hasn't happened yet.

Cure for Whiplash?

Believe it or not, I still have faith in the design crafted by Madison and Hamilton. I mostly think that Trump is out of his depth, simplistically imagined running a country was like ordering people around in his privately held firm, and is going to become an even more frustrated and marginalized figure. He will continue to stoke the flames of division, enjoy the support of a narrowing base of support, and likely serve out his term through 2020. Trump will continue to create havoc, but I think his megalomania, impulsiveness, and the incompetence of he and his team are going to get the better of him to the point where he'll have little else to work with than his Twitter account.

As anyone who's studied the Watergate years knows, the pendulum of power doesn't reverse itself quickly, but when it does, it can do so decisively. Throughout early 1974, Nixon's legal and political troubles were mounting; not the least of which was a formal House impeachment process. The original break-in at the DNC's Watergate headquarters was in June 1972. Yet, it wasn't until the July 1974 Supreme Court ruled Nixon had to turn over his White House audio recordings that everyone knew it was over; including Nixon. He resigned two weeks later.

Baring a Nixon-esq smoking gun of some kind, my bet is that Trump's name will just be added to America's list of terrible presidents (see C-SPAN's Rankings). Anyone ever heard of Andrew Johnson (the House impeached him) or James Buchanan (many consider him the worst)?

One other point of comparative solace I look to these days is the year 1968. Arguably one of the worst years in American political and social history, 1968 was even more divisive and violent than 2017. In 1968, the Vietnam War was going badly (Tet Offensive proved that), racial tensions were high (riots in many cities, including Washington, D.C.), the civil rights movement's effects were still being felt unevenly, there were political assassinations (MLK and RFK), and we had a presidential candidate willing to exploit the politics of race (George Wallace). A terrible year, but not necessarily the worst year in American history. For that, a case could be made for 1863 (height of the Civil War) or 1932 (deepest point of the Great Depression)?

We are not in 1968 territory, but I do wonder who will put the 2016 genie back in the bottle? Who is going to tackle the ugliness and division that created Trump? Who's going to clean up the additional wreckage Trump leaves behind? I'm deeply pessimistic it will be the Democrats. They seem to be preparing to fight an election campaign on some other planet. But I'm not so much more optimistic about the Republicans either. The House (Ryan) and Senate (McConnell) leadership have shown they have weak moral compasses. What about Ohio Governor John Kasich in 2020? Vice-President Pence, perhaps?

Hmmm... Pretty thin gruel as a cure for whiplash. I think I'm gonna need some Advil too......