January 20th, 2018, marks the first anniversary of Donald Trump’s inauguration as the 45th President of the United States, and the passage of a year affords an appropriate occasion for assessing his term in office thus far. In his case, however, such an assessment involves a complication: the need to distinguish between Trump the President and the Trump presidency. The two are closely related, of course, but they are also distinct: the public personality of the President has a powerful effect on, but is not the whole of, the administration over which he or she presides.
Words, although important, are not deeds. The President is the head, but far from the totality, of the federal government. And the work the federal government performs does not determine everything important that happens in the United States. Trump the President emerges from a number of accounts, not all of them of undisputed accuracy, as an unattractive personality poorly suited to the job he holds: ignorant, impulsive, indolent, and intellectually out of his depth in the Oval Office. The Trump presidency after twelve months, however, has a record of governing that stands apart—or at least semi-detached—from the office-holder’s personality. The appraisal that follows, therefore, has as its focus the presidency rather than the President.
1. Donald Trump is conducting an unusual presidency. The most obviously unusual feature of his conduct of the office is his fondness for communicating with the world by Twitter. His tweets and the responses they evoke have dominated much of the political coverage of the print media and even more of the endless hours of broadcasting by the cable news channels. He has used his tweets for, among other purposes, waging personal vendettas, and what he has tweeted has sometimes strayed into nastiness, boorishness and mendacity.
The presidential Tweets have contributed to another, and ultimately more consequential, aspect of the Trump presidency. Unlike previous Presidents, this one has not tried to broaden his base of support. Those of his predecessors elected, like him, with less than a majority of the popular vote have been particularly attentive to this task. His public pronouncements, by contrast, along with his legislative program, have offered almost nothing to Democrats or Independents. To the extent that this approach harms Republican electoral fortunes in 2018 and 2020, it will have a major effect on the Trump presidency, although it did not in 2017.
The apparent lack of interest in broadening his coalition may help to account for another unusual feature of year one of the Trump presidency: the gap between the performance of the economy and the President’s approval rating. The public judges Presidents by the economic conditions over which they preside. In this the public is generally in error: Presidents ordinarily play only a minor role in creating the economic conditions that prevail during their terms. Still, an administration’s policies are not entirely irrelevant to the health of the American economy during its time in office and Trump’s predecessors have successfully taken credit for good conditions and unsuccessfully avoided blame for bad ones.
In 2017 the American economy performed impressively well. It enjoyed, by recent standards, robust economic growth. Unemployment declined. The stock market soared, attaining heights never before achieved. Yet the Trump approval rating remained low, and for most of the year was lower than that of Barack Obama’s over a comparable period, who inherited, and after a year in office presided over, considerably worse economic circumstances than did Donald Trump.
In addition, the 45th President has played an unusually modest role in his party’s legislative agenda. For its first major proposal, the repeal of the Affordable Care Act, virtually all of his predecessors going back to the beginning of the last century would have taken command of the issue: farming out different parts of it to the relevant departments for analysis and drafting, assembling their work into a bill in the White House, summoning Congressional leaders to plan a legislative strategy, and then lobbying Members of Congress and speaking to the nation on behalf of the measure.
Trump did almost none of this, and reports suggested that he was not familiar with the details of the bill that Congress considered, which failed to gain the votes necessary for passage. For the other principal legislative initiative, the tax bill (which did pass), the President was not much more active. The first year of the 115th Congress more closely resembled the working of the federal government in the 19th century, when the legislative branch was more powerful and the executive less so, than any previous Congress in living memory. In this way Trump’s conduct of the presidency had more in common with constitutional monarchies, or the presidencies of Germany and Israel, whose occupant serves as the head of state but not the head of government, than with the way in which recent American Presidents have defined the job. The “energy in the executive” that Alexander Hamilton commended was occasionally in evidence in 2017, albeit mainly in the Twitterverse rather than in the service of passing laws.
2. Donald Trump has governed as a Republican President. The President’s capture of the Republican presidential nomination resembled a hostile takeover in the business world. As the Republican presidential candidate he took a number of positions on major issues that departed from the party’s orthodoxy. The principal accomplishments of his first year in office, however, fall well within the bounds of that orthodoxy. A tax bill that lowers corporate rates, the repeal of regulations that business considers counterproductive, the appointment of conservative judges to the federal bench (including one to the Supreme Court): these are all measures that any Republican President would have proposed.
In foreign policy the gap between the President and his presidency is perhaps widest. By most accounts Trump’s encounters with foreign leaders, especially those who rely on the United States and on whom the United States in turn relies for cooperation in promoting American interests around the world, have not gone well. The President’s international interlocutors have not, it seems, come away with an impression of him as a knowledgeable, dependable chief executive. On the other hand, he has conducted a more or less orthodox Republican foreign policy. He has not, at least thus far, withdrawn from NATO, NAFTA, or the World Trade Organization. His National Security Strategy, issued last month, differs from his predecessor’s view of the world in ways that most members of the Republican wing of the foreign policy community would endorse.
Almost no Republican elected office-holder or former public official or major financial contributor placed Donald Trump anywhere near the top of his or her list of preferred presidential candidates in 2016. Once he secured the party’s nomination, most of them supported him in the hope that he would turn out to be a vehicle for advancing their agenda. In 2017, at least, that hope was realized. Republicans have reason to be happy, and Democrats unhappy, with the political developments of the past year, as they almost surely would have been if any other Republican had been elected President in 2016.
3. Donald Trump is a populist—of a certain kind. The political analyst William Schneider has noted that populism, which expresses at its core a hostility to elites, comes in two varieties in the United States: hostility, located in recent years mainly in the Democratic Party, to economic elites, and hostility to cultural and educational elites, the bearers of which tend to gravitate to the Republicans. In his campaign Trump appealed to both, but his presidency has catered only to the second.
While it is intended to promote the creation of jobs, the 2017 tax law provides few direct benefits to Americans who are struggling economically. A large initiative to build and refurbish infrastructure, which would generate jobs and that candidate Trump promised, did not make an appearance during his first year in office. The 45th President has not produced, as he also promised, waves of fresh employment in coal mines and steel mills.
On the other hand, he has directed his ire at the cultural elites, including the universities, the entertainment world, and especially the mainstream media, which he has repeatedly accused of propagating what he calls “fake news.” He declared his distaste for professional football players—many of them from poor backgrounds but who are, by the standards of most Americans, highly paid and very well-known—who refused to stand for the pregame playing of the national anthem in order to protest racial injustice. This turned out to be, politically, one of Trump’s more successful positions. Polls showed that the majority of respondents agreed with him. His criticism made the players—or the players made themselves—seem unpatriotic, never a winning strategy in any country. Trump, by contrast, appeared to be defending the national honor and especially the honor of the country’s armed forces, which seldom if ever makes a politician less popular.
4. Donald Trump may—or may not—be threatened by the Mueller investigation. Because of the growing polarization of American public life, opposition to recent Presidents has become increasingly intense. Clinton Derangement Syndrome was succeeded by Bush Derangement Syndrome, which gave way to Obama Derangement Syndrome. This progression has continued into the Trump presidency. Prominent Democrats declared it illegitimate even before it began and a number have expressed the hope that he will be removed from office before the completion of his term. The legal, nonviolent method of doing so is impeachment by the House of Representatives and conviction after a trial in the Senate, and in one House vote in late 2017 a total of 58 Democrats supported a call for impeachment. The proponents of such a course have invested their hopes for uncovering impeachable offenses in the investigation by the Special Counsel and former FBI Director Robert Mueller into the collusion—if any—between the Trump campaign and the Russian government.
Nothing is known at this point about what, if anything, the investigation has discovered about the role of the President himself. What can be said is that Trump’s admiration for Russia’s Vladimir Putin, whose policies attack American interests and American values, hardly advances either, which is what American foreign policy is supposed to do. By itself, however, that admiration breaks no law. It was, moreover, on full display during the presidential campaign, so that those who voted for Trump had ample opportunity to know of his attitude toward a militantly anti-American dictator. Furthermore, a President’s approach to foreign policy is properly a matter of policy, not law, and is therefore ordinarily determined by elections and congressional votes rather than by legal or quasi-judicial proceedings.
What can also be said is that impeachment and conviction are not exclusively legal matters: they are at heart political. The Constitution provides for the removal of the President from office for “high crimes and misdemeanors” but leaves to the Congress the responsibility for deciding what presidential activities may qualify. Moreover, whatever Mueller finds, this President can be removed only with Republican support: conviction requires a two-thirds majority in the Senate and Republicans will certainly hold more than one-third of the seats in that body for the next three years. For the Trump presidency to end prematurely, Republicans would have to take an active role in ending it. It is extremely unlikely that they will do so, but it’s also not entirely unthinkable.
If they fare badly in the midterm elections in 2018 and anticipate further severe losses in 2020, and if they impute their misfortunes to Donald Trump’s personal conduct, a Mike Pence presidency might well come to look increasingly attractive to Congressional Republicans. For the same reason, however, the Democrats, for all their loathing of the incumbent of the Oval Office, might conclude that their interests require his remaining there through the next presidential election in order to ensure their own success. Such political calculations could lead to the bizarre (and admittedly far-fetched) circumstance in 2019 in which the Republicans seek to remove Trump from the presidency and the Democrats work to keep him there.
5. Donald Trump helped make sexual harassment a major national issue. The most enduringly important development in the United States in 2017 was the rise of the #MeToo movement, a spontaneous expression of support for women who have suffered sexual harassment. It attracted wide attention, spread rapidly, ended the careers of prominent men accused of such misconduct and, one must hope, made harassment less likely in the future.
None of this involved the government doing anything. Rape and assault were already crimes and have been for centuries. The movement did, however, have something to do with the fact that Donald Trump was President. Before he won the office multiple women had accused him of such conduct and it seems safe to say that his denials did not persuade all of the American public. His election kept the accusations alive and lent greater credibility to, and generated greater indignation about, such charges in general.
Just as the Supreme Court follows the election returns, as the American humorist Finley Peter Dunne (writing as Mr. Dooley) observed, so the media follows the national zeitgeist. Two fervently anti-Trump publications, The New York Times and The New Yorker, published articles documenting the many sexual assaults of the film producer Harvey Weinstein, a generous patron of Democratic candidates and liberal organizations. The articles triggered an avalanche of similar accusations that powerfully reinforced the apparently not-sufficiently-powerful social norm against such predations by powerful men.
It is conceivable that none of this would have happened without the Trump presidency. The two publications are devoted to the Democratic cause and strongly supported Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election. Had she won, the articles they published would have targeted an important political friend of the President and would have led to the uncomfortable question of why her husband had not lost his job for comparable activities—as a female Democratic senator, Kirsten Gillibrand of New York, ultimately said should have happened. The issue the two journalistic outlets brought to the forefront of public attention would have qualified as what the Clintons and their supporters have a habit of calling “distractions,” and the two publications might have been reluctant to distract the second President Clinton from her appointed rounds. It is therefore within the realm of possibility that, in the matter of sexual harassment, the election of a man widely accused of misogyny has accomplished more for women than the victory of the first female major-party candidate would have done.
Counterfactuals cannot, of course, be proven and it is perhaps unfair to the editors of The New York Times and The New Yorker to speculate that under different political circumstances they might not have published the articles that touched off the social avalanche. They are, after all, professionals in addition to—and, it is to be hoped, before—being partisans. Still, history can work in strange ways, and it is at least conceivable that if 39,000 votes (about three one-hundredths of one percent of the national total) had been cast for the Democratic rather than the Republican presidential candidate in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania on November 8, 2016, Harvey Weinstein would still be producing movies, Bill Clinton would still be a respected elder statesman, Matt Lauer would still be a weekday morning presence in millions of American homes, and Al Franken would still be a senator.