The Trump Era: Part One

There he is, the President, duality personified: both immovable object and irresistible force, unsmiling with slitty eyes beneath that quasi-blond car-hood of a hair-do, lumbering from one presidential prerogative to the next through squalls of opprobrium, perplexing leaders from foreign lands, punking congressmen and senators, inducing swoons of un-safeness among the zhes, theys, and thems on campus, provoking the op-ed bards of The Times to mouth-foaming hysterics, tweeting any old thing that flies through the interstices of his brain-pan, the Golden Golem of Greatness, MAGA sword in smallish hand against a swirling red sky.

How did we get here?

On January 20, 2017, as President Donald Trump began his inaugural address, a cold rain began to fall.

A few hours later, Trump claimed the rain had not begun to fall.

“The crowd was unbelievable today,” Trump crowed to revelers at the Liberty Inaugural Ball. “I looked at the rain, which just never came. You know, we finished the speech, went inside, and it poured!”

It wasn’t a consequential falsehood. And neither was Trump’s claim that his inaugural crowd was the largest ever, a real whopper he sent his press secretary out to defend the next day in the face of overwhelming photographic evidence otherwise. Neither the meteorological conditions at his swearing-in nor the size of the audience that witnessed his swearing-in altered the remarkable fact that he had just been sworn in as the president of the United States. So why would the holder of the most powerful office on earth insist on juicing his already impressive narrative with petty embellishments, especially when his attempts at propaganda could be so easily and objectively disproved?

In retrospect, it’s obvious that Trump was starting to construct an alternative reality for his supporters, a kind of Alt-Right VR land establishing himself (rather than the “enemies of the people” in the “FAKE NEWS” media) as the only reliable source of Truth. Really, it was pretty obvious at the time. Trump aide Kellyanne Conway was already spinning that the administration was helpfully supplying the media with “alternative facts.”

A year later, Trump is still spinning an alternative reality in which he’s achieved more than any other first-year president, he doesn’t watch much TV, the Russia investigation is nothing but a partisan witch hunt, the successive defeats of both candidates he endorsed in a Senate race in Alabama actually demonstrated his immense popularity, the coal industry is coming back, Americans are finally free to say “Merry Christmas” without fear of persecution, and legislation that would slash taxes for the rich in general and real estate developers in particular would somehow hurt his bottom line. No matter how often the fact-checkers fact-check him, he doggedly sticks with his alternative facts, as if repeating them enough times would make them real.

The most consequential aspect of President Trump -- like the most consequential aspect of Candidate Trump -- has been his relentless shattering of norms: norms of honesty, decency, diversity, strategy, diplomacy and democracy, norms of what presidents are supposed to say and do when the world is and isn’t watching. It’s a mistake to describe his all-caps rage-tweeting or his endorsement of an accused child molester or his threats to wipe out “Little Rocket Man” as unpresidential, because he is the president. He’s by definition presidential. The norms he’s shattered are by definition no longer norms. His erratic behavior isn’t normal, but it’s inevitably becoming normalized, a predictably unpredictable feature of our global political landscape. It’s how we live now, checking our phones in the morning to get a read on the president’s mood. The American economy is still strong, and he hasn’t started any new wars, so pundits have focused a lot of their hand-wringing on the effect his norm-shattering will have on future leaders, who will be able to cite the Trump precedent if they want to hide their tax returns or use their office to promote their businesses or fire FBI directors who investigate them. But Trump still has three years left in his term. And the norms he’s shattered can’t constrain his behavior now that he’s shattered them.

If the big story of the Trump era is Trump and his unconventional approach to the presidency, two related substories will determine how the main narrative ends. The first is the intense personal and institutional pushback to Trump -- from the otherwise fractious Democratic Party; the independent media; independent judges; special counsel Robert Mueller; advocates for immigrants, voting rights, the poor, the disabled, the environment and other Resistance causes; and ordinary citizens, who have made Trump the least popular first-year president in the modern era.

The second substory is the sometimes grudging but consistent support -- some critics call it complicity -- that Trump has enjoyed from the Republicans who control Congress. The uneasy marriage of convenience between Trump and the congressional GOP explains his two big legislative victories, the confirmation of Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch and the recent $1.5 trillion tax cut. It also explains Capitol Hill’s “see-no-evil” approach to investigating activities that would have triggered endless outrage and probable impeachment hearings in a Hillary Clinton administration.

In fact, this dynamic explains a lot about politics in the Trump era. Trump’s job security depends on support from GOP legislators. Their job security depends on Trump’s base showing up to support them in 2018, and on Trump improving his approval ratings enough to avert a Democratic wave that would bounce them out even if his base does show up to support them in 2018. So after campaigning as an anti-establishment populist, Trump has mostly governed as a partisan corporatist, earning loyalty points from congressional Republicans by stocking his administration with movement conservatives and embracing their unpopular agenda, ditching his promises to protect Medicaid and close tax loopholes for hedge funds while consistently siding with business owners and investors over workers and consumers. Congressional Republicans, even those who once called him unfit to serve, have mostly ignored his antics and even his sporadic attacks on them, kissing his ring in public even as they roll their eyes in private. They’d prefer their tax cuts without the white nationalist retweets, but it’s a package deal.

Anyway, it’s been a whirlwind of a year, a year of the "covfefe" tweet and may more colourful tweets, a year the United States quit the Trans-Pacific Partnership and the Paris climate accord, a year Republicans failed to kill off Obamacare, a year Trump attacked Snoop Dogg and Stephen Curry on Twitter, a year Trump claimed the airport mobs protesting his controversial travel ban were merely travelers stranded by a Delta computer glitch. It was the first and last year in the White House for Trump’s first chief of staff, deputy chief of staff, national security adviser, deputy national security adviser, chief strategist, communications director, press secretary, and, Omorosa’s job title, whatever that was. Trump ran on change in 2016, and he brought change in 2017, not just change from former President Barack Obama but an obsession with undoing all of Obama’s change. In this year-end edition of the Did-It-Matter-Meter, we’ll once again try to rate the immediate impact and potential long-term importance of all Trump’s changes.

The main takeaway, as it has been since Week One, is that Trump’s frenetic activity hasn’t yet transformed the way America works in too many fundamental ways. But it could.

It really could.

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