Donald Trump, the tail [media master] who wags the dog [body politic] of democracy?

John Emerson has recently posed the question: “With all the things wrong with Trump, why is his dumbness the final zinger for so many people? He's brutal and malignant and his goals are all wrong, but what we talk about is his toupee and his IQ” (see this post, where I quote John extensively). I think it’s a very good question, but I don’t know quite what to do with it. That is, it points somewhere, but where?

I note as well, the Dan Drezner has been running a Twitter thread in which he quotes Trump associates talking about him as a young child. It recently reached 1000 tweets. Here’s a recent pair of tweets, but by no means the most recent:

I’ll believe that Trump is growing into the presidency when his staff stops talking about him like a toddler. https://t.co/Rl5DkYTRnW pic.twitter.com/FrkA8HVEjI

— Daniel W. Drezner (@dandrezner) October 20, 2019

The valence is different from that of anti-Trump people, these staffers, after all, have to work with the man and, presumably, they are more or less aligned with him politically. Stupid is one thing, childish another, but they share a core meaning: not a full adult like we are.

And in both cases “we” people who have succeeded by, in Emerson’s words, “testing well, filing applications, and credentialization” and “in the schooled, credentialed world, dumbness is the disqualifying sin.” It’s just that some of us want him out of there, while others are doing all they can to keep in him there and functioning. Trump lives and functions best outside the world of coherent procedures, of rules, regulations, and bureaucracy. In Emerson’s formulation, he’s at home in a world that includes

the managers of the huge slush funds of various kinds: intelligence and propaganda services of various nations, organized crime groups, offshore banking and money launderers. And the world of these slush funds is the lawless, untaxed deregulated world of globalization. Trump knows how to work in this world the way we do not.

It’s a world of pirates and improvisers shooting from the hip, trusting in their gut, and making it up as they go along. It’s a pre-modern social world with modern tools and implements.

That’s one thing. And in Emerson’s view that world is the result of short-sighted decisions by the Doyens of Credentialdom:

America's most wrongheaded moves during my lifetime were made by very smart people from Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, and the U of Chicago -- deregulation, privatization, the militarization of policing, the exemption of big money from taxation, the looting of Russia, the Vietnam and Iraq Wars, and so on.

And, in particular, they’re the ones who created the media world which Trump has been able to master and, in turn, parlay that mastery to the Presidency – even if, perhaps, he didn’t expect to succeed.

Emerson makes light of Trump’s bankruptcies, observing that “they’re normal in his biz.” Perhaps so. I wonder though, if in the end, his real estate business was just a vehicle to build and propagate his personal brand. As long as he hand enough wealth to put on a good front, little else mattered. And once he discovered that he could work the TV screen, everything became secondary to that. Then he discovered he could work the Twitterverse, 140 and then 280 characters at a time.

And that put him in position to use the media to leverage the company’s political system in favor of his personal brand. He’s thus made a wag the dog scenario – remember the movie? – into the current political reality.

What I’m fishing for is the proper way to conceptualize the relationship between his personality and the media-drenched political sphere. Is it that he was the first one to see the possibility? I can think of three movies off the top of my head that deal with this: All the King’s Men, A Face in the Crowd, and Network. The first was based on a book loosely based on a real politician, Huey Long of Louisiana. The demagogic abuse of the media is hardly a new possibility, or fear. It’s been with us since when, the invention of the printing press or not too long after?

Perhaps Trump is simply the first one to pull off this media reversal/takeover at the national level. Well, sure. But why him, why The Donald? That’s what I’m trying to conceptualize. The timing was right? OK. But he saw/smelled a possibility and went after it. It’s one thing to spot a way down field (I’m launching into a football metaphor) when you’re up in the stands with a pair of high-powered binoculars. But how do you spot the opening when you’re on the field as a quarterback or running back? That’s what Trump did, he spotted the opening from the field. Those movies, and by implication other more distant expressions and conceptions, they’re observing the field from the stands. They may see accurately, but you can run with the ball from up there.

OK, that’s enough. Perhaps more later. Check out my post from September 2018, Trumposaurus Rex @ 3QD – Toward a cybernetic interpretation.

Addendum, later in the day: I just took a look at that post. In there make the point that Trump’s post-election combination of daily tweeting and fairly frequent rallies (combined with keeping tabs on his TV profile) is something new and those two activities in tandem put him much closer in touch with this political base. Perhaps THAT’s what different and what gives him the power to wag the dog.

Addendum, 10.23.19: The NYTimes recently published an Op-Ed by an anonymous official within the Trump administration, I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration. This official is in favor of much of what Trump has done, but thinks this about the man himself:

The root of the problem is the president’s amorality. Anyone who works with him knows he is not moored to any discernible first principles that guide his decision making.

Although he was elected as a Republican, the president shows little affinity for ideals long espoused by conservatives: free minds, free markets and free people. At best, he has invoked these ideals in scripted settings. At worst, he has attacked them outright. [...]

From the White House to executive branch departments and agencies, senior officials will privately admit their daily disbelief at the commander in chief’s comments and actions. Most are working to insulate their operations from his whims.

Meetings with him veer off topic and off the rails, he engages in repetitive rants, and his impulsiveness results in half-baked, ill-informed and occasionally reckless decisions that have to be walked back.

“There is literally no telling whether he might change his mind from one minute to the next,” a top official complained to me recently, exasperated by an Oval Office meeting at which the president flip-flopped on a major policy decision he’d made only a week earlier.

What the electoral college hath wrought, 4 "inversions" 1839-2016

In U.S. Presidential races, the popular-vote winner will lose 40% of elections decided by 2 million votes or less. Electoral College "inversions" have been likely since the 1800s, from @MikeGeruso, Dean Spears, and Ishaana Talesara https://t.co/mCxLHGut39 pic.twitter.com/6NmnRvyiVj

— NBER (@nberpubs) September 15, 2019

Trump as King Cyrus, or, The Bible's got a place for all of us

And here's Trump's place:

Cyrus, in case you’ve forgotten, was born in the sixth century B.C.E. and became the first emperor of Persia. Isaiah 45 celebrates Cyrus for freeing a population of Jews who were held captive in Babylon. Cyrus is the model for a nonbeliever appointed by God as a vessel for the purposes of the faithful.

That's from a NYTimes op-ed by Katherine Stewart, Why Trump Reigns as King Cyrus. It continues:

As the Trump presidency falls under siege on multiple fronts, it has become increasingly clear that the so-called values voters will be among the last to leave the citadel. A lot of attention has been paid to the supposed paradox of evangelicals backing such an imperfect man, but the real problem is that our idea of Christian nationalism hasn’t caught up with the reality. We still buy the line that the hard core of the Christian right is just an interest group working to protect its values. But what we don’t get is that Mr. Trump’s supposedly anti-Christian attributes and anti-democratic attributes are a vital part of his attraction.

Today’s Christian nationalists talk a good game about respecting the Constitution and America’s founders, but at bottom they sound as if they prefer autocrats to democrats. In fact, what they really want is a king. “It is God that raises up a king,” according to Paula White, a prosperity gospel preacher who has advised Mr. Trump. [...]

The great thing about kings like Cyrus, as far as today’s Christian nationalists are concerned, is that they don’t have to follow rules. They are the law. This makes them ideal leaders in paranoid times.

And so:

I have attended dozens of Christian nationalist conferences and events over the past two years. And while I have heard plenty of comments casting doubt on the more questionable aspects of Mr. Trump’s character, the gist of the proceedings almost always comes down to the belief that he is a miracle sent straight from heaven to bring the nation back to the Lord. I have also learned that resistance to Mr. Trump is tantamount to resistance to God.

This isn’t the religious right we thought we knew. The Christian nationalist movement today is authoritarian, paranoid and patriarchal at its core. They aren’t fighting a culture war. They’re making a direct attack on democracy itself.

Trump Works the Presidency: Imperial Boss and Cyborg Operator

Another working paper; title above; abstract, contents, and introduction below. Download here:

Academia.edu: https://www.academia.edu/37531960/Trump_Works_the_Presidency_Imperial_Boss_and_Cyborg_Operator
SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3260841

Abstract: One feature of Trump’s Presidency is that he consistently blurs the line between his personal interests and duties and his duties to and responsibility for the nation. This kind of distinction has been dramatized in various works, such as Shakespeare plays (Henry V, Part II) and current TV series, The Crown, and NCIS. General behavior and policies aside, there are two specific mechanisms Trump employs that act to blur that crucial distinction: 1) He issues a constant stream of tweets on political matters and on national policy. 2) He conducts regular campaign-style rallies around the nation. Using these two mechanisms he projects his unbridled Id over the nation, thereby connecting with his “base” and, in effect, fusing with it to form a hybrid cybernetic organ of national control.

Contents

King Tyrant Lizard-in-Chief 2
Trump, Falstaff, and the Queen 3

The Rejection of Falstaff 3
The Humbling of Philip Mountbatten 4

Donald Trump is no Leroy Jethro Gibbs 6

The honor to serve 6
Everything in its place 7
Personal interest vs. public duty 8
What would Donald do? 10
God save the Queen! 11

Feed Me Donald! – Trump, Musk, the Internet, and Monsters from the Id 13

Limbic Resonance 14
Trumposaurus Rising 15
Feed Me Donald 16
Yes, I mistrust those organic metaphors 17

Trumposaurus Rex – Toward a cybernetic interpretation 18
Appendix: Salvation and Democracy, or How One's Personal Relationship with Christ Underwrites Governmental Legitimacy 22

King Tyrant Lizard-in-Chief

This working paper isn’t about President Trump’s politics, his views and policies. It’s about how he runs/enacts/executes the Presidency.

The first two pieces, “Trump, Falstaff, and the Queen” and “Donald Trump is no Leroy Jethro Gibbs”, are about his flagrant disregard for the distinction between his personal interests and responsibilities and his responsibilities and duties to the nation as its president. Shakespeare marks the distinction in Henry V, Part II by having Prince Hal reject his old carousing buddy Falstaff once he’s ascended the throne to become King Henry V. In The Crown Elizabeth enforces the distinction by having her husband bow down before her, in public, during the coronation ceremony. In the last episodes of season seven of NCIS we learn that while he was a Marine sniper Leroy Gibbs (the central character in the show) had murdered a drug lord who was responsible for the deaths of his wife and young daughter. Abby Sciuto, a Forensic Specialist, has discovered this and is reluctant issue a report that would reveal this fact, thereby exposing Gibbs to arrest and trial. Gibbs gives her permission to issue the report.

In each of these cases a character is faced with a decision that pits their duty to a position against deep bonds of personal affection. Prince Hal has had been a close companion to Falstaff for several years. Elizabeth loves her husband and does not want to humiliate him. Abby feels a deep personal loyalty to Gibbs and he, of course, has no desire to go on trial for murder. But he knows what duty demands. This last case is particularly important in this context because NCIS is known to be popular among Trump supporters, who respond to its patriotic sentiment and respect for authority.

The next two pieces, “Feed Me Donald! – Trump, Musk, the Internet, and Monsters from the Id” and “Trumposaurus Rex – Toward a cybernetic interpretation”, are about, if you will, Trump’s procedural innovations, the personal tweet stream and his series of campaign-style rallies. The provocative nature of Trump’s tweets allows him to dominate the 24-hour news cycle and to keep in emotional contact with his base by monitoring the effects of his tweets through Fox News and other programs. The rallies give him an immediate performative buzz, allowing him to bask in the glow of fan approval – for we ARE talking about fans here – and, of course, allows his fans to experience his powers.

At the same time we must realize that Trump is all but powerless in the face of his need for emotional release and fan approval. Equally, there is a sense in which his base is constantly demanding that he feed them with his anger, rage, and, beneath it all, his fear. He needs them, they need him. It is a technologically mediated marriage of convenience. A conversation between Elon Musk and Joe Rogan outlines that cybernetic man-machine hybrid. A clip from the 1986 film, Little Shop of Horrors, illustrates the hunger.

The concluding appendix is about the structure of governmental legitimacy as expressed in The Declaration of Independence. The federal government gets its legitimacy from the people, though the mechanism of voting. The people are endowed with their powers from God. This stands in contrast to a monarchy where the monarch gets their powers directly from God. The mechanisms of government thus depend on the separation of church and state. Though Trump does not claim divine authority, he is quite willing to enact policies that erode the distinction between church and state. And, of course, his mode of governance is perhaps close to that of the authoritarian monarch than that of any previous president. That mode comes into play through his inability to distinguish between his private person and his role as president and it is amplified by his tweets and rallies.

Learned Helplessness and Voter Apathy

In view of recent developments in presidential politics I've decided to bump this 2012 post to the top of the queue.

* * * * * 

This is rude and crude. Don't know whether or not I believe it. But it's worth thinking about. Bleg: Does anyone know of anything along these lines, pro or con, that's well thought-out and documented?

There are things that are important to us, and things that are not. There are things that we can control, and things that we cannot. Our ability, or not, to control unimportant things is of little consequence. It is otherwise with our ability to control important things.

We cannot control the weather, for example, not very much. Nor can we control the fact that we, and everyone we know, is going to die. Yes, we may have some limited control over the timing and circumstances but the fact of death itself is beyond our control.

So how do we deal with those things that are enormously important to us, but which we cannot control?

Learned Helplessness

I want to come back to that, but for now let’s set it aside and think about learned helplessness, a phenomenon identified by Martin Seligman and his colleagues in the late 1960s. Here’s a typical experiment as explained in the Wikipedia entry:

In Part 1 of Seligman and Steve Maier's experiment, three groups of dogs were placed in harnesses. Group 1 dogs were simply put in the harnesses for a period of time and later released. Groups 2 and 3 consisted of "yoked pairs." A dog in Group 2 would be intentionally subjected to pain by being given electric shocks, which the dog could end by pressing a lever. A Group 3 dog was wired in series with a Group 2 dog, receiving shocks of identical intensity and duration, but his lever didn't stop the electric shocks. To a dog in Group 3, it seemed that the shock ended at random, because it was his paired dog in Group 2 that was causing it to stop. For Group 3 dogs, the shock was apparently "inescapable." Group 1 and Group 2 dogs quickly recovered from the experience, but Group 3 dogs learned to be helpless, and exhibited symptoms similar to chronic clinical depression.

That is to say, the dogs in Groups 1 and 2 did not appear to be depressed. The experiment had a second part:

In Part 2 of the Seligman and Maier experiment, these three groups of dogs were tested in a shuttle-box apparatus, in which the dogs could escape electric shocks by jumping over a low partition. For the most part, the Group 3 dogs, who had previously learned that nothing they did had any effect on the shocks, simply lay down passively and whined. Even though they could have easily escaped the shocks, the dogs didn't try.

Trump, Oprah and the New American Monarchy?

In the wake of assertions that Oprah, you know, should, um, err, run for president, I’ve been thinking about the United Kingdom (aka Great Britain). It’s a constitutional monarchy. The monarch is head of state, but has no responsibilities for governance, while the prime minister is head of the government. The monarch symbolizes the nation while the prime minister gets things done. The American presidency combines those two functions.

Trump, however, has not been particularly adept at getting things done. He has not prior experience in government, is not at all suited to the demands of the presidency, and apparently didn’t really want the job in the first place. He is, in effect, a largely symbolic head of state – though the majority of his citizens did not elect him (but then, the British monarch isn’t elected either) – who talks about making America great again while leaving governance, if not to change, to a poorly coordinated congeries of underlings of varying degrees of incompetence. That is, under Trump the functions of head of state and head of governance are being pried apart with governance, alas, being largely headless.

And now, along comes Oprah with a stirring speech at the Golden Globes. Now she’s being put forward as a candidate for the presidency. It seems to me that, in effect, she’s being put forward as a candidate for a head of state position that’s only loosely coupled with head of governance. THAT’s what the Trump presidency is doing. Decoupling the two functions.

Oprah is a more attractive person than Trump is. But we have no particularly good reason to think she would be effective at governance. Would she appoint more competent staff? Probably. Would he nominations to high level posts be more competent? Likely so, if only because she will have been thinking about it and working on it.

But still, is this what we want, a separation between head of state and head of governance, with the latter function being basically catch as catch can? More to the point, is this what we’re stuck with given the current media environment? Has the carefully calibrated system of checks and balances been broken, permanently?

75% Americans are afraid of government corruption

In The Smithsonian:

For the third year in a row, corruption of government officials has topped the list—only this year it jumped 13 percentage points, from 60.6 percent of Americans identifying themselves as afraid of government corruption in 2016, to a whopping 74.5 percent being afraid of the same in 2017.

“Our previous lists had more to do with disasters and crime, and that naturally lent itself to the type of messaging [about crime] we’re doing,” Bader says. “The list this year is fundamentally different in the sense that it’s showing a great fear of some of the things happening in this presidency.”

Fear of North Korea using weapons came in at number nine on the list, with 44.9 percent marking themselves as being afraid. The survey has been asking about nuclear attacks since it first started; this is the first year North Korea was listed specifically. “It’s very difficult to curb people’s fears about North Korea when frankly, North Korea and how it’s being addressed is very scary,” says Bader.

Another first this year was environmental concerns appearing in the top ten list of fears, of which there were four: pollution of oceans rivers and lakes; pollution of drinking water; global warming/climate change; and air pollution. And the survey was conducted before Hurricanes Harvey and Maria and the ongoing California wildfire crisis, with questions sent out from June 28 to July 7. The researchers ascribe the increased environmental fears to media coverage of President Trump’s decision to withdraw from the Paris Climate Agreement and cut funding to the Environmental Protection Agency, as well as coverage of the lead in the tap water in Flint, Michigan.

H/t 3QD.

Over the weekend the Nacirema Nationals trounced the Trumptastic Bombers

Sunday was the most important sports day since Ali decided not to fight in Vietnam.

–Richard Lapchick, Director
Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport, 

in The New York Times

The Trumpistas went up against the Nacirema and were creamed. How's this going to work out? What makes the question an interesting one is that many Trumptistas are also partisans of the Nacirema ( = "America" spelled backward). I grew up in Western PA, Trump country, but also football country. It'll be interesting to see how this works out. Will Trump double-down after his defeat by the NFL? Will the players persist? What of the owners, many of whom are Trump partisans?

Across the Nation

Writing in The New York Times (Sept 24, 2017) Ken Belson reports:

On three teams, nearly all the football players skipped the national anthem altogether. Dozens of others, from London to Los Angeles, knelt or locked arms on the sidelines, joined by several team owners in a league normally friendly to President Trump. Some of the sport’s biggest stars joined the kind of demonstration they have steadfastly avoided.

It was an unusual, sweeping wave of protest and defiance on the sidelines of the country’s most popular game, generated by Mr. Trump’s stream of calls to fire players who have declined to stand for the national anthem in order to raise awareness of police brutality and racial injustice.

What had been a modest round of anthem demonstrations this season led by a handful of African-American players mushroomed and morphed into a nationwide, diverse rebuke to Mr. Trump, with even some of his staunchest supporters in the N.F.L., including several owners, joining in or condemning Mr. Trump for divisiveness.

However:

But the acts of defiance received a far more mixed reception from fans, both in the stadiums and on social media, suggesting that what were promoted as acts of unity might have exacerbated a divide and dragged yet another of the country’s institutions into the turbulent cross currents of race and politics.

At Lincoln Financial Field in Philadelphia, videos posted on social media showed some Eagles fans yelling at anti-Trump protesters holding placards. At MetLife Stadium in East Rutherford, N.J., before the Jets played the Dolphins, many fans, a majority of them white, said they did not support the anthem protests but also did not agree with the president’s view that players should be fired because of them.

Moreover, there is a rule:

The Steelers, along with the Tennessee Titans and the Seattle Seahawks, who were playing each other and similarly skipped the anthem, broke a league rule requiring athletes to be present for the anthem, though a league executive said they would not be penalized.

In other sports:

In a tweet Friday, Mr. Trump disinvited the Golden State Warriors, the N.B.A. champions, to any traditional White House visit, after members of the team, including its biggest star, Stephen Curry, were critical of him. But on Sunday, the N.H.L. champion Pittsburgh Penguins said they would go to the White House, and declared such visits to be free of politics.

Nascar team owners went a step further, saying they would not tolerate drivers who protested during the anthem.

American Ritual

If you google “football as ritual” you’ll come up with a bunch of hits. It’s a natural. It’s played in special purpose-build facilities and the players wear specialized costumes. The teams have totemic mascots and the spectators will wear team colors and emblems of the totem. Ritual chants are uttered throughout the game and there’s lots of music and spectacle. I could go on and on, but you get the idea. When anthropologists go to faraway places and see people engaging in such activities they call it ritual. We call it entertainment. It’s both.

While not everyone actually plays football, a very large portion (mostly male) of the population has done so at one time in their life. When I was in secondary school touch football was one of the required activities in boys gym class. Those who don’t play the game participate vicariously as spectators. The game is associated with various virtues and so participating contributes to moral development.

Other sports are like this as well and other sports have been involved in anti-Trumpista activity. But let’s stick to football as that’s where most of the action has been so far.

Lawfare on impeachment in the context of the contemporary presidency

Bob Bauer (former White House Counsel to President Obama) observes:

The presidency in its current form is, in many respects, something of a constitutional absurdity. We entrust the occupant to wisely exercise vast powers, but the barriers to entry into competition for this office have been virtually eliminated. Provided that he or she meets basic constitutional qualifications—for example, age—anyone can run. The aspirants are not required to submit to any formal screening or peer review. The political parties may have once performed a function like that, but now they do not: They host the event but have no control over the invitation list because a candidate wishing to participate can invite himself. Now it is largely up to the press and the operation of fierce political competition to ferret out disqualifying information, and to get this job done in the compressed period after a candidate becomes serious and undergoes the fullest, most sustained scrutiny. We hope for the best.

Even the availability of resources limits the field only so much. Often a little press buzz and a good showing in Iowa, in whatever order that occurs, are enough to launch a relatively low-budget and improbable candidacy well into the later stages of the primary election process—and sometimes all the way to the nomination.

So informal mechanisms for judging worthiness are all there is to go on, and these are only so reliable. It is precisely the candidate with little prior experience in public life and the scrutiny that goes with it who may stand the best chance—as an “outsider”—of advancing well into the process.

They didn't contemplate such things back in the 18th Century, when the Constitution was formulated and adopted as the foundational laws of the land:

While not a step to be taken lightly, or routinely, the “dreadfulness” of removal can be gauged only with reference to the office as it stands, in relation to the processes by which candidates compete for it. If someone not “viable” does slip through the crazy-quilt process, then the impeachment process is a safeguard, the use of which should not stand or fall on whether the new president committed his crimes and misdemeanors before taking the oath of office.

Of course, not all 18th-century assumptions and precedents built on them need be discarded, but there is also no virtue in disregarding the 21st-century realities of institutional and political change. And while impeachment might well remain an extraordinary remedy, it does not follow that it must be viewed as inevitably a constitutionally catastrophic outcome to be avoided if at all possible. In fact, the constitutional catastrophe could well be an entirely outdated understanding of impeachment. This is a useful question to be debated now, and it is an important one without regard to the specific case of Donald Trump.

The Perpetual Election?

For some time now the American presidential election has run on for a year or more, staring in the year prior to the actual election with trial balloons and such. I’m wondering if the Trump Legacy will be a perpetual election.

Trump himself continues with election-style rallies, has done more of the than press conferences. His private Twitter stream seems more of a piece with an election, in which candidates are acting as private individuals aspiring to office. His hunger for positive PR is, of course, perpetual. I suppose all presidents want to be linked in some measure, but Trump’s hunger is something else.

Finally, I keep reading these stories about how Pence is thinking about 2020. What about Hillary and Bernie and Warren and Zuckerberg? You gotta’ be kidding!

Is that where we’re headed, to the all-the-time presidential election season, just one long exhausting ritual bash?

"Lawfare" comes of age [@lawfareblog]

I first became aware of Lawfare through a wonderful March 3 post by Benjamin Wittes and Quinta Jurecic, What Happens When We Don’t Believe the President’s Oath? It seems that a lot of people discovered Lawfare about the same time and its readership has blossomed until

Today is the day and this morning is the morning during which @lawfareblog's 2017 traffic will pass that of the site's whole prior history. pic.twitter.com/cq2cAflZd3

— Benjamin Wittes (@benjaminwittes) July 14, 2017

Obviously it is the Presidency of Donald Trump that made Lawfare's commentary so salient. Trump's bull-in-a-china-shop style begged for informed legal analysis, and Lawfare was there to provide it.

Congratulations Ben Wittes, Robert Chesney, Jack Goldsmith and the rest of the team!

Let's further blur the line between the Presidency and DJT

Brilliant. There's a new Twitter bot that turns Trump's tweets into official White House statements. https://t.co/1wV6McVqZW

— Kyle Griffin (@kylegriffin1) June 5, 2017

See this post: Trump, the person (DJT) versus the role (POTUS).

Trump, the person (DJT) versus the role (POTUS)

Lawfare’s Quinta Jurecic has a new post up, A New Jurisprudence for an Oathless Presidency, in which she considers, as she has in earlier posts, the judicial fate of Trump’s travel ban. Her discussion turns “on whether the judiciary can permissibly consider off-the-cuff statements made by Trump and his associates as evidence of religious animus in the drafting of the executive orders,” a matter which may soon end up before the Supreme Court. The issue is the intent of the order and what constitutes legitimate evidence of that intend.

Heretofore the practice has been to ignore such “off-the-cuff statements” (including Presidential tweets) because, in effect, they are merely personal statements and cannot be taken to reflect the intention of actions taken in the name of the Presidency. For reasons Jurecic has stated before and reiterates here, the courts are now allowing such statements to be taken into evidence. There is the opinion that Trump himself does not make a firm distinction between his personal interests and opinions and the Presidency and therefore the courts cannot treat his actions in the ordinary way.

And so Jurecic ends up here:

And examining Trump’s campaign-trail and presidential statements on the travel ban—an examination the majority considers permissible under McCreary—the court finds the national security rationale behind the travel ban to have been proffered in bad faith. (In her concurrence, Judge Stephanie Thacker reaches the same conclusion only on the basis of post-inauguration statements by Trump, having reasoned that candidate Trump’s comments are not appropriately considered.)

There are certainly disagreements to be had with this analysis. (Judge Niemeyer, for example, argues that it substantially misapplies both Mandel and Din. On Lawfare, Peter Margulies and Josh Blackman have made similar points.) But if the courts are going to write a new jurisprudence for an oathless presidency into the law, Mandel and Din actually make for a very natural place to start. Both literally concern the question of “bad faith,” the same question raised by whether the courts can trust Trump’s fidelity to his oath. To put it another way, the cases are an expression of the “presumption of regularity,” the idea that we can usually trust public officials to do their duty. And as the Trump administration is discovering, that presumption of regularity is only a presumption, which courts can waive in extraordinary circumstances.

If the majority—along with the number of other courts that have ruled against both the original and the revised travel ban—is crafting a new body of law for a new kind of presidency outside the presumption of regularity, why not say so explicitly? I suspect that many onlookers sympathetic to the plaintiffs but concerned by the charge into uncharted legal territory might be comforted by a direct acknowledgement of the dynamics at work here, but the rhetorical signposts of blindness and sight may be as close as the courts can comfortably get. It may be a question of wanting to step lightly or to avoid further accusations of making up law from whole cloth. Or perhaps some of the judges ruling against the ban are seeing through a glass darkly, and may not themselves be entirely aware of the implications.

That’s what’s interesting, that the judges may be “crafting a new body of law for a new kind of presidency” and this is being done is full view of the public. At the center of this action we have the distinction between a person, in this case Donald J. Trump, and the status that person occupies, the presidency of the United States.

That distinction, of course, is quite general and applies to all manner of organizational life, both public and private, and not just to the presidency. The idea of a meritocracy, for example, depends on the distinction. One succeeds in an organization based on one’s competence and accomplishments, not on one’s attachments to kith and kin. Is the Trump presidency going to unfold as a morality play about that distinction?

Jurecic concludes:

Courts regularly rely on legal fictions and simplifications, which are what make it possible to map the reasoned structure of law onto a chaotic and unreasonable world. There is nothing wrong or unusual about this. The difference here is that the bizarre facts of the travel ban cases and the bad faith at the core of Trump’s presidency have exacerbated—to the point of absurdity—the gap between the abstract legal questions at play under existing doctrine and the facts at the ground. The situation recalls Thomas Kuhn’s description of scientific crisis, in which an existing paradigm of thought begins to lose its ability to explain and predict the shape of things. We may be at that point now—where the paradigm of deference to the executive in national security without reference to the integrity of the president’s oath is clearly faltering but the jurisprudence of an oathless presidency has yet to fully emerge.

* * * * *

You might want to look at an earlier article by Jurecic, Body Double: What Medieval Executive Theory Tells Us About Trump’s Twitter Accounts, where she says:

The astute reader will instinctively see what I’m driving at here: President Trump’s two Twitter accounts. Indeed, I want to propose here almost entirely with a straight face that the relationship between the @POTUS and @realDonaldTrump accounts is the new manifestation of a very old dynamic. That is, the distinction between @POTUS and @realDonaldTrump is the distinction between the office and the person who fills it, what we might call the President’s “Twitter politic” and his “Twitter natural.”

You might also want to review a post I made shortly after the election, The Crown and the Presidency, 2016, in which I discuss the Netflix series, The Crown, and point out that one of the central themes of that series, at least in its first season, is the distinction between the person, Elizabeth, and the status she came to occupy, Queen of England.

Working for 45

Jack Goldsmith has an interesting article at Lawfare: How Hard Is It to Work for President Trump? The problem arises, of course, because Trump spews forth an endless stream of lies, bull shit, and mere exaggerations. Goldsmith notes, "Most senior Executive branch officials see themselves to work for both the President and the nation (or the American people)." With a man like Trump, just how does that go?

Of Comey (FBI) and Rogers (NSA) Goldsmith notes:

...they are both non-political appointees who lead agencies with missions largely independent of the White House. They likely see their jobs as detached from the goings-on in the White House, except to the extent that the White House becomes caught up in the FBI investigation of Russian interference in the election. I also expect that Comey and Rogers believe it is important to stay in their jobs out of commitment to the agencies they serve, and in order to minimize our unconventional President’s damage to their agencies and to national security more generally.

Mattis (Defense) and Kelley (Homeland) are likely similar.

And then we have 45's staff, such as Priebus (Chief of Staff) and McGahn (WH Counsel):

... much of the work of these officials amounts to little more than enabling and protecting the President, personally and politically. That becomes a problem when the enabling and protecting comes in the service of mendacity or in a way inextricable from mendacity.

A good deal of the daily work by these officials in the White House, in other words, is a lower-key version of the work of Sean Spicer, who compromises himself daily in order to prop up the president’s lies and destructive actions. I imagine that these officials have the hardest time telling themselves (and others) a story about why their services are needed to minimize the damage Trump is causing, for these are the officials whose jobs are largely devoted to empowering the President...These jobs will likely grow harder and harder if the Trump presidency continues to accomplish so little, especially if the FBI investigations begin to absorb White House political and legal attention. And these are the jobs about which it will be harder to explain later why one continued in the job after it was clear that the President one worked so hard to support was so unworthy of his office.

Trump: The Man, the Oath, the Presidency

In the course of a discussion over at Marginal Revolution, prior_test2 linked to a most interesting post at Lawfare by Benjamin Wittes and Quinta Jurecic entitled “What Happens When We Don’t Believe the President’s Oath?” As title suggests, it centers on the President’s Oath of Office, which is quite brief: “I do solemnly swear . . . that I will faithfully execute the office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.” Their point is that it is this oath that links the private individual, Donald J. Trump, to the public office, President of the United States, and thereby both binds him to that office and separates his private interests and concerns from that office.

Alas:

There’s only one problem with Trump’s eligibility for the office he now holds: The idea of Trump’s swearing this or any other oath “solemnly” is, not to put too fine a point on it, laughable—as more fundamentally is any promise on his part to “faithfully” execute this or any other commitment that involves the centrality of anyone or anything other than himself.

Indeed, a person who pauses to think about the matter has good reason to doubt the sincerity of Trump’s oath of office, or even his capacity to swear an oath sincerely at all. We submit that huge numbers of people—including important actors in our constitutional system—have not even paused to consider it; they are instinctively leery of Trump’s oath and are now behaving accordingly.

And so:

...the presidential oath is actually the glue that holds together many of our system’s functional assumptions about the presidency and the institutional reactions to it among actors from judges to bureaucrats to the press. When large enough numbers of people within these systems doubt a president’s oath, those assumptions cease operating. They do so without anyone’s ever announcing, let alone ruling from the bench, that the President didn’t satisfy the Presidential Oath Clause and thus is not really president. They just stop working—or they work a lot less well.

By way of clarification:

There’s a big, if somewhat ineffable, difference between opposing a president and not believing his oath of office. All presidents face opposition, some of it passionate, extreme, and delegitimizing. All presidents face questions about their motives and integrity. Hating the President is a very old tradition, and many presidents face at least some suggestion that their oaths do not count. Obama, after all, was a foreign-born Muslim to his most extreme detractors.

Yet, for a variety of reasons we discuss below, there is something different about the questions about Trump’s oath, and it is how widespread and mainstream the anxiety is. It’s also, and we want to be frank about this, how reasonable the anxiety is when applied to a man whose word one cannot take at face value on the prepolitical trust the oath represents. That person does not get certain presumptions our system normally attaches to presidential conduct.

And so we have:

On the contrary, the belief that there is something different about this president is extraordinarily common among sober commentators of both the left and right—and, even more notably, among many of those with significant experience in government in both career and political roles.

So why the doubts? For one thing, Trump’s highly erratic statements and behavior include any number of incidents that seem to reflect a lack of understanding of his office or its weight. It’s not just the tweets. This is a person, after all, who suggested before the election that he might not even serve as president if he prevailed; who then said that he would accept the results of the election “if I win”; who made up a whole lot of voter fraud; who promised to prosecute his opponent; who, in his first public address following the inauguration, stood in front of the CIA’s Memorial Wall and bragged falsely about the number of people who attended his inaugural ceremony; who has made use of the immense power of the bully pulpit to publicly complain about the “unfair” decision by a private retail company to drop his daughter’s fashion line; who approached the process of selecting a Secretary of State, National Security Advisor, and nominee to the Supreme Court in a manner more fit for reality television than the office of the presidency; who refused to accept responsibility for the death of a Navy SEAL in a botched counterterrorism raid conducted on his orders, claiming instead that “this was something they [the generals] wanted to do,” before standing in front of Congress and apparently ad-libbing that the SEAL was looking down with happiness from Heaven because Trump received extended applause during his address; and whose most memorable quotation coming out of the presidential campaign was the inimitable, “Grab ‘em by the pussy”—a phrase he then dismissed as “locker room talk.”

Moral seriousness and respect for his office just isn’t his thing.

This is also a person whose campaign was rife with promises to commit crimes and to abuse the powers of the very office for which he then took the oath.

The combination of the sprawling nature of his business and the intentional obscurity of his finances is also a factor.

Ezra Klein interviews Elizabeth Drew about Trump

This is a superb interview. Well worth listening two, all 73 minutes of it.

Elizabeth Drew is the author of Washington Journal, one of my favorite books about Watergate. Drew covered the story as a reporter for the New Yorker, and the book emerges from the real-time, journalistic diary she kept amidst the chaos. As such, it does something no other Watergate book does: tells the story not as a tidy tale with a clear beginning and inevitable end, but as an experience thick with confusion, rumors, alarm, and half-truths.

Of late, I've heard a lot of people comparing the early days of Donald Trump's administration — with the strange scandals around Russia, the fast resignation of Trump's national Security Advisor, and the mounting pressure for investigation — with Watergate. And so I asked Drew, who is now a writer at the New York Review of Books, to provide some perspective on whether that comparison makes sense, and how to think about the Trump scandals that are unfolding, slowly and haltingly, right now.

Books:

-Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America
-Andrew Schlesinger’s The Age of Jackson

Drew emphasizes that, whatever Trump is, it's something we've not seen before, so comparisons with Watergate are of relatively little value. Her sense is that it, whatever it is, can't be sustained for four years. But she's unwilling to speculate about what will bring it to a stop. We've got to let it unfold. Not that we should be passive, but simply that we cannot prejudge how to act and react. It's a new phenomenon.

Donald Trump: Pop Star as President

If Elvis Presley had been elected President of the United States, what kind of president would he have been? We now know: Trumpian. If Michael Jackson had been elected President of the United States, what kind of president would he have been? We now know: Trumpian. As far as I know these two musicians never had political aspirations – though a pill-addicted Presley once tried to cajole Richard Nixon into appointing him as anti-drug ambassador to the nation’s youth – but, like Trump, they lived in the public eye and they lived within an entourage of associates and ‘minders’ who kept the world at bay.

Secure in this circle, the star could do whatever he wanted, as long as the money kept coming in. For Presley and Jackson the money was driven by record sales and ticket sales. THAT was the connection with the world at large. They gift the world with music and the world gifts them with money. As long as those things are roughly in balance, the beat went on, more or less. Sure, there’s also the personal quirks, indulgences, and localized craziness that fueled the gossip rags of all media. But as long as the money train stayed on the rails the rest was just noise. The entourage could handle it. Until the drugs got out of control and the entourage was useless.

Pre-Presidential Trump is a more complicated case. Initially, and with the help of Daddy’s money and contacts – little Donald was born to an entourage – he made his money in real estate development. He did deals, face-to-face. Then, over time, he transitioned to a franchise operation and a TV star. Showbiz! But, as with Elvis and Michael, as long as the money came in, nothing else mattered. A little scandal here and there – and as far as we know, The Donald has never been into anything comparable to Elvis’s pill habit or Michael’s cosmetic adventurism and child fetishism – but it’s just noise.

Now that he’s President, things have changed. Drastically. Money is no longer his connection to the world. To be sure, he’s still holding on to his vast business empire – Yuge, I tell you, Yuge! The best! – though he’s distanced himself from it by the length of a pinky. But, and here’s the crucial point, that business empire is no longer his lever on reality. That’s not how he judges his personal efficacy any more. Let me repeat that, with emphasis: That’s NOT how he judges his PERSONAL sense of efficacy.

Now that he’s president his personal sense of efficacy is linked to his acts as president. And that’s not working out so well. He’s finding out that, at every level and in every way, the world is not willing to jump at his command. In particular, the media isn’t presenting a picture of his actions and efficacy that is consonant with his intentions. All of a sudden we have a comedian (John Oliver) placing educational ads on his favorite TV shows – fake commercials full of true facts! Trump’s image in the media was one thing when his world centered on his ability to generate a money stream; in that context it played a secondary and subsidiary role – all PR is good PR. Now that that income stream has been shifted into a secondary role, all he’s got left is the media flow.

He signs executive orders and he expects the media to show him how dynamic, forceful, and all-around-wonderful he is. And, remember, this is now the main event. When the media doesn’t comply. What does he do? He goes on TV and delivers a 77 minute rant against media.

How long can he keep this up?

Who’s afraid of the Big Bad Trump? – “You need some of the major institutions to be with you”

Mark Schmitt in conversation with Robert Wright, Bloggingheads.tv, January 5, 2016. Late in the conversation Wright asks: “Are you concerned about the authoritarianism?” Here’s Schmitt’s response (c. 48:35):

Schmitt: I hate to say I’m not, because obviously all those impulses are there. I think the discipline to do it isn’t there. I was thinking the other day, again...Again, if you’re going to be a systematic fascist or a systematic authoritarian, you need some of the major institutions to be with you. You either need public opinion, which he won’t have. You need the military, which he won’t have. You need the sort of ‘deep state’ intelligence apparatus, which he’s alienated and won’t have.

You need the corporate sector in a big way, which I don’t think he’ll have. I think the games he’s playing with corporations are just too abusive to them. He’s bullied and then suddenly messed with the stock price of both Boeing and Lockheed-Martin in the last few weeks. I don’t think they take well to that. I don’t think they’re interested in being part of a fascist-authoritarian state. I think they’re interested in being part of a dynamic globalized global economy, unless they’re like Wilbur Ross* and they’re just bottom feeders. [...]

He’s not going to have enough of Congress to back him up on an authoritarian-fascist direction. So I don’t think you can be a solo fascist. From everything we know about fascism, the conditions [aren’t really here].

The whole conversation is worth listening to.

* Trump has picked Ross for Secretary of Commerce. From Wikipedia:

Wilbur Louis Ross, Jr. (born November 28, 1937) is an American investor, and former banker, known for restructuring failed companies in industries such as steel, coal, telecommunications, foreign investment and textiles. He specializes in leveraged buyouts and distressed businesses. As of August 2014, Forbes magazine lists Ross as one of the world's billionaires with a net worth of $2.9 billion.

"The nation-state is a failing institution"

That line is from a long post that Tim Burke has recently written, The Anatomy of Anti-Trumpism: Ten Thoughts and Reconsiderations. That's in the 9th of his ten thought, “What is uniquely wrong with America?”. All ten thoughts are worth reading, but that ninth one is something of a hobby-horse of mine, so I'm going to quote it in full:

There’s some elements of legitimate American exceptionalism littered in the last year’s events, but American progressives are not going to really understand what’s going on nor effectively react to it unless or until they grasp how much of this is a global story. The deeper story is that the nation-state is a failing institution. It cannot deliver what people all around the planet believe it has promised to deliver, not in its present form. Progressive or liberal political parties all around the globe gave up on delivering social democracy in a sustained way except in a handful of northern European nation-states during the 1980s and 1990s, and generally now run on the premise that they would be better-trained managers of systems that they have no desire to fundamentally reform or change. All over the globe that has become an unconvincing, pallid electoral strategy that generally appeals only to people who see themselves as better-trained managers of their own institutions, and to the people who are their social clients and dependents. Conservative or reactionary parties have gained ground because they offer some grander vision, because they promise (however transparently falsely) to radically reform or abolish failed systems, because they cross social boundaries that progressives no longer cross. I think this is very similar to how Islamist parties made inroads in cases like the coup-cancelled 1992 election in Algeria–not necessarily because people were drawn in positive terms to their message, but because they were the only viable reformist alternatives to business as usual.

A global perspective could help progressives to understand why they are losing ground everywhere. It is not, a la Jonathan Haidt, because conservatism is cognitively natural to human beings. It is that late 19th Century institutions are not working well for 21st Century humanity. If you want to gain political ground, you have to stop incrementalist tinkering around the edges of those institutions. Progressives everywhere stick to that, even people fairly far to the left, because they are the major remaining beneficiaries of those poorly functioning institutions. We need a new set of political aspirations that take us beyond our limitations.

Tyler Cowen on Trump the Deal-Maker as President

Writing in Bloomberg View, Cowen explains:

One common feature of many real estate deals is that they are based on selling to different groups of people at different prices, but in sequence. Say a developer has produced a series of office buildings, condominiums and town homes to be sold, or hotel rooms to be rented out. It is common practice to sell (or rent) the more desirable units first at relatively high prices. As units leave the market, new lower-valuation buyers are recruited for cheaper and lower-quality units. Finally, as the process nears its end, there may be a kind of fire sale to clear out the remaining items and finish up the project. If pulled off successfully, this will yield a lot of profit for the developer.

So, Trump has the ability to approve (or veto) tax cuts, and the Republicans really want tax cuts:

So Trump might “sell” this asset to congressional Republicans for a high price, for instance support for infrastructure spending, approval of his appointments and an acceptable compromise on international trade and foreign affairs.

And so on through a variety of "high value" programs where Trump "probably doesn’t have strong, detailed preferences over how exactly to govern." Cowen figures Trump cuts deals like these in the first year or two – "while the Republican majority remains secure" – and then approaches the Democrats to "offer them some lesser deals at lower prices." So:

If Trump, perhaps working with his daughter Ivanka, crafted a reasonable federal child-care or preschool policy, many Democrats would jump on board. They wouldn’t become Trump supporters in return, but they would moderate their criticism, as they would have a victory to take home to their voters.

In short, the second half of the Trump administration might consist of Trump offering a series of smaller but still significant trades to Democrats, taking care to bring along some Republican votes as well.

Cowen then imagines a fourth year in which Trump deals "climate change legislation and a higher federal minimum wage to Democrats and a smattering of swing-district Republicans".

Could it happen? Who knows?