A Show about Nothing

By Kevin D. Williamson

Sunday, April 30, 2017

There is a reality-television program called American Pickers, and what happens on it is this: A junkman drives around in a van and offers to buy other people’s junk, sometimes haggling over the price. The supporting characters are assistant junkmen and sundry onlookers. It is as though someone decided to remake Sanford and Son without actors, Redd Foxx’s humor, or a plot.

(Or that nifty theme music.)

Its popularity is as inexplicable as it is undeniable.

Because nothing actually happens on American Pickers, the show relies on the illusion of action, which is created through camerawork and editing. Junkman offers $x for a quantity of junk; Junk-Haver produces a look of concentration. The camera cuts quickly back and forth among the faces of Junkman, Deputy Junkman, Assistant Deputy Junkman, Junk-Haver, and Sundry Junk-Having Onlookers. And then there is a commercial for erection pills.

The application to the first 100 days of the Trump administration is of course obvious.

President Donald J. Trump is a creature of reality television. He may not be very good at running hotels or casinos, but he is a gifted performer, a master of creating the illusion of action. As he marks his first 100 days in office (one day of a Trump presidency would have been incredible enough), what has President Trump actually done?

There is the confirmation of Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court. For that, the church bells should be rung. The Gorsuch confirmation represents a genuine and genuinely important political victory. That victory belongs to Mitch McConnell, the wily Republican leader in the Senate who understood that Barack Obama was an even lamer duck than he seemed and took the opportunity to hand an abusive and overreaching administration a political defeat of a kind never before dealt to an American president. Well done, Senator McConnell. And well done, whoever had the job of explaining to Donald Trump what a Gorsuch is and keeping the president’s batty sister off the nation’s highest court.

What else you got?

Trump made a “solemn vow” that on his first day in office, he would label China a currency manipulator and slap sanctions on Beijing. A few weeks later, he reversed course, because — we have the president’s own word on this — somebody explained the issue to him. Solemn vows are not Donald Trump’s thing.

Trump repeatedly promised that the woefully misnamed Affordable Care Act would be repealed, and that this would be among his first actions in office. A few weeks later, he reversed course, because  — we have the president’s own word on this — somebody explained the issue to him. “Nobody knew health care could be so complicated!” he said. As with many things Trump says, that is not quite true. It is not the case that nobody knew health care is complicated. Pretty much everybody who has given two seconds’ thought to the issue, read a copy of the Wall Street Journal (Hello, Mrs. Clinton!), or stood within 25 feet of Avik Roy knows that health care is complicated. Pretty much everybody but the reality-television host who was duly elected president of these United States knew that.

President Trump is not a details guy.

There was going to be a wall paid for by Mexico. What there will be is some additional border fencing that Trump promises “eventually, at a later date, in some way” will be paid for by Mexico. We do not have the president’s word on this, but it seems likely that somebody explained that issue to him, too, things like how rivers work and what private property is, not to mention the niggling fact that most illegals do not enter the United States by wading across the Rio Grande or enter illegally at all.

Trump’s promised schedule was always absurd. And presidential candidates often make absurd promises about their first 100 days, forgetting about such minor details as Congress and the Constitution and democracy and all that. But Trump was, he assured us, a different kind of politician, a builder and a doer, a winner, a hard-charging negotiator. Which is to say, he convinced the electorate that he was in reality the character he plays on television. Many of his talk-radio and cable-news partisans are still trying to convince us that is the case, but it is not entirely clear that these reality-show performers are able to tell the difference between the political theater and the theater, between action and acting.

Instead of hard choices and committed action, what Trump has produced is a flurry of shallow gestures that create the illusion that he is doing something meaningful. But those executive orders range from the shoddy and unusable to the symbolic. He produced a “Buy American” executive order without quite seeming to understand that the Buy American Act already is law and has been since the administration of Herbert Hoover. Trump’s “Buy American” guidance is essentially a memo to federal agency heads asking them to think really hard about it before issuing one of the Buy American Act waivers that they routinely hand down in order to get around the fact that the Buy American Act rules are deeply stupid and entirely unpractical. He met with some business leaders and announced that he had saved jobs by preventing a great deal of outsourcing that never was actually scheduled to happen. He made a lot of noise about saving the coal industry without taking into account that what is killing it is the natural-gas industry.

He installed a bunch of amateurs in the White House, including family members, none of whom has any particular experience or talent related to the portfolios given them. He abominated Goldman Sachs and then hired half of its old-timers league.

He has produced a vague and half-baked tax plan that many of his fellow Republicans have said they cannot support. He can’t hire people or figure out what he thinks about China, Syria, or the Russians whose shenanigans are plaguing some of the associates he would dearly like to forget. He threatened to pull out of NAFTA, which he does not have the legal power to do on his own, and then announced that he’d be renegotiating the trade accord without ever having said which of its provisions he objects to — or, indeed, ever publicly describing any of its provisions or the trade rules that it created.

Trump’s first 100 days are a bust. For the next 100, Republicans should try something else: Having Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell send him useful and responsible pieces of legislation to sign. These need not be dramatic and far-reaching: In fact, it would be better if they were not. Send him a bill reforming corporate taxes instead of a tax-reform omnibus. Create stronger federal penalties for employing illegal immigrants and see to it that federal law-enforcement agencies get serious about enforcing them. Figure out what you think about health care, if you can. Republicans will get reform the same way Johnny Cash got his Cadillac: one piece at a time.

Conservatives had better start facing the fact that the president is a man overmatched by his job. All of President Trump’s reality-television posturing, all of his hooting and hollering and fussing and foolishness and tweeting and preening is sound and fury signifying squat. The Trump administration is a show about nothing.

Der Einhundert Tage

By Jonah Goldberg

Saturday, April 29, 2017

Today is the 99th day of Der Einhundert Tage. Release the 99 luftballons!

Of course, if you’re reading this on Saturday, then today is Der Einhundert Tage! (Add one luftballon).

“What is Der Einhundert Tage?” you ask.

It’s “100 Days” in German. There’s no reason not to say it in English, save for the fact that it just sounds so much more ominous and impressive in der Sprache der Deutschen. Given how so many on the left think we’re back in 1930s Germany, I figured I’d throw them a bone. Also, I figure anything I can do to make this 100 Days thing even slightly more interesting is worth doing. Well, within reason. I’m not going to sacrifice 100 bulls in front of the White House.

In other words, I agree with Donald Trump that the 100 Days marker is an arbitrary and somewhat ridiculous device, even if he ill-advisedly invested too much in the gimmick. And it’s always been a gimmick. Even FDR’s First 100 Days — which started this nonsense — has been embellished by members of the New Deal cargo cult. Most of the legislation he passed was off the shelf from Congress and had been debated for years. FDR even opposed the FDIC when it was first brought up.

It is worth recalling that FDR’s head of the National Recovery Administration wanted a truly impressive first 90 days. Hugh “Iron Pants” Johnson (I always wondered if he went by “Iron Pants” to keep people from saying his name too fast) distributed a somewhat tongue-in-cheek memo at the Democratic National Convention in 1932 proposing that all members of Congress and the Supreme Court be put on an island for 90 days so that the administration could have a really free hand getting things done.

I mention this because a) I think it’s interesting, b) it’s always worth making a hyuuugjohnson joke when the opportunity arises (so to speak), and c) because I think it highlights an important point. The yearning for “action” implicit in the First 100 Days thing is not an altogether healthy one in a democracy. It’s not necessarily sinister, either.

There’s nothing wrong with a newly elected president trying to translate his mandate into legislation or otherwise spending his political capital when it’s at its highest. Nevertheless, there is an unpleasant cult of action implicit in the First 100 Days that I’ve never liked. After all, that was why FDR proposed it in the first place. He wanted to tell everyone to back off and let him have a free hand in his “bold, persistent experimentation.” That’s not really how our system is supposed to work. Presidents shouldn’t be able to say, “Hold my beer while I fundamentally transform America on my own.”

Die ersten hundert Tage von Präsident Trump

With all that said, what do I think of Trump’s First 100 Days? Well, since we’re on an FDR kick, I’m reminded of what one-time FDR consigliere Raymond Moley said in response to the notion that there was a coherent unified plan to the New Deal.

This has been, as Michael Warren chronicles over at The Standard, an ad hoc presidency from the outset. And like a Clinton Eastwood movie or a three-course meal of steak, tofurkey, and snails, you could say it’s been characterized by the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.

What’s interesting to me is that I don’t think Trump truly realized it was going to be like this until pretty late in the game. He said in a Reuters interview just Thursday that he was surprised by how hard the job was. “I thought it would be easier,” the president said.

Now, on the one hand, all president say they’re surprised by how much harder the job is than they expected. So, fine. But Trump also says that he thought his old job would be harder than being the president of the United States. And I believe him. There are a lot of stories around Washington that jibe with this. Trump wanted to be something of a ceremonial figure, a bit like a British monarch in the 19th century, who gives some direction to the prime minister, but otherwise serves as an emblem of national greatness. It turns out that there’s more to the job than going around giving MAGA speeches and riffing on the media.

And, to Trump’s credit, it appears that he is starting to understand that and act on what should have been obvious from the get-go.

I’ve written a lot of late about how we now know Trump has no coherent ideological program. “Trumpism” is a psychological orientation, not a political philosophy. It’s actually far more similar to FDRism than a lot of people realize.

For instance, as Amity Shlaes reminds us, Franklin Roosevelt personally set the price of gold every morning: “One day [Treasury Secretary Henry] Morgenthau asked FDR why the president had chosen to drive up the price of gold by 21 cents. The president cavalierly said he’d done that because 21 was seven times three, and three was a lucky number.”

Now, FDR did have a philosophy but not a very deep one. As Oliver Wendell Holmes famously said, Roosevelt had a “second-class intellect but a first-rate temperament.”

I’ll leave it to others to score Trump’s intellect, but as for his temperament, if it was a ticket on the Titanic, I suspect it would be down below decks dancing on the tables with the Irish.

That said, I’ve been mildly surprised by a few things about Trump’s performance so far — and most of them were pleasant surprises. Most of his appointments have been good and a few have been great. I think there’s a lot of hype to his executive orders, but there aren’t many I don’t support.

In short, he’s doing better than I thought he would. But this is a remarkably low bar. It’s not quite like saying that Greta is the “sexiest East German weightlifter alive” or “this is the most exciting show on C-SPAN” but it’s not that far off. Still, I hope there are many more pleasant surprises in the days to come. We only have one president at a time, and so there’s really no choice but to hope he continues to learn on the job and that his team of Sherpas can help him with the climb.

All about the Base

What vexes me about the First 100 Days, however, isn’t what it has revealed about Trump, but what it reveals about his biggest fans. This time last year, it was easy to find people who parroted — sincerely — Trump’s claim that fixing everything would be “easy.” They loved to hear him say that everyone in Washington was dumb and that he had the “best brain.” He was a super-manager, a battle-hardened Sardaukar from the ranks of the übermenschen of the business world.

Any time he did or said something ridiculous, Trump’s defenders would either defend it on the non-existent merits or explain that his critics didn’t see the genius behind his strategy. Or they would mock the notion that anyone would take what he says “literally” when all enlightened people merely take him “seriously.”

Trump would rely on his instincts like a Chinatown chicken playing tic-tac-toe, and people would call him a “chess master.” For he wasn’t any old chicken, he was the Mobutu Sese Seko Nkuku Ngbendu Wa Za Banga of American politics (“The all-powerful rooster who, because of his endurance and inflexible will to win, goes from conquest to conquest, leaving fire in his wake”).

But now Trump’s biggest boosters — and much of his base according to polls — insists that they never thought it would be easy, that Trump is doing great, even though he hasn’t been remotely able to accomplish the things he wanted to in his First 100 Days, and even Trump admits that this is all so much harder than even he thought it would be. As an unnamed White House staffer told Politico, “I kind of pooh-poohed the experience stuff when I first got here. But this sh** is hard.”

But no one cares, because the signature image of the Trump presidency so far is a goalpost on wheels. Being all-in for Trump means never having to say you’re sorry.

Then there are the folks who are mostly-in for Trump. Every day I hear people say on Twitter, “Yeah, he’s flawed but at least he’s not Hillary.” But what kind of standard is that? I’m glad Hillary’s not president. Truly. But if your yardstick for a Republican president — not candidate, but president — is now “He’s better than Hillary,” then you’ve filed down the yardstick to a couple inches. “Better than Hillary” strikes me as the minimum requirement for a conservative president, not an omnibus justification for anything he does.

The Trump Transformation?

Every time the president does something controversial, pro-Trump (and anti-anti-Trump) pundits rush to a TV studio to explain that he’s staying true to his base. Sometimes that’s true, but often it’s nonsense. The base has become quite malleable in how it defines what counts as “success.” Indeed, they’re the ones usually pushing the goalpost. Moreover, the president isn’t just the president-of-his-base, he’s the president of the whole country. I always rankled when people defended George W. Bush’s malapropisms and odd syntax as something to celebrate. Wasn’t one of Ronald Reagan’s greatest attributes his status as “the Great Communicator”?

As Richard Neustadt argued a half century ago, the chief power of the president is persuasion. Lasting conservative victories can come through legislation, to be sure. But even greater ones come from changing public attitudes so that voters want to see those victories endure. FDR’s New Deal was a very mixed bag, at best. But the main reason so much of it remains intact, alas, is that he fundamentally changed American attitudes toward government.

Barack Obama famously wanted to be a liberal Reagan or FDR, fundamentally transforming political orientations in this country. The ultimate verdict on that isn’t in yet, but right now it looks like Obama failed fairly spectacularly. It’s early yet, but how is Trump doing in this regard? Who outside his “base” has been convinced of the rightness of conservative policies? Consider that support for Obamacare, free trade, and immigration are at all-time highs.

I keep waiting for Trump supporters to respond to his flip-flops (Syria, China’s currency manipulation, NATO, or his claim Thursday that he’s now a “globalist and a nationalist”) like Steve Martin in The Jerk:

He doesn’t realize he’s dealing with sophisticated people, here. Marie, now just stay calm. Stay calm. Don’t look down, don’t look down! Look up! Just keep your eyes up and keep them that way, okay! Waiter, there are snails on her plate. Now get them out of here before she sees them! Look away, just look away, keep your eyes that way! You would think that in a fancy restaurant at these prices you could keep the snails off the food! There are so many snails there you can’t even see the food! Now take those away and bring us those melted-cheese-sandwich appetizers you talked me out of!

Instead, we get so much of this kind of thing:

1) I am loyal to @realDonaldTrump.

Any further inquires, please see #1.

— Bill Mitchell (@mitchellvii) April 17, 2017

Trump Discovers the Trouble with Being President

By Ian Tuttle

Friday, April 28, 2017

It turns out that being president is hard.

“I loved my previous life. I had so many things going,” Donald Trump told Reuters in a newly published interview. “This is more work than in my previous life. I thought it would be easier.”

The president’s plaintive remark should come as no surprise. This is the same man who, in February, announced: “Nobody knew that health care could be so complicated.” Donald Trump, the wealthy heir to a real-estate empire and complete political neophyte, was, compared to any of his predecessors, uniquely unprepared for what is quite possibly the most difficult job on Planet Earth. And after 100 days in office, he’s beginning — at least, in his more introspective moments — to appreciate just how difficult that job is.

Then again, Barack Obama’s tenure was marked by a similar lament. “I think it is important to remind everybody that . . . I’m president, I’m not a king,” he told Univision in January 2013, discussing the possibility of suspending deportations of non-criminal illegal aliens. “I’m required to follow the law.” The executive was, he acknowledged, only one of three branches of government, and that presented structural challenges to advancing his agenda.

Elected, like his successor, largely on his charisma and promise to transform “the system,” President Obama found himself flummoxed by it. He, too, thought the presidency would be easier.

But where Trump’s comments seem tinged with wistfulness — O, to enjoy unburdened the breeze at Mar-a-Lago! — Obama’s were more often tinged with frustration. In February 2013, again discussing immigration during a Google Hangout interview, he was more transparent: “This is something that I’ve struggled with throughout my presidency. The problem is that, you know, I’m the president of the United States. I’m not the emperor of the United States.”

In private, Obama was more forthright about the challenges of the office. Plotting an approach to the Arab Spring that would appear supportive of democratic protesters and also protect American interests proved so difficult, he “told people that it would be so much easier to be the president of China,” the New York Times reported in March 2011. “As one official put it, ‘No one is scrutinizing Hu Jintao’s words in Tahrir Square.’”

The modern presidency, as Barack Obama ultimately discovered, is an impossible job. The president must be the leader of his party, but also the leader of the nation — “the only national voice in affairs,” in the words of Woodrow Wilson, who reshaped the office in the 20th century. And he must be not only the leader of his nation, but “the leader of the free world,” on whom the oppressed can look with hope. He must be all things to all people everywhere — and yet he must remain a citizen among citizens, abiding by the law.

Obama’s response to this conundrum was to abandon the law in favor of, as he liked to say, “the right side of history,” an ends-justify-the-means solution of which Wilson would have approved. Those same things that he acknowledged, as late as 2013, were beyond his powers, he would go on to do: granting lawless de facto amnesties to nearly half the illegal population in the United States under his DACA and DAPA orders; declaring that neither the nuclear arrangement hammered out with Iran nor the Paris climate accords were “treaties” so that he could withhold them from Senate consideration; and unilaterally manipulating the Affordable Care Act when its measures proved politically costly.

Donald Trump is being mocked as a buffoon for discovering that the presidency presents unique challenges, especially to those who seek sweeping and dramatic overhauls of American policy. In fact, he is only learning the same lesson as his predecessor — and he could do the country a service merely by rejecting his predecessor’s reckless response to that lesson.