By Noah Rothman
Friday, February 02, 2024
The temptation to evaluate Trump’s administration solely on the style he brought with him into the Oval Office is a trap into which both his critics and his supporters fall.
Donald Trump’s critics are liable to subordinate the policies over which he presided to their distaste for his garish affect and boorish demeanor. Trump’s fans are apt to attribute all criticism of the president to his detractors’ distaste for these superficial characteristics, even as they promote candidates who mimic these behaviors but reject the Trump administration’s policies. And yet, when attempting to ascertain the former president’s staying power as a political force, Trump’s promoters get closer to the mark when they note that the former president’s record suffices to convince voters to look past his vulgar deportment. Nowhere was the discrepancy between what Trump says and what Trump does starker than his record on Russia.
The former president’s remarks this week on his approach to providing support for Ukraine’s effort to beat back Russia’s invading force illustrate this dichotomy. “I say pay,” Trump said in his uniquely terse fashion, adding of America’s European allies, “and they’ll pay, too.” Trump distilled his view on the American interests at stake in Europe’s war down to the transactional and material: “You add them all up, and they are in for about $20 billion, and we’re in for $200 billion because we’re stupid. All we have to do is say, ‘Pay!’”
Trump’s figures are wrong. Through October of last year, European nations had committed roughly $83 billion to Ukraine, with another $54 billion package approved by the European Union just this week. While the U.S. contributes the lion’s share of military aid to Ukraine, that has amounted in dollar terms to about $77 billion over the same period. Still, Trump’s remarks are not suggestive of the hostility toward Ukraine’s cause displayed by so many who attempt to emulate his style.
Trump’s fans are confused, but that’s understandable. The gulf between the president’s rhetoric and his administration’s policies toward Russia was vast. Trump’s reliably obsequious attitude toward Vladimir Putin — sometimes going so far as to accuse his own country of gross immorality and its officials of corruption in contrast to the Kremlin’s functionaries, propping up the myth of Russian political and military acumen — contrasted with his administration’s conduct. While Trump flattered Putin, his subordinates imposed Magnitsky Act sanctions on Russian officials. They seized Russian diplomatic facilities, expelled Russian diplomats, provided lethal aid to Ukraine, scrapped the defunct intermediate-range nuclear forces treaty, and put the screws to Russian mercenaries in Syria, culminating in a set-piece battle between Moscow’s proxies and U.S. commandos.
Conventional Republicans could look at these results and dismiss the president’s contradictory rhetoric. That luxury will not be available to them in a second Trump term. The conventional Republicans who were the architects and executors of those policies have long since fallen out of Trump’s favor, and the feeling is mutual.
Former secretary of state Rex Tillerson was reportedly one of the primary lobbyists for Ukraine’s cause, overcoming Trump’s initial objections. “He was as dumb as a rock,” Trump said of his former chief diplomat. National-security adviser H.R. McMaster and Defense Secretary Jim Mattis were equally vigorous proponents of a confrontational approach toward Russia. Neither are highly regarded today by either Trump or his MAGA acolytes, nor have they made their hostility to Trump’s restoration a secret. Onetime NSA John Bolton and former CIA director Gina Haspel used all their powers of persuasion to convince Trump to adopt policies designed to contain Russia and punish the rogue states in its orbit. “It was extraordinarily difficult,” said Fiona Hill, Trump’s former senior director for European and Russian affairs in the NSA, of the effort to steer Trump toward a policy of containment. “If she didn’t have the accent, she would be nothing,” Trump later sniffed of the British-born Hill.
In 2016, Trump inherited a Republican Party populated by conventional conservatives who’d watched as the Kremlin grew steadily more belligerent over the Obama years. The policies they pursued between 2017 and 2021 reflected that evolution. The same can be said of Trump’s policies toward the Middle East.
Barack Obama’s monomaniacal pursuit of a nuclear deal with Iran ushered in a sea change in regional politics, compelling Sunni-dominated states to subordinate their vestigial hostility toward Israel to the acute threat presented by Iran’s increasingly menacing Shiite militias. Conventional Republicans began to see a pathway to peace in the region based around a bloc in opposition to Iran — an unconventional approach that sidestepped the intractable Palestinian question. Those ideas bubbled up from right-wing think tanks into the halls of power, culminating in the Abraham Accords.
Administration officials began laying the groundwork for that epochal shift in regional dynamics within weeks of Trump’s ascension to power. Mattis reportedly performed much of the diplomatic legwork in the early efforts to create an intelligence-sharing relationship between Israel and its Sunni neighbors, but the efforts to convince Trump of the “ultimate deal” in the Middle East were left to advisers such as Jared Kushner and U.S. Ambassador to Israel David Friedman as well as influential outsiders such as GOP donor Ronald Lauder. In the interim, Lauder has closed his checkbook to Trump. Friedman was vocally critical of Trump’s decision to sit down to dinner with antisemitic influencers Nick Fuentes and Kanye West. Although he has endorsed Trump’s 2024 campaign, the former president’s vanguard remains cool to the former ambassador. Kushner has been relegated to a behind-the-scenes role now after his father-in-law reportedly asked him to hang back.
Few aspects of Trump’s record feature as prominently in his defenders’ arguments as his management of the economy. Democrats and progressives derided Trump’s team of economic advisers as one populated by “bankers and billionaires” — a cadre composed of a conspicuous number of “Steves” whose avarice would produce little but woe. They were wrong. Much to the chagrin of the radical populists on the left and right alike, Trump’s economic policies were, by and large, profoundly banal.
Many of those policies were the work of conventional Republicans in Congress, to whom Trump outsourced much of the presidency. He signed into law reforms to retirement accounts and 401(k)s, making saving and withdrawing easier. He approved a tax-code-reform law vastly simplifying the filing process and allowing Americans to retain more of their incomes. He made regulatory reform an early priority of his administration, providing more flexibility to businesses than the bureaucrats who would constrain them. With the notable exception of Trump’s heedless addiction to tariffs, the former president’s economic record was a success because of the conventional conservatives who made it one.
But the same pattern applies. “Gary Cohn, I could tell stories about him like you wouldn’t believe,” Trump groused of his former National Economic Council director. If the reports are to be believed, Trump was convinced against pushing Congress to raise gas taxes to pay for an infrastructure bill or force businesses to absorb the cost of a minimum-wage hike due, in part, to the efforts of former Office of Budget and Management director and, eventually, acting chief of staff Mick Mulvaney. “Merely a ‘backbencher,’ who once gave a news conference that was legendarily bad,” Trump later said of Mulvaney. “This guy was uncharismatic, a born loser.” The author of the tax-code reforms for which Trump takes credit, former House speaker Paul Ryan, was run out of Washington on a rail by the MAGA Right. According to Trump, Ryan is a “pathetic loser” and a “weak RINO.” In Ryan’s estimation, Trump is an “authoritarian narcissist.” There is no love lost between them.
Even in areas of public policy where Trump’s instincts led the way — immigration policy, most notably among them — the former president relied on seasoned conservative policy-makers to ensure his preferences didn’t run afoul of the law. Trump ignited what would become a sustained protest movement against him within his first week in office by implementing a disastrous executive order designed to limit travel into the U.S. from Middle Eastern and North African nations. American citizens were incarcerated. Families were separated. Foreign nationals who’d risked their lives working with U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan were abandoned. The Supreme Court swiftly struck it down. Only the third iteration of the ban — one that incorporated travel restrictions on North Korea and Venezuela so as to comport with U.S. anti-discrimination statutes — survived judicial scrutiny. By all accounts, the architect of the fiasco, Stephen Miller, remains in Trump’s good graces. The members of the Office of Legal Counsel whom Miller and company attempted to bypass during the fight over the ban are unlikely to enjoy similar esteem.
At the very least, the arguments on Trump’s behalf that focus on his policy successes are revealing of Republican voters’ preference for sound executive policy. Although they attract disproportionate attention from the press, only a small minority of Republicans are drawn to Trump because he is inclined to “break some rules and laws to set things right.” Those who aren’t lured into Trump’s orbit in pursuit of political identity actually want to get things done, and the things they admire most about Trump’s time in office are the policies reflective of a general Republican consensus. But the authors of those policies are on the outs today. They’re unlikely to be asked to return, nor is it clear that most would answer the call if it came.
In 2017, Trump took control of a Republican Party with a robust intellectual infrastructure populated by capable officials who understood the workings of government. That no longer describes the GOP today. If voters return Donald Trump to the White House, there’s no telling what the contours of his administration will look like. We can be relatively sure, however, that they won’t look much like the first go around.
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