Bureaucracy’s wheels too creaky for Trump
Iread an interesting story Friday morning on the American news website Politico. com. It says — these are the opening words — “Being president is harder than Donald Trump thought, according to aides and allies who say that he’s growing increasingly frustrated with the challenges of running the massive federal bureaucracy.”
Trump, it seems, had imagined that being the chief executive of the U.S. government would be a lot more like being the chief executive of a family-led real estate and hospitality business. Instead, the only part of the job that seems to have met his expectations, if you believe the Politico team, is that the White House is a pretty classy joint.
One thing that occurs to you immediately on reading the story — thinly sourced, but with some quotes from friends and supporters — is that President Trump does not necessarily have the particular business background Americans might choose, even if they were super keen on having a business-y president. The building of hotels and condos and golf courses is a line of work that does seem to attract tight- knit, secretive family groups. It is exclusive and hightrust, like Hollywood, and may thus encourage the pursuit of vendetta, like Hollywood. It requires a high level of sales ability and charisma, as opposed to rigour or toughness.
Trump, like other builders, has traditionally depended on an inner circle of advisers and overseers, some of them plucked from obscurity to take on jobs of staggeringly large responsibility. Everybody in a real-estate conglomerate is working toward the same bottom line, and the art of management is a matter of getting waitresses and gardeners and carpenters and architects to push toward that bottom line.
It puts a premium on being charming and friendly, even sweet, in person. And Trump actually is that, despite his fierce political persona and his boasts of bad behaviour toward women. He’s very nice to children and strangers in everyday settings; he seems almost shockingly well- regarded by exwives on whom he cheated.
What I’m saying is that maybe we don’t want t he American president to be like that; maybe we want him to be from some more complicated, less intuitive, squishy line of business. Maybe a dealmaker- fraternizer isn’t the right kind of person; maybe we want someone with more intellectual humility, or more inborn realism. Trump may have entered the White House thinking he could spread around some charm, reassure everyone that he is not a monster, and get the people he needed to work with closely to pull together on his agenda.
The problem is that there is no “bottom line,” no share price or other paramount metric of success in politics. Getting re- elected may not even be Trump’s personal main goal, or a goal at all. Every politician has a choice of how quickly he wishes to spend the political capital he brings into office. The team members who are there to help him get re- elected, most of them much younger than Trump, have their own personal reputations to establish and uphold even if they don’t have different political agendas. As they all naturally will.
And then ... well, there is the rest of American government. One principal argument of the Politico piece is that Trump is discovering the basic truth that the president is meant to be a mere executor and defender of laws, as written by Congress and interpreted by the Supreme Court.
Trump’s mood has worsened, says Politico’s reporting team, “as he’s faced the predictable realities of governing, from congressional delays over his cabinet nominations and legal fights holding up his aggressive initiatives to staff infighting and leaks.” They add that he “has privately expressed disbelief over the ability of judges, bureaucrats or lawmakers to delay — or even stop — him from filling positions and implementing policies.”
Maybe the check-y-and-balance-y nature of American government was truly a secret, and is now a surprise, to Donald Trump. But this account of Trump’s frustration can be read upside-down. Isn’t the false view of a president as an all- powerful, unrestrained issuer of fiats also the view of those who are pathologically frightened of Trump’s effect on the world — certain that we are on a short road to economic misery and ( this keeps coming up for some reason) nuclear war?
We have lived through times when appeal courts chiselled away, for better or worse, at sweeping plans to reform American immigration or criminal justice. We have seen cabinet members oppose presidents by means of inertia and backbiting. Yes, we have also seen overly trusting legislators carelessly hand their war, spending, and oversight powers to presidents in times of crisis — and sometimes contrived crisis. But Trump is more a destroyer of his party, and of the political establishment, than he is a creature of it.
He earned his office by means of a successful appeal to the people, over the heads of the professions, classes, and persons, including Republicans, through which he must now try to govern the country. Trump’s impatience might be a sign that the White House is still constitutionally capable of being isolated from all functions except those that are “executive” in the narrowest sense — cut off from the network of real power, like a computer server with a fried hard drive.