Chaotic campaign foretold Trump’s erratic first week in office
Tweets, executive orders show that, so far, the office has not changed the man
President Donald Trump is moving at an unprecedented pace to change the direction of the country and reset America’s place in the world. Amid many distractions of his first week in office, the president has kept his focus on the ideas that animated his campaign - most notably immigration and trade - and on the people who most enthusiastically responded to him.
Nowhere has that been more apparent, and with such major implications, than with the indefinite ban on immigration by Syrian refugees and travel restrictions on immigrants from certain Muslim-majority countries that he ordered Friday. Even with all the qualifiers, it is a step that two years ago would have been unimaginable for a prominent politician in either party to advocate.
The reality is that he governs as a minority president and a controversial one. His approval ratings hover around 40 percent. Although he fairly won a majority in the electoral college, a majority of all votes cast in the election went to other candidates.
His opponents should not be fooled by any of this. Nothing has affected his governing priorities or his seeming determination to act on as many as he can as quickly as he can. He is the perpetualmotion president. He may appear obsessed with the false claim that the election was marked by massive voter fraud or the exact size of the crowd at his inauguration. But he is still moving on the agenda that he outlined as a candidate as if he won a smashing landslide.
Trump’s opening days fully reflect his campaign. He was the chaos candidate, someone who continually found ways to inject controversy and distractions into the conversation. His words and actions often seemed random and self-defeating. But they also seemed designed in part to distract from other controversies and to keep his opponents off balance. His first week in office is an extension of that style and strategy: speed and disorder, but disorder whose partial purpose is to keep his opponents spinning.
Throughout the campaign, the controversies he created drew the most attention. Trump understood there were other powerful forces at work in the election that he could use to his advantage: the dissatisfaction with traditional politicians, a desire for change, Clinton’s political weaknesses and the iron bond between him and his supporters. What was supposed to sink him did not. Trump has not forgotten.
Nor has he forgotten who put him where he is. He gives no indication that he believes he must reach beyond his base to be successful. His inaugural address was both a vow of dramatic, even radical, change and an ode to the “forgotten Americans” he sees as his base. He also has identified his antagonists. To the Washington ruling class, Trump rhetorically offered the back of his hand. He has been even more blunt in his attacks on the media, which both he and White House chief strategist Stephen K. Bannon have labeled the true “opposition party.”
His policies still lack depth and detail. Given a free hand, his would be a United States drawn inward and self-interested, wary of the world. He favors trade and economic policies that would reverse years of consensus among Democratic and Republican presidents. His executive order on immigration moves the country to where it has never been before, with an all-but-stated religious test for entry into this country.
Trump is attempting to take full advantage of one of the biggest powers of the presidency: the ability to set an agenda and communicate his vision and priorities.
If successful in making good on his vision, his presidency would be described as one of the most important and controversial of modern times. One week, however, is just one week, which is why it is premature to speculate on how the story ends. No one can project in any linear fashion the future of a Trump presidency.
What is known is that he cannot govern by executive order alone, nor carry out sensitive diplomatic negotiations through tweets, nor do many of the things he says he would like to do without the aid of legislation.
His posture toward the use of torture has been instructive. Since taking the oath, Trump has forcefully restated his belief that torture works. But in the next breath, he has in essence recused himself from the decision about whether the United States would employ those methods to gain intelligence. On that question, he said he would defer to Defense Secretary James Mattis and the new CIA director, Mike Pompeo, neither of whom supports torture.
Trump’s first week in office will not be remembered as smooth. He faces a steep learning curve. The president was at times the undisciplined candidate seen on the campaign trail, perplexing to staff and allies in Congress. At other times, he projected a more serious and sober persona. Through the week, there were mixed signals on policy and distractions that threw his team off course. But as a sign of things to come, it was all that Trump’s supporters might have hoped for and all his opponents feared.