Observations from the Beltway

In his visit to Pittsburgh, NPR’s politics editor provides shrewd analysis of the day’s events

Domenico Montanaro, National Public Radio’s editor for politics and digital audience, visited Pittsburgh last week as a guest of WESA (90.5 FM), our local NPR station. I had the opportunity to sit down with him for an hour to try to put some order into what is happening in Washington at the moment. He also addressed a larger group of Pittsburghers at the Senator John Heinz History Center Tuesday night.

In my view, he is one of the sharpest observers of the Washington scene today, having tracked both the campaign and what has occurred since then very closely. He is, ironically enough, like President Donald J. Trump, from Queens. He studied at the University of Delaware, a faithful “Blue Hen” like one of my sons and Baltimore Ravens quarterback Joe Flacco, and the Columbia University School of Journalism. He has since worked for the Asbury Park Press, NBC News, the Public Broadcasting Corporation and NPR.

Mr. Montanaro’s comments on a number of sensitive, difficult American political issues — including the Trump team, the state of the Democrats, the Department of State and prospects for American diplomacy — and the issues in the evolution of the American economy were very interesting. I will try to keep separate what he thinks and what I think.

In an effort to put some order into what is happening in Washington, and the personalities involved, he makes a distinction between Washington traditionalists, who are not organized into a “deep state,” and the new Trump team. He sees the Trump people as anti-elite, with a chip on their shoulders, and fully disdainful of traditional power centers in government, even in terms of learning from them how the U.S. government works in practice.

For the record, in my view, a veteran of 35 years as a career Foreign Service officer, there is no “deep state.” What there is, however, are career civil servants and Foreign Service officers who believe that Americans vote, and that their votes should be respected, but that government in the United States needs to continue to function, with due respect to American principles and to the structure of the country’s governments, federal, state and local.

That group does not meet on the corners under streetlights and does not conspire. Most of all, to the degree that it is a corps, it does not aspire to overthrow the Trump government. Resistance to Mr. Trump’s wilder ideas comes in other forms, including the courts, the media sometimes, the states and their governments, and Congress, in all of its glorious panoply of shifting, conflicting interests and factions.

In Mr. Montanaro’s analysis, the anti-elite faction among the Trump team is led by chief strategist Stephen K. Bannon, who seeks to dismantle the infrastructure of current American government. The more “transactional” group among the Trump team is led by White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus, who is trying to keep the railroads running in spite of factional conflicts, tweets and other disruptions to governmental order. The presidency can rightly be described at the moment as “awry.”

In the foreign policy domain, there is a bifurcation of power and decision-making between Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and Mr. Trump’s son-in-law and White House senior adviser Jared Kushner. In the meantime, Mr. Tillerson is astonishingly operating without staff — no undersecretaries, no assistant secretaries — trying to do the impossible. He will need to sort this out or quit. Diplomacy in 2017 is at least half private and half public.

The Democrats are in really bad shape. The Clinton machine was devastated. The party has to rebuild, and quickly. It needs energy and new people. Its current leaders are old, droopy and not marketable. They will need to have a vigorous internal and external leadership “primary” if they are to come back to life. The 2018 midterm elections are probably too soon to expect much. It might be 2020 or even 2022, speculates Mr. Montanaro, before they will be competitive again on a national level, particularly given their weak situation on the state level, where the gerrymandering factor also operates.

Asked whether he thought the Trump administration would make it through the president’s four-year term, Mr. Montanaro said, “yes,” absent either a crash of the economy or a “bad war.”