San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Trump’s legacy:
Leader made clear from the start he would be the focus, attacking rivals on social media.
Less than a month after Donald Trump was inaugurated, he made it clear to the country he was going to be a very different president. Trump and Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe were having dinner on the crowded terrace of his upscale Mar-a-Lago club in West Palm Beach, Fla., when an aide came to the table and told him North Korea had just tested a ballistic missile.
Within minutes, that table was transformed into the White House situation room, with thennational security adviser Michael Flynn, chief strategist Steve Bannon and other staff members for the two leaders gathering around as Trump and Abe pored over documents in full view of startled Saturday night diners. “HOLY MOLY!!!” tweeted Richard De-Agazio, a club member who took pictures from where he was seated, a few tables away from Trump. “Wow ... the center of action.” Trump was always going to be the center of action and the focus of government, whether he was tweeting from his White House quarters in the early morning hours, signing executive orders at his desk in the Oval Office or making rambling, hourlong speeches to enthusiastic supporters at rallies across the country. Even when Democratic challenger Joe Biden was declared the winner of the presidential race Saturday after a bitter fall campaign, Trump kept the focus on himself by refusing to concede and promising a scorchedearth legal battle in an effort to overturn the election results.
Biden’s likely victory will put a new cast on the presidency. As an ultrawealthy, thricemarried celebrity developer who lived much of his life in the gossip column headlines, Trump brought baggage with him that Biden and virtually every other president lacked. Whether it was a multibilliondollar ongoing business, a history of some 3,500 lawsuits, six bankruptcies to clear billions of dollars of debt, or reported post-affair payoffs to an adult movie star and a former Playboy model, Trump violated every norm expected of politicians — and largely got away with it.
At least until election day, he also got away with neardaily lying and insults directed at opponents and even some Republican allies. He solicited foreign help to discredit Biden, became only the third president ever to be impeached because of it, and got away with that, too. He floated suggestions that the Justice Department should investigate his political rivals.
He clung to supporters whose extremist or racist views alienated the moderates he needed to win reelection. While politicians are often ridiculed for carefully parsing each statement and tiptoeing away from fights, someone who has faced voters for years wouldn’t have said “there were very fine people on both sides” when the 2017 violence in Charlottesville, Va., pitted neoNazi white supremacists against civil rights activists and church members.
Fights and dog whistles
Trump’s supporters gloried in the president’s unfiltered willingness to say anything at any time, but diplomats both at home and across the world are looking forward to the day when disputes can again be worked out in private and decisions can be reached without an illtimed tweet or offthecuff remark blowing them up.
His efforts to project himself as a strong, “law and order” president led to battles with the Black Lives Matter movement and protesters against police violence, as Trump labeled them as thugs and violent anarchists. The president’s claim that he was protecting a longvanished 1950sstyle suburbia by ensuring residents would “no longer be bothered or financially hurt by having lowincome housing built in your neighborhood” was seen as a dog whistle against Black people and other people of color.
Also missing in a Biden administration will be Trump’s almost daily battles with the news media, which the president blamed for almost all of his political problems clear to election day.
“We have made tremendous progress with the China Virus, but the Fake News refuses to talk about it this close to the Election,” the president said in a recent tweet. “COVID, COVID, COVID is being used by them, in total coordination, in order to change our great early election numbers. Should be an election law violation!”
Leading by tweets
Trump reveled in the attention and the power of the presidency, where a single 280character tweet could bypass his staff, political leaders and, most important, the media to communicate instantly with the world.
“Boom. I press it and within two seconds, ‘ We have breaking news,’ ” Trump said at a 2019 news conference.
Trump’s energy and enthusiasm for his policies never seemed to flag. But keeping up with the constant flow of tweets and retweets — as many as 200 on one remarkable day in June — along with his offhand remarks could be exhausting, not only for his harried and often harassed staff but also for an American public used to a very different style of leadership.
It was a concern Biden’s campaign recognized early on, with arguments that the former vice president would bring back a more familiar — and much less personalitydriven — type of government. “Remember when you didn’t have to think about the president every single day?” one of Biden’s ads asked.
That was never going to be Trump.
“Show me someone without an ego, and I’ll show you a loser,” he said in a 2013 tweet.
It was that ego, along with Trump’s refusal ever to be pegged as a loser, that defined much of his presidency. He saw his election as a demand for a new direction for the United States, along with a call for fundamental reforms that would take the country in a new, more populist direction, with “America First” as its motto. And he brought an “us versus them” mentality to the country’s political landscape that resulted in an opposition that loathed him just as much as his supporters adored him.
Trump saw himself, as the historian James Flexner said of George Washington, as the indispensable man, the one person able to change what he believed was a disastrous course for the country. “Nobody knows the system better than me, which is why I alone can fix it,” Trump said as he accepted the Republican presidential nomination in 2016.
No hiding the agenda
Trump never tried to disguise the changes he wanted to see in America. Even before he took office, he promised to pull out of international agreements he didn’t believe were favorable enough for the country, tighten immigration rules, cut what he called business-killing environmental regulations, trim taxes and appoint more conservative judges.
While Trump’s success varied, those issues remained his priorities for all four years of his presidency.
That’s not to say the details didn’t change over the years.
A week after he took office, Trump signed an executive order barring all refugee arrivals for 120 days and temporarily banning travel from seven Muslimmajority countries. When the courts blocked that order, Trump revised it and tried again until a third version passed Supreme Court muster in December 2017.
And the president has been more than willing to exaggerate the success of his efforts. From the day in 2015 when he announced he was running for president, Trump has promised that he will build an immigrant-proof wall along the southern border and that “Mexico will pay for it.”
He pushed hard for that wall, even forcing the longest partial government shutdown in U. S. history in 2018 to try to compel Congress to allocate $ 5.7 billion for its construction. Trump ultimately folded, then declared a national emergency to allow him to reallocate military construction money for the wall, bypassing Congress altogether and sparking a new round of court battles.
But of the billions that already have been allocated and spent, none of the money comes from Mexico.
Of course, that’s not the way Trump saw it. Or at least it’s not what he told his fans.
“And Mexico is paying for the wall, by the way,” Trump said at an Oct. 13 rally in Johnstown, Pa. “You know that. I’ve been saying it. They hate to hear that. But they’re paying.”
Some changes may last
The wall was just part of Trump’s hardline stance on immigration, which led to controversies that followed him throughout his presidency. His “zero tolerance” policy for illegal border crossings prompted immigration officials to take children from their parents who were held for possible deportation. More than 4,300 children were separated from their parents and guardians before the program was ended by the courts in June 2018. Government lawyers said in October that 545 still hadn’t been reunited with their families.
Trump’s most visible legislative accomplishment was the 2017 passage of a sweeping tax bill, the first overhaul of the tax code in more than 30 years. While critics said the bill skewed toward businesses and the wealthy, Trump said it represented $ 3.2 trillion in cuts for American families.
How long those changes will stand is a question. Biden has said he would raise the corporate tax rate “on day one” of his administration and has proposed his own tax plan that would reverse many of Trump’s cuts. That will be all but impossible, however, with a shrunken Democratic majority in the House and a Senate that could remain under GOP control. The Senate majority will be decided in a pair of runoff elections in Georgia on Jan. 5.
And Biden will have an even harder time changing Trump’s rightward tilt to the nation’s judicial system. With the October confirmation of Amy Coney Barrett, Trump has named three of the Supreme Court’s nine members, giving conservatives a 63 advantage.
The high court is only the tip of the problem for Democrats. Trump used the power of the presidency and the strong hand of Kentucky Sen. Mitch McConnell, the GOP leader in the Senate, to appoint more than 218 federal judges, many of them young conservatives who will hold those seats for years.
Trump did plenty of his own work, too, using executive orders, federal rulemaking and his own constitutional powers to change more than 100 environmental regulations on everything from vehicle emission standards to the endangered species protection for the gray wolf.
In international affairs alone, the president moved the U. S. Embassy in Israel to Jerusalem, ended the North American Free Trade Agreement, pulled the country from the Paris Climate Agreement and the Iran nuclear deal, and imposed tariffs against goods from China, along with slashing the number of refugees allowed to resettle in the United States. But just as Trump dumped many of former President Barack Obama’s executive orders, he can expect to see Biden quickly move to reverse many of his rules and orders.
Outsider’s struggles
The problem with candidates who run for president as outsiders is that if they win, they’re still outsiders, but with all the responsibilities of running a country as large and diverse as the United States. And Trump often struggled.
“I loved my previous life. I had so many things going,” he said in an interview with Reuters three months after taking office. “This is more work than in my previous life. I thought it would be easier.”
Democrats and Republicans who had battled for years before barely passing Obama’s Affordable Care Act in 2010 rolled their eyes when Trump told a group of governors at a White House meeting in 2017 that “nobody knew health care could be so complicated.” Although he is still trying to kill the health care law, he never proposed an alternative.
The health care question became even more complicated in January when the first coronavirus case was reported in the United States. For months, Trump downplayed the seriousness of the disease, which was threatening the economic prosperity he hoped to carry him back to the White House.
But as the pandemic spread, many of the nation’s governors shut down businesses, closed schools and called on people to stay home, sending unemployment soaring and putting the economy into free fall.
By election day, Trump, who was stricken with the disease himself, was reduced to claiming that the country was “rounding the turn” on the coronavirus and that masks and local shutdowns weren’t needed. At the same time, states across the nation were reporting record numbers of new cases, with the national death toll topping 235,000.
Unlike previous presidents, who had extensive political or military experience, Trump’s business background came from running his own privately held family company. He was the boss, he set the policy and made the decisions and the staff’s only job was to make it happen.
That’s not the way it works in Washington, where a president has a corporate board of 535 members of Congress looking over his shoulder, making suggestions and criticizing his decisions.
Trump didn’t think that was how the presidency should work.
“When somebody is the president of the United States, the authority is total and that’s the way it’s got to be,” he said in April.
That’s not the way the Constitution reads and it’s not the way Biden, who spent decades in the Senate and eight years as vice president, is likely to view the job. While even a former constitutional law professor like Obama would get frustrated with Congress, he and presidents before him recognized the need for a separation of powers.
For Trump, though, the presidency was an extension of his career in business, a fulltime effort to get his way, regardless of what he had to do.
“My style of dealmaking is quite simple and straightforward,” Trump said in his 1987 book, “The Art of the Deal.” “I aim very high, and then I just keep pushing and pushing and pushing to get what I’m after.”