One year under Trump
For the president, it’s been a year of pushing the boundaries of his power.
WWASHINGTON hen President Donald Trump meets with aides to discuss policy or prepare for a speech, he may ask about the pros and cons of a new proposal. He may inquire about its possible effect. He may explore the best way to frame his case.
But there is one thing he almost never does. “He very seldom asks how other presidents did this,” said John Kelly, the White House chief of staff. Trump is the 45th president of the United States, but he has spent much of his first year in office defying the conventions and norms established by the previous 44, and transforming the presidency in ways that were once unimaginable.
Under Trump, it has become a blunt instrument to advance personal, policy and political goals. He has revolutionized the way presidents deal with the world beyond 1600 Pennsylvania Ave., dispensing with the carefully modulated messaging of past chief executives in favor of no-holds-barred, crystalbreaking, us-against-them, damnthe-consequences blasts borne out of gut and grievance.
He has kept a business on the side; attacked the FBI, CIA and other institutions he oversees; threatened to use his power against rivals; and waged war against members of his own party and even his own Cabinet. He fired the man investigating his campaign and has not ruled out firing the one who took over. He has appealed to base instincts on race, religion and gender as no president has in generations. And he has rattled the nuclear saber more bombastically than it has been since the days of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Rather than a force for unity or a calming voice in turbulent times, the presidency now is another weapon in a permanent campaign of divisiveness. Democrats and many establishment Republicans worry that Trump has squandered the moral authority of the office.
“We’re seeing the presidency completely and utterly transformed in a way I don’t think we’ve seen since before the Civil War,” said Jeffrey A. Engel, the director of the Center for Presidential History at Southern Methodist University and the author of When the World Seemed New about President George H.W. Bush.
Trump has cast aside the mythology of a magisterial presidency removed from the people in favor of a reality-show accessibility that strikes a chord in parts of the country alienated by the establishment. That indifference to the way things have always been done has energized Trump’s core supporters, who cheer his efforts to destroy political correctness, take on smug elites and smash a self-interested system that, in their view, has shafted everyday Americans.
“The norms and conventions are exactly what he ran against and, in his view, are why we’re in the fix we’re in,” Kelly said in an interview. “He’s got a view of what’s better for America.”
In upending the traditional dynamics of governance, Trump has made himself the most dominant figure in American life even as polls show that he is also the most unpopular first-year president in modern history. He is testing the proposition that a president can still effectively remake the country without securing or even seeking a broader mandate.
“You’ve got someone who is defining the presidency very differently,” said Michael Beschloss, the presidential historian. “Trump is essentially saying, ‘I’m not going to operate just within the boundaries that the founders might have expected or people might have expected for 200 years. I’m going to operate within the boundaries of what is strictly legal, and I’m going to push those boundaries if I can.’ ”