Trump interview enlightens, but larger questions remain

Last week’s New York Times interview with Donald Trump was horrifying, yet curiously unsurprising. Yes, the world’s most powerful man is lazy, ignorant, dishonest and vindictive. But we knew that already.

In fact, the most revealing thing in the interview may be Trump’s defense of Bill O’Reilly, accused of sexual predation and abuse of power: “He’s a good person.” This, I’d argue, tells us more about the man from Mar-a-Lago and the motivations of his base than his ramblings on infrastructure and trade.

But first a question: How much difference has it made, really, that Donald Trump rather than a conventional Republican sits in the White House?

The administration is, by all accounts, a mess. The vast majority of key presidential appointments requiring Senate confirmation are unfilled; whatever people are in place are preoccupied with factional infighting. Decision-making sounds more like palace intrigues than policy formulation in a republic. And there are those tweets.

Yet Trump’s first great policy and political debacle — the collapse of the effort to kill Obamacare — owed almost nothing to executive dysfunction. Repeal-and-replace didn’t fail because of poor tactics; it failed because Republicans have been lying about health care for eight years. So when the time came to propose something real, all they could offer were various ways to package mass loss of coverage.

Similar considerations apply on other fronts. Tax reform looks like a bust, not because the administration has no idea what it’s doing (it doesn’t), but because nobody in the GOP ever put in the hard work of figuring out what should change and how to sell those changes.

What about areas where Trump might sound different from ordinary Republicans, like infrastructure?

A push for a genuine trillion-dollar construction plan (as opposed to tax credits and privatization), which would need Democratic support given the predictable opposition from conservatives, would be a departure. But given what we heard in the interview — basically incoherent word salad mixed with random remarks about transportation in Queens — it’s clear that the administration has no actual plan, and probably never will.

True, there are some places where Trump does seem likely to have a big impact — most notably, in crippling environmental policy. But that’s what any Republican would have done; climate change denialism and the belief that our air and water are too clean are mainstream positions in the modern GOP.

So Trumpist governance in practice so far is turning out to be just Republican governance with (much) worse management. Which brings me back to the original question: Does the appalling character of the man on top matter?

I think it does. Trump policy may not be that distinctive in practice. But style matters, too, because it shapes the political climate. Trumpism has brought a new sense of empowerment to the ugliest aspects of American politics.

Trump isn’t an honest man or a stand-up guy, but he is, arguably, less hypocritical about the darker motives underlying his worldview than conventional politicians are. Hence the affinity for O’Reilly, and an apparent sense that news reports on the host’s actions are an indirect attack on him.

And the big question about Trumpism — bigger, arguably, than the legislative agenda — is whether unapologetic ugliness is a winning political strategy.