In predicting Trump epoch, forget about middle ground
Ross Douthat
Anyone who tells you, with perfect confidence, what a Trump administration will do is either bluffing or a fool. We have a prospective Cabinet and a White House staff, but we haven’t got the first idea how the two will fit together or how the man at the top will preside over it all.
What we can do is set up a matrix to help assess the Trump era as it proceeds, in which each appointment and development gets plotted along two axes. The first, the X-axis, represents possibilities for Trumpist policy, the second, the Y-axis, scenarios for Donald Trump’s approach to governance.
The policy axis runs from full populism at one end to predictable conservative orthodoxy on the other. A full populist presidency would give us tariffs and trade wars, an infrastructure bill that would have Robert Moses doing back flips, a huge wall and E-Verify and untouched entitlements and big tax cuts for the middle class. On foreign policy, it would be Henry Kissinger meets Andrew Jackson: Détente with Russia, no nation-building anywhere, and a counterterrorism strategy that bombs and drones first and asks questions later.
In an orthodox-conservative Trump presidency, on the other hand, congressional Republicans would run domestic policy and Trump would simply sign their legislation: A repeal of Obamacare without an obvious replacement, big tax cuts for the rich, and the Medicare reform of Paul Ryan’s fondest dreams. On foreign policy, it would mean brinkmanship with Vladimir Putin plus military escalation everywhere.
The second axis, the possibilities for how Trump governs, runs from ruthless authoritarianism at one end to utter chaos at the other. Under the authoritarian scenario, Trump would act on all his worst impulses with malign efficiency — and then, come a major terrorist attack, Trump would jail or intern anyone he deemed a domestic enemy.
At the other end, Trump and his team would be too stumbling and hap- less to effectively oppress anyone, and the Trump era would just be a rolling disaster.
On the governance axis, the president-elect’s strong-arming of the private sector, his media-bashing tweets and his feud with the intelligence community all suggest an authoritarian timeline ahead.
Then, finally, there is the question of how the axes interact. A populist-authoritarian combination might seem natural.
But you could also imagine an authoritarian-orthodox conservative combination, in which congressional Republicans accept the most imperial of presidencies because it’s granting them tax rates and entitlement reforms they have long desired.
Or you could imagine a totally incompetent populism, in which Trump flies around the country holding rallies while absolutely nothing in Washington gets done.
As for what we should actually hope for — well, the center of the matrix seems like the sweet spot for the country: A Trump presidency that is competent enough without being dictatorial and that provides a populist corrective to conservatism without taking us all the way to mercantilism or a debt crisis.
But this is Donald Trump we’re talking about, so a happy medium seems unlikely. Along one axis or the other, bet on the extremes.