Trump’s ‘credibility gap’ is the biggest since Nixon
‘Perfect accuracy’ of words and facts seem to matter less and less in this evolving political story
President Trump drew the biggest inaugural crowd in history — except he didn’t. President Obama wiretapped Trump Tower during the campaign — except there’s no evidence he did. Trump fired FBI director James Comey because the deputy attorney general concluded Comey had mishandled the Hillary Clinton email investigation — except now the president says it was his decision alone and cites the Russia investigation as one of the reasons.
On issues big and small, substantive and cosmetic, the Trump White House has failed to give accurate accounts of what happened until photographs, records, reporting and, in some cases, the president’s own words provide a new version of the facts. Even when confronted with evidence, the president and his spokespeople don’t always acknowledge the need to correct a falsehood.
That doesn’t seem to bother Trump.
“It is not possible for my surrogates to stand at podium with perfect accuracy!” he tweeted Friday with apparent good cheer, then mused about canceling the daily press briefing. Later, press secretary Sean Spicer didn’t make it clear whether the president was serious or joking about upending a fixture of White House operations since the Harding administration, and he wouldn’t expand on a separate tweet from Trump suggesting that he might have recorded his conversation with Comey.
Concerned or not, Trump now faces the biggest credibility gap of any president since at least Richard Nixon during Watergate (a scandal that forced his resignation) or Lyndon Johnson during the Vietnam
War (a spiraling controversy that prompted him not to seek a second full term). For LBJ, it was the disparity between the official version of the war’s course and the reporting from the front lines that added the phrase “credibility gap” to the political lexicon.
“I wrote a book about what goes into making great presidential leadership, and one of the elements I said was credibility, was trust,” said presidential historian Robert Dallek, author of Hail to the Chief: The Making and Un
making of American Presidents as well as biographies of Franklin Roosevelt, John Kennedy, Nixon and Johnson. “When presidents lose the trust of the public, I think it’s very difficult if not impossible for them to govern.”
The controversies have taken a toll on Americans’ views of Trump. In a Quinnipiac Poll this month, those surveyed said 61%33% that Trump wasn’t honest. That is a 28-percentage-point underwater rating on honesty, double the 14-point divide he scored in the same survey at the beginning of the year.
The poll was taken before the latest and most spectacular example: Comey’s firing. Tuesday night at the White House, Spicer said the decision had been made by Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who had criticized Comey’s handling of the Hillary Clinton email inquiry; Trump had accepted Rosenstein’s recommendation. Vice President Pence repeated that explanation to reporters Wednesday.
But on Thursday, Trump told NBC’s Lester Holt he had decided to fire Comey regardless of what Rosenstein recommended, and he cited a different reason. “When I decided to just do it, I said to myself, I said, you know, this Russia thing with Trump and Russia is a made-up story. It’s an excuse by the Democrats for having lost an election that they should have won.”
Trump’s decision to dismiss the FBI director has rattled official Washington, stoked what Democrats already call the “resistance” and fueled reporting that the president is about to shake up his senior White House staff — though the fiercest controversies have centered on the president’s statements, not those of his aides. Questions about whether Trump will stand by his word imperil the administration’s efforts to negoti- ate a health care compromise and a major tax package with members of Congress. And it casts a cloud over his first international trip, which begins this week.
“President Trump has sacrificed his credibility (with) his outrageous disregard for the truth and his penchant for outrage,” said Ron Klain, a senior White House aide in the Clinton and Obama administrations. “It will be sorely missed when a crisis comes.”
Credibility is a precious political resource, said Frank Donatelli, a Republican consultant and political director in the Reagan White House.
“Presidential credibility can enhance public approval, as in ‘he acts on what he believes,’ ” Donatelli said, noting that personal popularity helped Reagan and other presidents succeed even when support for policies was lower. That’s one reason a president’s approval rating is so closely watched: “A president’s influence over events is directly related to his standing with the voting public. Members of Congress will be more deferential to a president with strong public support.”
Trump’s rating seems relatively stable, ticking down just a bit in two surveys since the FBI furor. His approval rating was 39% in the Gallup and NBC/ Wall Street
Journal polls posted Sunday. That is a historic low for a modern president at this early point in his presidency, but it’s just about where he has stood through the first 100 days of his tenure.
Trump allies also take comfort in the approval ratings for those pressing the questions. Just 34% approve of the job congressional Democrats are doing, the Quinnipiac Poll shows. And respondents disapprove of the way the news media cover Trump 58%-37%.
Credibility has damaged Trump’s team, too. There’s Spicer, regularly dispatched to defend Trump’s most provocative assertions, who was the target of a brutal parody this weekend on NBC’s Saturday Night Live.
“Trump is innocent,” the Spicer figure, portrayed by Melissa McCarthy, says at a White House briefing. “How do we know? Because he told us so. Period.” When she uses a motorized podium to track down Alec Baldwin, playing Trump, at his New Jersey golf course, she demands, “Have you ever told me to say things that aren’t true?”
Baldwin’s reply: “Only since you started working here.”