What would a Trump presidency look like? The possibility can no longer be brushed aside arbitrarily.
GOP front-runner forces look into future
WASHINGTON — President Trump.
A lot of people have trouble putting those two words together.
“I don’t even want to get into that … God,” said John Sununu, the White House chief of staff under President George H.W. Bush. “I don’t even want to be in a story that has that assumption in it.”
But the assumption can’t be brushed aside.
The chance that Donald Trump will win the Republican presidential nomination has grown dramatically with his victories in early voting states and his leads in polls of the states that vote over the next three weeks.
The intense attacks that Trump’s leading rivals, Sens. Marco Rubio of Florida and Ted Cruz of Texas, have waged in recent days provide a good measuring stick for their concern that he could soon race beyond their reach.
And although lots of Republican strategists fear — and Democrats hope — that Trump would stand no chance in a general election, many of those same people confidently predicted his demise in the primaries.
So, with an election win no longer a far-fetched notion, what might a Trump presidency look like?
“It would be chaos,” Rubio declared Friday on CBS. Trump, he said, “refuses to answer questions on any specific public policy” and “has no ideas of any substance on the important issues.” That’s not entirely true. For voters interested in policy, Trump has indeed been frustratingly vague. The issues page on his campaign website is sparse. On some matters, he refuses to be pinned down. On others, he openly admits
not knowing much, as he did when asked in Nevada recently about federal land ownership in the West.
Nonetheless, in eight months of campaigning, 10 debates and scores of speeches and interviews, the New York billionaire has set out his top priorities and given a fairly clear sense of how a President Trump might approach his job.
In ideological terms, Trump scrambles traditional lines — borrowing some ideas from the left, others from the right.
He shows no particular interest in the long-standing conservative GOP goal of shrinking the size of the federal government.
Asked in Thursday night’s debate how he
would balance the federal budget, he fell back on the slogan of eliminating “waste, fraud and abuse” and named only two specifics that he would cut — the Common Core education standards, which aren’t a federal spending program, and Environmental Protection Agency regulatory powers that he said he would shift to the states.
One of his most specific pledges — to reject any cuts to Social Security or Medicare — points in the other direction. Coupled with his pledge to increase military spending, Trump’s refusal to cut programs for the elderly would put about 60 percent of the federal budget off-limits.
By contrast to his vagueness on the size of govern-
ment, Trump is clear on the central theme of how he sees the presidency: the personal use of executive power.
In almost every statement he makes, Trump depicts the presidency as an arena in which he would fix problems through the exercise of his will and negotiating ability.
Some of Trump’s most controversial plans could be carried out by executive authority. Many legal experts think that Trump could impose his plan to bar most foreign Muslims from entering the U.S., at least for a while, because the president has broad authority over immigration, particularly where it intersects with national security.
By contrast, “he would have a hard time doing anything that requires the cooperation of Congress,” said William Galston of the Brookings Institution.
If elected, Trump would take office after what amounts to a hostile takeover of the Republican Party and over the opposition of Democrats. He likely would not be able to count on much support from either side on Capitol Hill.
That would mean trouble for his promises to build a wall along the Mexican border or to round up and deport the roughly 11 million people in the U.S. without legal authorization. Both would require Congress to approve billions of dollars in new appropriations even if Trump could pressure the Mexican government into reimbursing the U.S. for the cost of the wall, which the Mexicans said they won’t consider.
On foreign policy, a President Trump would face a different set of constraints — other countries.
And other Trump promises go far beyond what a president can do.
“You have to tell people ‘no’ all the time” in government, said Rob Stutzman, who was a top adviser to another larger-than-life figure, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and who backs Rubio. “It ultimately is a business where you disappoint people.”