Each president is different
CRAWFORD NOTCH, N.H. — At the end of Trump’s first year in the White House, one question is unavoidable if not unanswerable: Has the presidency changed Trump more than Trump has changed the presidency?
Almost every president has been transformed merely by taking the oath of office. That solemn vow transformed the identities of George Washington, Ulysses Grant, Dwight Eisenhower and the nine other generals who became chief executives; they became civilian commanders. It transformed the regional figures Calvin Coolidge, Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton into national leaders. It transformed the obscure politicians Abraham Lincoln and Harry Truman into iconic leaders. It transformed generational figures such as Theodore Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy into timeless symbols.
But it may be possible to argue that, after he leaves Washington, the presidency may not have transformed Trump at all. Certainly it would be hard to disagree that his first 11 months left the president acting, thinking, deciding and tweeting much the same way he did 11 months before he stood on the West Front of the Capitol, spoke of “American carnage” and vowed to put, and keep, America first.
Some presidents (William McKinley, Herbert Hoover and George H.W. Bush) went into the presidency fixed in character. Some (Kennedy, Barack Obama, even Franklin Delano Roosevelt) were works in prog- ress. Still others (Truman, Richard M. Nixon and George W. Bush) were transformed by the office.
But none of them was as resistant to change as Trump. McKinley, a product of small-town Ohio, took America international. Hoover, shaped by laissez-faire nostrums that made him rich, embraced more aggressive action against the Great Depression than has been acknowledged for two generations. The elder Bush, steeped at the United Nations and the Central Intelligence Agency in Cold War precepts, adapted to a unipolar world without a Soviet bloc.
Trump has warred with his allies and sparred with, rather than romanced, his opponents. He has eschewed nearly every canon or doctrine of political behavior. Indeed, he actually has discredited conventional politics — a sharp departure from every one of his 44 predecessors, including the great improviser FDR.
Lincoln, facing an even more tumultuous first year than Trump, had every reason to forgo conventional politics in a nation literally breaking apart. “He saw no shame in the practice of politics, and experienced no priggish discomfort about what it takes to get great things done,” Princeton historian Sean Wilentz wrote. “He was never too good for politics. Quite the contrary: For him, politics — ordinary, grimy, unelevating politics — was itself a good, and an instrument for good.”
But while the presidency has not changed Trump, it is very likely that Trump has changed the presidency.
He has in some ways removed party, and in some ways ideology, too, from the presidency. He was elected a Republican and — this weekend’s Camp David summit on legislative priorities is an example — leans toward Republicans for succor. But he is far more intuitive than ideological. He has scrambled the political calculus for this decade, and may have changed the notion of conservatism forever.
Ronald Reagan, himself an outsider, still had enormous respect for presidential precedent and comportment. Trump does not, although, in fairness, Obama was photographed in shirtsleeves in the Oval Office and, unforgivably for traditionalists, with his feet on the presidential desk built from the timbers of HMS Resolute.
Few presidents — perhaps none besides Jackson, Truman and Nixon — spoke of their rivals with the bitterness and anger of Trump. Truman’s remarks seem almost innocent today, the equivalent of saying “heck” in public. Nixon’s insults, some anti-Semitic, were uttered in private and were revealed only because the Supreme Court ordered that his tapes be released. But Trump’s are vitriolic, at times cruel and crude.
It is too early to know whether the president’s style will become a presidential style, employed to some degree by successors. Nor can we say whether it is a reflection of the coarsening of American life or whether it contributes to a further coarsening of our civic culture. Some things a president can affect, even control. This may be one of them. So much else that any president, or this president, confronts is well beyond his power.
David M. Shribman is executive editor of the Post-Gazette (dshribman@ post-gazette.com, 412 263-1890). Follow him on Twitter at ShribmanPG.