There are all sorts of lessons we like to pass on to our kids when it comes to competition, chief among them how to be a good loser and how to be a good winner. Sometimes, winners learn they have to be extra gracious, even if they don’t feel very gracious, because of the long-term benefits of taking the high road.
This is particularly true in governing, especially governing in a polarizing climate. As for the losers, not appearing bitter is usually a hallmark of the losers who hope to have futures.
Of course, these basic rules of political decorum are ones Donald Trump has rarely followed. Sure, the president-elect has shown a tad more grace since winning this election, some of it because he won a more decisive victory than he did in 2016. Throw in his very narrow popular vote lead and he’s feeling pretty good about himself. And he should — his theory of the case about the campaign and about working-class voters of all stripes has proven true. He’s been accumulating political capital, and his victory only gives him an opening to accumulate more … if he chooses to.
And that’s really the question I have about how he plans to conduct this presidency. How much of his presidency is going to be focused on revenge, how much on reform, how much on self-enrichment and how much on accumulating power for himself or his movement?
So far, given his picks for the Cabinet and other positions, he seems to be leaning more on revenge than reform.
On some level, I accept the notion that one person’s revenge is another person’s “reform,” so I’m sure Trump could argue he’s appointing reformists. Then again, an arsonist who burns a building down isn’t going to be mistaken for a reformist architect. Perhaps the arsonist could make the case that he couldn’t share his vision if he didn’t first burn the existing place to the ground.
What will ultimately matter is whether these folks can govern like reformers or end up simply as conduits for Trump’s revenge. And it’s hard not to see all of this as more revenge than reform — from the creation of a list of generals to fire to the threat of purging the non-political federal workforce — it’s hard not to see this as anything other than a revenge Cabinet.
And politically, it just doesn’t make a lot of sense.
Let’s say he’s successful in trolling the left and “owning the libs” by getting the Senate to acquiesce to his picks of former Rep. Matt Gaetz to run the Justice Department, former Fox host Pete Hegseth to run the Defense Department, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to lead the Department of Health and Human Services and former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard to be director of national intelligence. What will that accomplish for him and his voters in the long term? If the reason to pick these folks is pure revenge and they carry out what Trump’s id wants done, is that really going to help him implement any actual agenda? If he picks all these early fights with, essentially, the biggest and most important parts of government, how fast will the turmoil created go from “change can be painful, let’s be patient,” to simply “instability is painful, and we need to some balance to calm the waters”? Don’t believe me — just rewind the tape to Trump’s last term.
And it’s that question that nags at me more than anything else: Why is he so intent on picking the most controversial firebrand he can think of for every post? Why does he want everyone in his Cabinet armed with sledgehammers? Is he this angry at the so-called deep state? Is he this convinced the government set him up over Russia or over the various other civil and criminal cases he has faced? Or is he this convinced the government knows everything he has done that is problematic and he fears that?
Is either answer a satisfying one for the average voter?
Either Trump is right and government was weaponized to stop him, or the government has been right, Trump is a unique threat, and he’s trying to weaken the parts of government that could have the most credibility against him, namely the military and federal law enforcement.
Here’s the political problem Trump is creating for himself: He’s taking full ownership of the entire bureaucracy now. There is no fantasy or mythical “deep state” to blame for not fulfilling his promises. He’s appointing folks he says share his vision — so no excuses of being jammed by the ol’ establishment wing of the GOP (like what happened in his first term).
This time, he has to deliver, and his ability to deliver depends on whether he can put together a stable set of political actors to not only do his bidding but also somehow deliver on his promises to a whole new group of voters who are “trying out” Trumpism for the very first time.
If the next six months at the Pentagon are more about which bathrooms folks can or can’t use and who can or can’t defend the country (and trust me, if you are watching Rep. Nancy Mace’s latest spectacle about where one member of Congress goes to the bathroom, you can see how quickly Hegseth could try to start a culture war inside the Pentagon, as well, and all evidence indicates that’s his mission), Trump is going to find himself taking more of the heat for his controversial pick of defense chief than his actual pick for the post.
There are a lot of potential land mines that Trump and the newly empowered GOP need to avoid. One is misreading their mandate on the culture front.
What many voters appeared to say with their votes, culturally, is that they don’t like to be told how they should behave. There’s a fierce libertarian streak in this country, and it can look “left” or “right” depending on which party’s in power. If the Republicans go from preaching against “DEI” to essentially imposing their own culture, forcing Bible study in public schools (see Oklahoma) or using gender stereotypes rather than pure merit to decide whether someone belongs on the front lines of combat, then they will be committing the same sin they accused coastal elites of committing, of “imposing their own culture” on a public that doesn’t agree with their every belief.
“Live and let live” is always going to be a more comfortable place for a diverse, multiethnic democracy to be than trying to impose one set of values over another.
And this is the very risk Trump has already invited by deciding to pick the most controversial firebrand one could find in some of these key positions. If his picks cause instability, the public will reject this administration faster than he thinks.
One thing Trump and the GOP are already misreading about his so-called mandate is that he was elected despite his personal unpopularity. That is, he wasn’t elected proactively by the voters who took him over the edge; he was elected because of who he was not.
This wasn’t a decision voters made because they like Trump. To the contrary, they made this decision because they didn’t think the Biden-Harris administration understood how they live their lives. Does Trump understand it? Perhaps he doesn’t, but he certainly knew how to channel their frustrations into a vote-getting message, and he certainly exposed the Democrats as not having any clue about how the working class was faring in this economy.
But these moments of peak political capital are fleeting, and when they go, they go. Just ask President Joe Biden.
Biden saw whatever political capital he accumulated at the start of his presidency vanish completely by the time of the botched Afghanistan withdrawal, not even a year into his term. What was remarkable about that moment is that Biden was never able to dig out of the approval rating hole from that August 2021 debacle.
I’ve wondered for quite some time why voters abandoned Biden as quickly as they did and why he didn’t get the benefit of the doubt. The conclusion I’ve come to is that the voters were never sold on Biden as a president in the first place. He was elected because of who he wasn’t (Trump) more than because of who he was (Barack Obama’s vice president).
And make no mistake, after the tumult of Covid, the voters who decide elections simply wanted calm and stable — not some massive ideological shift in philosophy, but a break from the instability that Trump was bringing. Well, I think Biden lost so much of his standing with the botched withdrawal because those decisive voters thought he might be as erratic or certainly as incompetent (or potentially so) as the previous occupant of the Oval Office.
Had Biden won his Democratic primary campaign in 2020 the old-fashioned way — slogging through the primaries, making his case, building his own political identity, instead of how he did win, having the primary campaign stopped in its tracks by a virus — perhaps the public would have given him some grace for his first big mistake. But that isn’t what happened, and the lack of connective tissue between Biden and the electorate served him poorly once his administration was being judged on the merits.
Every political party sees its time in power come to end because of the same issue: perceived overreach. Whether that overreach is on cultural norms or on dismantling (er, “reforming”) government or on simply misreading the electorate itself, there’s no better recipe for political failure than partisan overreach. And there’s no better cure for a losing political party than the ability to run against the overreach of the party in power.
The question is whether Trump and his GOP understand how they won. If they don’t accept the premise that they won because of who they were not rather than because of who they are, they’ll see their support erode as quickly for them as it did for Biden. Right now, Trump’s on the road to overreach, and he hasn’t yet taken the oath.
If the first thing out of the box in January is a mass deportation plan that looks as unstable and as erratic as the first round of appointments looks, not only will Trump not have a honeymoon, but he also might see his newly compliant, GOP-controlled Congress run for the hills — if his approval rating bottoms out as badly as Biden’s did before the end of his first year.
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