The first year of the Trump presidency was like the election that preceded it: unpredictable, norm-shattering, and disorienting. From the “American carnage” in his inaugural address to the kerfuffle over whether he referred to countries in Africa as “s—holes” or “s—houses,” Washington and the country learned to expect the unexpected.
But with three-quarters of his term left to go, there are lessons we can take from Year One.
Conservative Victories Must Come Prepackaged. The successful nomination of Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court wasn’t the Trump administration’s only victory in its first year, but it was its most significant conservative policy achievement. There was a perfect confluence of factors: broad agreement throughout the party about the need for a justice in the mold of Antonin Scalia; a highly motivated and organized group of activists, led ably by the Federalist Society’s Leonard Leo; and an engaged administration (from White House counsel Don McGahn to Attorney General Jeff Sessions). All that was required from Trump was his approval—which he gave, thanks to assurances by those around him that nominating Gorsuch would be well received by the party faithful.
There’s a straightforward path to more wins like it in this presidency: Conservatives must unite on an issue, lay the necessary groundwork, and present the president with a no-lose option. This was true with deregulation, a longtime conservative goal that has chiefly required Trump to sign the executive orders placed in front of him. The same goes for the decision to pull out of the Paris climate agreement.
Consider the administration’s biggest policy failure: the inability to repeal and replace Obamacare. At no point was there any consensus within the party about how to repeal the health-care law or what to replace it with. The free-market health-care activists with ideas were largely outgunned by a swath of competing business and lobbying interests. Chaos reigned, and there was never a bill for the president to sign.
To accomplish more in the Trump era, conservatives need to prioritize, unite, and present the president with a win.
Trump Can’t Bridge GOP Divisions. Politically, the Republican party is less divided today than it was on Inauguration Day. The Trump-dissenters in Congress—Jeff Flake, Bob Corker, Ben Sasse, Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, Adam Kinzinger, and others—are on the backbench or on their way out of office. The rest of the party has either heartily embraced Trump or begrudgingly accepted him as leader. But the unity around Trump papers over divisions on policy, and the president has been unable to do much about them.
If we look again at the failure on Obamacare, we see an administration hardly engaged with the issue until the first bill failed in the House. When the president did finally get involved, he either undercut the Republican effort (calling the second House bill “mean”) or was hamhanded and ineffective (as with the attempts to whip recalcitrant congressional Republicans to vote for the bill).
Trump could not unite the party. And as the first year of his presidency drew to a close, the three top GOP leaders in Washington gave different answers to what would be the legislative priority in 2018. For House speaker Paul Ryan, it is entitlement reform. For Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader, issue number one is confirming more judicial nominations. The president has infrastructure spending at the top of his list.
The lack of consensus among the party leadership is just a taste of the disagreements among the rank and file, who can’t seem to agree on anything from defense spending to surveillance to immigration, tax policy, and trade. Legislative fights in 2017 were about cobbling together a majority amid very thin margins, with neither the congressional leadership nor the White House making it easy for GOP fence-sitters to come their way. Republicans were successful on tax reform because there was a longstanding, broad agreement on the need for cuts.
The lesson here is that while Trump was able to take advantage of the Republican party’s divisions to win its nomination, he has neither the interest nor the ability to resolve its ideological differences. Expect them to simmer and, at times, boil over for the rest of his presidency.
There Is No Trump Foreign Policy. When Trump was elected there was reason to expect that his administration would see a revival of hardnosed foreign policy realism. Yet the president has only a few determined views about the world: that the Iran nuclear deal is bad, that North Korea must be confronted with a show of power, and that the North American Free Trade Agreement must be abandoned. Everything else is up for negotiation.
Trump’s foreign policy has been incoherent and usually reflected the views of whoever was most influential with the president at any given moment. Advisers have had to race to keep up with the wavering lines. So it was that just six months after winning an election by running against foreign wars Trump approved a retaliatory strike on a Syrian airbase from which that country’s dictator, Bashar al-Assad, had launched a chemical attack on his own people. There were some opponents to the strike within the president’s inner circle—notably Steve Bannon—but practically everyone on the National Security Council was recommending a response, and Trump assented.
Even with the Iran deal, on which Trump’s views are strong, the president has been torn between his instinct to kill the deal and the entreaties of more cautious advisers like Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and Secretary of Defense James Mattis. The decision in July to recertify the deal to Congress was nearly derailed by Trump’s vacillation, encouraged by people like Bannon, former U.N. ambassador John Bolton, and Arkansas senator Tom Cotton. For several hours on the day of the congressionally mandated deadline, White House staffers were scrambling. In the end, Trump sided with Tillerson and Mattis. But the seed of decertification had been firmly planted, and at the next deadline 90 days later, Trump decided that the deal was no longer in the country’s national security interests.
Even foreign leaders can exert significant personal influence over the president. Despite taking a tough line against China during his campaign, Trump has been enamored of Chinese president Xi Jinping from their first encounter, in April at the Mar-a-Lago resort. Trump called their talks “tremendous” and said “progress” had been made. The flattery continued when Trump visited Beijing in November, with the Chinese literally rolling out the red carpet for the American president. The result of these good feelings between Trump and Xi? The administration declined to list China as an official currency manipulator late last year and has done little to address our trade deficit with the country of more than $350 billion.
What will guide and shape the Trump foreign policy in 2018 and beyond? The question really is: Who’s in the room?
Trump Can’t Get Out of His Own Way. The special counsel investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 election has caused Trump more headaches in his first year than just about anything else. It came about thanks to a series of mistakes made by the president himself: his effort to pressure FBI director James Comey to end the investigation of Michael Flynn; his decision to fire Comey over what appeared to be concerns about the director’s loyalty; and then his blabbing to NBC News’s Lester Holt that he had fired Comey because of “this Russia thing.” Six days later, Robert Mueller was appointed special counsel, and the Trump presidency may never recover.
On issues big and small, Trump has been unable to get out of his own way. As Mitch McConnell and White House staffers worked to push a teetering tax bill through the Senate this fall, Trump tweeted disparagingly about Jeff Flake, a frequent critic who nevertheless was a needed vote. In an Oval Office meeting in May with Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak and Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov, Trump inadvertently revealed classified information shared with the United States by an allied country’s intelligence service. This was at a time when questions about Trump’s possible collusion with Russian actors in the 2016 presidential election were prompting his Justice Department to appoint the special counsel.
When credible allegations emerged that Senate candidate Roy Moore of Alabama had sexually molested an underage girl, most Republicans backed away from their nominee. After several days of hemming and hawing about whether to withdraw his own tepid endorsement (Trump had supported the incumbent, Luther Strange, in the primary), the president instead went with a full-on embrace of Moore in the closing days of the special election—only to have Moore lose anyway.
Trump’s self-sabotage has dragged down his approval numbers and damaged the Republican party’s image, despite what appears to be a booming economy and a set of modest conservative achievements under the GOP’s stewardship. Reining in the worst of his public persona, from the tweets to the vulgar comments behind the scenes, could do the party a lot of good as it heads into the November midterm elections. That’s in his best interest, too, because if the GOP loses the House, Trump will almost certainly face a serious attempt at impeachment.
Will the president learn his own lesson from his first 365 days in office and tamp things down? Don’t count on it. If there’s one lesson the rest of us all learned, it’s that Trump is his own worst enemy.
Michael Warren is a senior writer at THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
