Notes on Donald Trump’s America

And eventually we’ll see to what extent Trump’s character problems do, or do not, become his destiny.

In the meantime, a few observations about the election and politics in America going forward:

-Everyone keeps saying we’re in “uncharted waters,” and that phrase is almost perfectly accurate. Trump is such a black box that no one really knows what to expect from his administration. Including him. Remember Nancy Pelosi’s “You have to pass it to find out what’s in it” argument for Obamacare? Well, that’s more or less the situation with Trump: We had to elect him to discover what he’ll really do as president.

Is item #1 on the agenda going to be The Wall that Mexico is paying to build? Or repealing Obamacare? Or passing a trillion-dollar stimulus–sorry, I mean “infrastructure”—bill that fiscally responsible Republican legislators are suddenly going to love? Should we be taking Trump seriously, or literally, going forward?

-While we’re on the subject of unknowable-Trumpiness, what do you make of Trump elevating at the same time, to co-equal status atop his administration, Reince Priebus (who is the establishment) and Steve Bannon (whose mission is to burn the establishment to the ground)? I don’t have an answer.

But a reader sends along a funny bit of analysis:

-If you’re looking to understand Trump, you could do worse than this analysis from Erik Hoel: “Trump’s behavior is 100% modelable as a Tit-for-tat-with-some-forgiveness Markov process.”

Tit-for-tat is a surprisingly effective game-theory strategy—the player treats others the same way they treat him. (Think of it as the economic version of the Golden Rule.) This simple strategy is made even more formidable by introducing some forgiveness: The player retaliates against bad treatment the majority of times, but not all of the time. This produces an exceptionally high level of Nash equilibriums.

If you’re looking to make the case that Trump was playing four-dimensional chess all along, this theory is a pretty good one.

– I suspect that a number of electoral norms will change because of Trump’s victory. For instance, why would any candidate for president ever again release his or her tax returns?

– Something else that’s shattered is the dream of a third-party in American politics. If there was ever going to be a year when a third-party could have thrived, this was it: We had two wildly unpopular and untrusted major-party candidates who also happened to occupy much the same ideological space. This left lots of room for growth for a third-party challenger.

And with three third-party candidates running, they got a grand total of 5.2 percent of the vote. That’s because 90 percent of Republicans and 89 percent of Democrats voted their party.

The power of partisanship has grown to such a degree that it seems nearly impossible to start a viable third-party on the ideological grounds. At this point in America, voters are partisans first and ideologues second. So conservatives will probably have to work within the GOP framework for the foreseeable future.

– Unless, of course, the real route to a third-party is celebrity. Maybe a sufficiently exciting/outlandish/click-bait-ish candidate could establish a viable third party where ideological dissenters could not.

Maybe we’ll test that in 2020 when Kanye runs third-party after losing the Democratic nomination to Oprah.

-When it comes to happy outcomes from a Trump administration, chief among them is this: Hillary Clinton will now exit, stage left. Like the poor, Bill Clinton will always be with us—he’s too needy to ever really go away. But his wife can now go back to making money and never need burden herself, or the public, with a relationship that neither party ever truly wanted.

Also, the Chelsea 2028 talk gets tamped down an awful lot, too. Though the way our politics is going, you can’t really count anything out, can you? Maybe the Ivanka-Chelsea fusion ticket will be just what this country needs in a few years.

– As for President Trump, it’s difficult to know right now just how completely he has remade the political landscape. I’m inclined to think that the answer is “quite a lot.”

He may well be the Reaganite figure that others claimed he was all along–reshuffling voting coalitions and reconfiguring the Republican party in terms of both policy and ideology.

And I’m open to the argument that Trump’s mandate is larger than it seems. If it turns out that he overperformed his polls by significant margins, he may well bring out of the shadows other marginal and/or reluctant supporters who were for him, but not enough to actually show up and vote.

Also, just having Trump behind the White House podium will further normalize him to the public. If he’s successful—which, again, we all hope he will be—then why couldn’t he be remaking the party into something new and impressive? Just imagine how daunting the Democrats’ task of retaking not just Florida and North Carolina is, but having to flip those states while also winning back almost the whole of the industrial heartland?

– All of that said, we might not want to get carried away. One of the mistakes I made in reading Trump was discounting the polls during the primaries but then not discounting them during the general election. So we ought to allow for the possibility that while Trump’s mandate might be larger than it looks, it might also be somewhat smaller.

– Consider the devil’s advocate case: Hillary Clinton did actually win the popular vote, and probably by about 1.5 million voters when all is said and done. She did this while bracketed by third-party challengers on both her left (Jill Stein) and her right (Gary Johnson). If you assume that those voters would have broken even 2-1 for her, then she would have won Wisconsin, Michigan, and Florida. She would be president-elect right now.

You can always play this game with elections: “Flip just X votes here and there and the outcome is totally different!” But on this election the number of votes you need to flip to get a Clinton win is incredibly small—flip 77,399 votes in those three states and we’re all talking about what a genius the Clinton team is. Couple that with Trump losing the popular vote and having remarkably high unfavorables and maybe his mandate is actually much narrower than people think.

After all, he won a different group of voters, but in total he won just about the same number of voters as McCain and Romney.

– In sum, it’s entirely possible that Trump is Reagan. But it also seems possible that he’s Pete Wilson.

You might remember Wilson as the last Republican governor of California. (If you want to count Arnold Schwarzenegger as a “Republican,” we can argue about that some other time.)

Before Wilson, Republicans had been elected governor of California for all but five of the terms since 1917. Wilson came into office riding a wave of fanfare so overpowering that, for five minutes, he was thought to be a serious contender for the White House.

Since Wilson, California has been more or less a single-party state wholly owned by the Democrats. If you wanted to put money on the next time Republicans might win the governor’s mansion there, I wouldn’t even know where to set the line.

All of which is to say that the future is highly contingent.

We should hope for the best, of course. (Justice Diane Sykes has a nice ring to it.) But it’s always a good policy to also prepare for the worst. Just in case.