“This is more work than in my previous life,” President Trump said as he neared his hundredth day in office. “I thought it would be easier.”
When conservatives said he was not one of them, this is a big part of what they meant. As a candidate and now as a president, Trump seems to accept the left-wing conceit that good people who are smart and work hard can solve any problem if they have enough power.
On the campaign trail, Trump consistently asserted that America’s problems, from the persistence of ISIS to the disappearance of factory jobs, were due to the ill-intent, incompetence, or weakness of the nation’s leaders. This echoed President Barack Obama’s promise that it was only corruption and cynicism that prevented America from being greater.
Trump, like Obama, thus portrayed himself as above the fray, standing outside the swamp. And just as the promise of easy answers worked for Obama electorally, it worked for Trump last November, too. Just as Obama found governing much harder than electioneering, and social and economic problems more complex than he had expected. He would retreat to campaigning whevever possible, for that was where he was comfortable and adept in a way he was not when it came to governing.
Similarly, Trump has found the job of being president, the duty of governing, and the task of tackling the country’s challenges to be hard, no matter how “strong,” “smart,” or immune to being “bought” one is.
He thought that dealing with North Korea was a simple matter of pressuring China to help out. A 10-minute conversation with Chinese leader Xi Jinping showed Trump the situation was trickier.
Similarly at home, he did not realize how complex policymaking really was. “Nobody knew that healthcare could be so complicated,” Trump said in February. But other people did know this. This was one reason Democrats took years to hash out their plans. This is one reason conservatives opposed big-government plans to try to rationalize the industry. It’s also why the conservative disposition is to appreciate the complexity of things and to resist the impulse towards quick fixes and centrally planned grand overhauls.
Two months after Trump granted how complex healthcare is, he still appeared to find it hard to accept reality, and the need of tradeoffs. Here he is in a telling back-and-forth during his exclusive interview with the Washington Examiner:
WEX: So on healthcare, you have said you want to lower premiums.
POTUS: Right.
WEX: You want to maintain coverage levels.
POTUS: Right.
WEX: You want to increase consumer choice.
POTUS: Right.
WEX: But you want to spend less taxpayer money on healthcare.
POTUS: Right.
WEX: Some of those are a little conflicting.
POTUS: No —
WEX: — and it’s difficult to get those all simultaneously. So at the end of the day, what’s your biggest priority?
POTUS: OK, well all of those things. I think we’re gonna do all of those things….
When a conservative sees a problem that has existed for generations, he assumes it has deep and tangled roots, and that anything that looks like an easy “solution” probably isn’t, and might even exacerbate things.
This is part of the wisdom behind the Constitution’s checks and balances. Our Founders didn’t want to empower either a small elite cadre or an ephemeral passionate majority to impose their sweeping changes on society or government. These checks and balances grate on Trump, just as they grated on Obama.
The U.S. Constitution is designed to frustrate those who aspire to fundamental transformation. This is just as clear now, after 100 days of Trump, as it was throughout eight years of Obama.
