The Vaporware Presidency

Maybe people were taking Trump seriously instead of literally, or diagonally instead of orthogonally, but whatever the case, the walk-backs started soon after the ruckus died down. First, the Pentagon announced that the parade couldn’t include tanks, because they would destroy the streets. Instead, Trump’s parade would be heavy on wheeled vehicles and aircraft, they said.

Then it was revealed that the parade would cost $12 million. Or, as Axios put it dryly, “just $2 million less than what the now-cancelled military exercises with South Korea would have cost, which Trump has described as ‘tremendously expensive’.”

But of course, that was just the initial estimate. Eventually the budget ballooned out to $92 million. In August, Trump announced that he was “cancelling” the parade. He then tried to use this pretend cancellation of a make-believe parade that never had any chance of actually marching to attack local Democrats. And in the same breath he suggested that the real parade will really, truly, take place next year.

And if you believe that, I’ve got a wall to sell you.

Welcome to the vaporware presidency.

The term vaporware gained common usage in tech circles in the early 1980s. “Vaporware” refers to a piece of software that is announced long before it actually exists. Coined by a disgruntled Microsoft engineer complaining about the company’s Xenix operating system, vaporware carried an additional meaning: The reason the nonexistent software was announced so prematurely was to act as an anti-competitive club against other potential entrants to the market. Sometimes the company announcing its vaporware knew it couldn’t deliver the product. Sometimes it didn’t even intend to deliver it.

Today, when tech people talk about vaporware, they generally mean incompetence. But the roots of the term encompass malice, too.

Whatever its motivations, the Trump presidency has been bloated with vaporware. And much of it came pre-installed.

The big one, of course, is The Wall That Mexico Is Going to Pay For. We’re halfway through the Trump administration and there is no wall. Instead, the president is getting ready for a kabuki fight with Democrats in the lame-duck Congress over funding for construction of a wall that will never be granted. You can bet the milk money that after he fails to get Dems to agree to pay for The Wall That Mexico Was Supposed to Pay For, construction will be punted until the 2020 election. At which point Trump will try to sell voters on the idea that they need to re-elect him to “finish the wall” that was never started in the first place.

Other bits of Trump’s vaporware are, as they say in the tech world, no longer being supported. Remember when Trump talked endlessly about how his “infrastructure plan” could top the $1 trillion mark? Not only did he never get this plan turned into law, he never even turned his “plan” into an actual plan. I doubt you’ll ever hear about it again. Ditto the death penalty Trump wanted to impose for drug dealers. And the voter fraud commission that was going to prove that, actually, Trump really did win the popular vote in 2016.

My personal favorite bit of Trump vaporware was the president’s announcement that he was going to end birthright citizenship via executive order. There was, as you may recall, quite a kerfuffle about this ridiculous proposal. Some people argued that not only could Trump do away with birthright citizenship with a stroke of his pen, but that he must do so, because it was a critical step for defending our nation state.

And then a week or so later, suddenly the entire topic of birthright citizenship was just . . . gone. Trump stopped talking about it. Trump supporters seemed to forget about it. And the people who had rushed out to argue how crucial it was that Trump end it were suddenly on to the next thing.

But the most consequential piece of vaporware is probably Trump’s Red Wave. The president spent months claiming that, despite all available evidence, there was going to be a “Red Wave” in the midterm elections:

Like the military parade, the Red Wave was abruptly canceled. And like the military parade, Trump will eventually tell his supporters that the real Red Wave is coming next election.

Some of them might even believe him.