Swamped

It will not be remembered as such. And the reason for that often goes overlooked.

Most critiques of the Trump administration have focused on the various moral failings of the president — his inflammatory and divisive rhetoric, his pettiness, his willingness to promote manifestly false claims. But a full understanding of why the promised revolution was so close and yet remained so far requires an appreciation of his gross political ineptitude.

Trump modeled his presidency on the administration of Andrew Jackson, who injected the “people versus the powerful” message into the discourse. Trump’s inaugural address was decidedly Jacksonian in its rhetoric, and he pointedly hung a picture of Jackson in the Oval Office. But Trump was no Jackson. Both of them might have had populist instincts, but Jackson grasped presidential politics in ways that Trump never did, for the latter misapprehended the very nature of presidential politics.

The role of the president in the executive branch is not akin to that of a business owner, whose employees, when he tells them to do something, are obliged to do it or be fired. American government is distinctively different. Power is separated along multiple lines of authority. Take the Cabinet, for instance. High-level officials serve at the pleasure of the president, of course, but their departments are the creation of Congress, whose laws govern their work.

Moreover, the overwhelming majority of government workers are part of the professional class of bureaucrats, immune to the ebb and flow of partisan politics. The president cannot just tell these people what to do and expect them robotically to obey. Instead, presidential power is often exercised through a process of bargaining. Occupying as he does the most important office in the United States, and indeed the world, the president has an enormous number of resources at his disposal to induce other agents in government to do what he thinks they should.

But the president has to know how to employ them, and Trump never bothered to learn.

Take even the most rudimentary lessons that were lost on this president. In the first year of his administration, the details of a call between Trump and Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull were leaked to the Washington Post. Trump berated Turnbull over the issue of refugee resettlement and cut the call short, hanging up after just 25 minutes. The call itself was a major faux pas, for a smart president who understands the nature of executive power knows to cultivate the goodwill of foreign leaders, certainly not to alienate them needlessly. The call was leaked no doubt by somebody in the vast architecture of our nation’s byzantine foreign policy bureaucracy to embarrass the president.

The most obvious lesson of the fiasco was for the president to be more mindful of what he said over the phone, realizing that people in government who are not his political allies are listening. But less than two years later, Trump was back at it — with an indiscreet call to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, in which Trump encouraged Zelensky to look into Joe Biden’s family entanglements with the Eastern European nation. This call got him impeached. And yet Trump made the same mistake once again, brow-beating Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger over alleged vote fraud in Georgia. That call leaked, too, and no doubt contributed to the Republican Party’s loss in the Senate runoff elections there.

These are not the actions of a man who ever understood how the president wields power effectively. The first time might be chalked up to a rookie mistake — a grievous one, no doubt. But for this to happen several times over illustrates how little Trump cared about learning the way presidential power actually works.

Consider another example. One of the key features of successful presidents is being mindful about their staff, particularly in the West Wing. They must employ skilled political operatives who share their basic orientations toward government. But time and again, Trump failed to find such people — going so far as to make what were laughable mistakes. Hiring Anthony Scaramucci was the most ridiculous instance, but the case of John Bolton is illustrative. Why on Earth would Trump hire Bolton to be his national security adviser? On foreign policy issues, the two are poles apart. Why should Trump ever have presumed that Bolton would facilitate the president’s agenda as his national security adviser? Even an adviser who is a dutiful servant still has discretion in all sorts of matters — about what information to show the president, what to withhold, what advice to give, what to keep to himself. Bolton was the type of high-level adviser Trump needed more of: an experienced official who understood how to navigate the bureaucratic maze of government. He just needed versions of Bolton who were more fully on board with his vision of remaking government.

These are the kinds of errors that Jackson rarely, if ever, made. He may have been uncouth and uneducated, but Jackson came to understand how political power operated, and he learned how to wield it. He never made the same mistake twice, and he surrounded himself with men like Martin Van Buren, whose political instincts were unrivaled and loyalty to the Jacksonian agenda indubitable. As a consequence, Jackson was able to outfox his rivals in government, while Trump found himself perpetually outmaneuvered.

If Trump failed at the inside game of politics, he was no better at the outside game. His populist crusade had a major catch from day one — he was not actually popular. He won just 46% of the vote in 2016, less than Hillary Clinton. He is not the first president to enter the White House having won less than a majority. Like George W. Bush before him, Trump should have realized that to win reelection, he would have to expand his electoral coalition. Six percent of the country voted against both Trump and Clinton, and the president should have made it his priority to capture as much of that vote as possible. This could have been done without violating his basic anti-establishment posture. Indeed, given the widespread disaffection with politics as usual, a populist pitch to the middle of the country might have done the trick. But Trump never even tried. Instead, he satisfied himself by playing to his most hardcore supporters. This again speaks to the difference between business and politics. If your company enjoys die-hard brand loyalty from 45% of a market, you are probably going to make a lot of money. In politics, it is a recipe for defeat.

It is especially interesting to look back on the last four years to see when these two failures reinforced one another. Trump was at the peak of his political power during the 115th Congress, when he had Republican majorities in both chambers. But did he use this opportunity to push through Congress his own vision of a populist program: infrastructure, a reimagining of industrial policy, or reforms that might actually “drain the swamp”? No. Instead, he let congressional Republicans occupy the whip hand. And rather than advance a Trump-style populist agenda, they focused on their age-old priorities, cutting taxes and trying to replace Obamacare. Trump, meanwhile, bided his time with petty Twitter wars and needless blowups on the front page of the Washington Post. The result was firebrand populist rhetoric with the same-old establishment policies. His other domestic success, the stocking of the federal judiciary with conservatives, is due to factors totally outside his own control: the shortsightedness of Senate Democrats in eliminating the judicial filibuster, the commitment of Mitch McConnell and Senate Republicans to fill as many seats as possible, and the elaborate network of judicial conservatives ready to occupy those roles. Trump succeeded here, not coincidentally, by getting out of everybody else’s way.

As president, Trump was crude and irresponsible and put his own vanity first. But the country has had vain, crude, and irresponsible human beings serve as fairly successful presidents, in part because they understood the game of Washington politics, which Trump never did. The atavistic rage of his acolytes storming the Capitol earlier this month, staging a deadly but ultimately futile protest, is perhaps the greatest visual metaphor for his tenure. He was the opposite of Caesar: He came, he saw, but it was he who was conquered. The “swamp” stood up to Trump, and it won handily.

Jay Cost is a visiting fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and a visiting scholar at Grove City College’s Institute of Faith and Freedom.