This week’s New York Times interview with Donald Trump
was horrifying, yet curiously unsurprising. Yes, the world’s most
powerful man is lazy, ignorant, dishonest and vindictive. But we knew
that already.
In
fact, the most revealing thing in the interview may be Mr. Trump’s
defense of Bill O’Reilly, accused of sexual predation and abuse of
power: “He’s a good person.” This, I’d argue, tells us more about both
the man from Mar-a-Lago and the motivations of his base than his
ramblings about infrastructure and trade.
First,
however, here’s a question: How much difference has it made, really,
that Donald Trump rather than a conventional Republican sits in the
White House?
The
Trump administration is, by all accounts, a mess. The vast majority of
key presidential appointments requiring Senate confirmation are unfilled;
whatever people are in place are preoccupied with factional infighting.
Decision-making sounds more like palace intrigues in a sultan’s
seraglio than policy formulation in a republic. And then there are those
tweets.
Yet
Mr. Trump’s first great policy and political debacle — the ignominious
collapse of the effort to kill Obamacare — owed almost nothing to
executive dysfunction. Repeal-and-replace didn’t face-plant because of
poor tactics; it failed because Republicans have been lying about health
care for eight years. So when the time came to propose something real,
all they could offer were various ways to package mass loss of coverage.
Similar
considerations apply on other fronts. Tax reform looks like a bust, not
because the Trump administration has no idea what it’s doing (although
it doesn’t), but because nobody in the G.O.P. ever put in the hard work
of figuring out what should change and how to sell those changes.
What about areas where Mr. Trump sometimes sounds very different from ordinary Republicans, like infrastructure?
A
push for a genuine trillion-dollar construction plan (as opposed to tax
credits and privatization), which would need Democratic support given
the predictable opposition from conservatives, would be a departure. But
given what we heard in the interview — basically incoherent word salad
mixed with random remarks about transportation in Queens — it’s clear
that the administration has no actual infrastructure plan, and probably
never will.
True,
there are some places where Mr. Trump does seem likely to have a big
impact — most notably, in crippling environmental policy. But that’s
what any Republican would have done; climate change denialism and the
belief that our air and water are too clean are mainstream positions in
the modern G.O.P.
So
Trumpist governance in practice so far is turning out to be just
Republican governance with (much) worse management. Which brings me back
to the original question: Does the appalling character of the man on
top matter?
I
think it does. The substance of Trump policy may not be that
distinctive in practice. But style matters, too, because it shapes the
broader political climate. And what Trumpism has brought is a new sense
of empowerment to the ugliest aspects of American politics.
By now there’s a whole genre of media portraits of working-class Trump supporters (there are even parody versions).
You know what I mean: interviews with down-on-their-luck rural whites
who are troubled to learn that all those liberals who warned them that
they would be hurt by Trump policies were right, but still support Mr.
Trump, because they believe that liberal elites look down on them and
think they’re stupid. Hmm.
Anyway,
one thing the interviewees often say is that Mr. Trump is honest, that
he tells it like is, which may seem odd given how much he lies about
almost everything, policy and personal. But what they probably mean is
that Mr. Trump gives outright, unapologetic voice to racism, sexism,
contempt for “losers” and so on — feelings that have always been an
important source of conservative support, but have long been things you
weren’t supposed to talk about openly.
In
other words, Mr. Trump isn’t an honest man or a stand-up guy, but he
is, arguably, less hypocritical about the darker motives underlying his
worldview than conventional politicians are.
Hence
the affinity for Mr. O’Reilly, and Mr. Trump’s apparent sense that news
reports about the TV host’s actions are an indirect attack on him. One
way to think about Fox News in general, and Mr. O’Reilly in particular,
is that they provide a safe space for people who want an affirmation
that their uglier impulses are, in fact, justified and perfectly O.K.
And one way to think about the Trump White House is that it’s attempting
to expand that safe space to include the nation as a whole.
And
the big question about Trumpism — bigger, arguably, than the
legislative agenda — is whether unapologetic ugliness is a winning
political strategy.
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