During the 2016 election, I addressed what I called the "burn it down" theory of electing Trump. The idea was that Trump would be so horrid that there would be a reaction moving the country dramatically to the left, as in response to the Great Depression, but as recently as March, I came back to this, and my assessment was as follows. My analogy was that we are being slowly eroded rather than burnt down, meaning there won't be a counter-reaction. And there may not be a way back.
However, I am also not comfortable calling Trump the worst president ever. Back in February, I posted this about a political science paper by Rottinghaus & Vaughn, surveying members of the Executive Politics section of the American Political Science Association (that would be the conference I just attended). They put Trump dead last, and I excoriated them for not putting James Buchanan dead last. That dude brought about the Civil War. Trump hasn't done anything that bad. Yet. James Buchanan was the worst. Period.
Later in that post, I went through some of the reasons that Trump hasn't been the worst, though, because he is clearly the least informed, least intelligent, most sociopathic and most corrupt president we have ever had. If you made a list of all of the worst characteristics a person could have to make that person as bad a fit as possible for the job, you'd have Donald J. Trump. As I have argued, he's like a stress test for the country, akin to that faced by banks. Absolute worst case scenario. So, why isn't the country completely aflame? I went through three possible reasons while excoriating my fellow political scientists from the Executive Politics section of the APSA. Time, opportunity, and checks within the executive branch.
We are less than halfway through Trump's first term, and yes, I write, "first term" because I put the odds at greater than 50% that he gets re-elected. Most presidents are re-elected. My Bayesian prior is that he wins a second term because I don't think that the scandals will have any electoral consequences in 2020 after enough mindless repetitions of the pilfered and misappropriated phrase, "fake news." The American public is too stupid. Am I worried about offending anyone with that? No. I wrote it and they can't fuckin' read.
Anyway, Trump has plenty of time to bring about disasters. Even Buchanan didn't torch the country on Day 1. That's clearly not where I'm going with this post, though.
Opportunity? Still relevant. Presidents matter most in times of crisis, and Donald Trump is the luckiest motherfucker in history, but how long can his/our luck hold? How many presidents go through their terms without a serious economic/international crisis? Bill Clinton. He, um... got lucky in the White House. Anyone with that kind of luck should bust out some cigars to celebrate! A lot of it really is luck, but crises do happen, and Trump is going out of his way to create crises with his stupid fucking trade war.
And that brings me to what else I wrote in that February post. I referenced Corker's comment about the White House being "adult day care," while belittling Corker for letting himself be brought to heel like the spineless coward that all congressional Republicans are. And now, we have the anonymous op-ed. The author basically says that this really is what's going on. They all know Trump is psycho, and the reason things aren't bursting into flames is that the White House staff and cabinet are stopping the fuckin' Idiot-in-Chief from doing all of the lunatic shit he wants to do. This account is backed by Woodward's book, painting the same picture.
I return, then, to the Trump versus Buchanan comparison. Without the resistors inside the White House, if these accounts are correct, Trump would do a lot more damage. How much? We don't know. We can't know. Enough to "burn it down," as my earlier posts discussed?
Well, one of the accounts we have from Woodward is the observation that Trump wanted to plan a first strike on North Korea. My most dire warning of Trump has been, and continues to be that he could just start a war that escalates to nuclear war. Woodward's account says I've been right about that. This has been a serious risk, tamped down by the resistors around Trump. Thank these people for saving our collective asses. Of course, if things had gone down that road, I wouldn't look at the situation as a glorious opportunity to rebuild. That really would be too close to a Ra's Al Ghul situation. Only a comic book villain looks at that scenario and says, "yeah, let's do that so that we can rebuild." Just because this country elected a cartoonish villain as president doesn't mean those of us with the capacity for conscientious thought must adopt comic book mentalities.
Regardless, if Woodward and the op-ed writer to whom I shall continue to refer as "Shallow Throat" are correct, then what keeps Trump from sinking to Buchanan levels of horribleness is the fact that Trump is surrounded by an efficacious resistance.
However, that leaves time and opportunity. The slow erosion of our democratic norms continues apace regardless of what the resistors do, and there is no way around that. That damage may be irreparable. Beyond that, though, in order for Trump to commit one single act to light the fire we cannot douse, the resistors only have to fail once, and the probability of that happening asymptotically approaches 1 the longer Trump remains in office. This is the basic problem of the crooks versus security. If crooks are trying to breach security, over and over again, maintaining security requires being successful every time. The crooks only have to be successful once. Given enough time, success becomes inevitable. Then, there's opportunity. Opportunity for Trump to do real damage comes from points of crisis. We aren't at a real crisis point, economically or internationally, which minimizes the importance of whoever sits in the White House. Crisis points happen. 1962 happens. 1941 happens. 9/11 happens. There are times when it really matters who the president is, and that you have someone sane and competent, as Michael Bloomberg implored at the DNC in 2016. The longer Trump is in office, the greater the probability that we hit a point at which it matters who the president is, and Trump is too stupid and crazy to handle a crisis, no matter how efficacious the resistors are.
Yes, it looks very much like the resistors are doing everything they can to keep things from going up in flames. Can that last? The longer Trump remains in office, the higher the probability that they will fail at least once on something big. All that batshit crazy idiot needs is once and James Buchanan could lose his title.
Put on a fresh pot of coffee, resistors! No sleep for the weary!
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