New Order? Neither Trump’s people nor his policies are that novel. His political style plainly is
Rarely can a political transition have represented such a contrast. The Obama era has ended and the tenure of Donald J. Trump has begun. The new occupant of the Oval Office has started his role much in the spirit of the insurgent campaign that ultimately delivered him an improbable triumph in the Electoral College. Washington, DC must feel like a different city already. Everything has changed.
Or has it? The Republican Party has held control of the White House, the Senate and the House of Representatives in the recent past, from January to May 2001 (when the defection of Senator Jim Jeffords of Vermont to the Democrats handed control of his chamber to his new party) and January 2003 to January 2007 (after which defeat in the 2006 mid-term elections rendered George W. Bush a lame duck operating alongside a Democratic Congress), so there is some policy precedent to look to.
The party has also produced a previous President in the post-war era with no prior elective political experience (Dwight D. Eisenhower) and has nominated other figures to be President whose claim was based more on their past business success than their previous political stature (Mitt Romney). To that extent, at least, the Trump Administration is not an absolute novelty and should not be an impossibility to anticipate. So what exactly constitutes continuity and what is the real change here?
People: The Trump Cabinet is an extension of an established Republican model
There is a long-standing and quite fundamental contrast between how Democratic Presidents and Republican Presidents organise their administrations. Democrats tend towards adopting a structure and a culture that is analogous to a large university. Republicans adopt large companies as a model.
As a result, Democrats place a sizeable weight upon academic intelligence, public sector training and diversity in those whom they appoint to the White House and the Cabinet, that diversity extending beyond gender, ethnicity and race to selecting, deliberately, individuals who hold different views on policy. The thesis is that the President should be exposed to all sides of an argument and then come to a conclusion on the course of action to be followed. It is a ‘hub of the wheel’ notion of authority. Considerable value is also placed on reaching an outcome that can command a high level of internal consensus with the minimum possible number of dissatisfied constituencies.
Republicans, on the other hand, favour a much more hierarchical form of organisation and start from the assumption that the broad thrust of policy is pre-determined by the President himself, and is not up for debate. There is more emphasis on the collective coherence of the team and far less on diversity whether it be in personal background or policy instincts. Academic intelligence is rated far less highly than the demonstrated capacity to innovate. Success in the private sector is deemed to be a significant asset.
To that extent, therefore, the Trump Cabinet is an extension of an established Republican model. It is, admittedly, unusual to have a Secretary of State (Rex Tillerson) with no experience of public office but his skill-set as a widely admired CEO of ExxonMobil is not that different from what is required of the diplomat-in-chief. The presence of extremely wealthy former corporate executives as Treasury Secretary (Steven Mnuchin) and Commerce Secretary (Wilbur Ross) alongside a couple of ‘can-do’ ex-Generals as Defence Secretary and as Homeland Security Secretary (General James Mattis and General John Kelly) also fits the Republican mould (remember General Colin Powell?).
Andrew Mellon served as a Republican Treasury Secretary for more than a decade (1921-1932). The first Eisenhower Cabinet was dubbed as ‘eight millionaires and a plumber’ (although this turned out to be inaccurate as an additional appointment made it nine millionaires and the ‘plumber’, Martin Durkin, Secretary of Labor and a former Head of the Plumbers and Steamfitters Union, resigned in protest that he was being ignored after just eight months in office). Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush also surrounded themselves with highly successful people from the world of business. Mr Trump’s team is not a deviation from a norm.
Policy: Trump’s philosophy and preferences have roots in the history of the Republican Party
Compared with his most recent Republican predecessors, Mr Trump’s hostility to traditional free trade, his overt nativism and raw dislike of mass migration and his combination of nationalism and isolationism rather than internationalism in foreign affairs is a strikingly different departure. On a wider historical landscape, however, he is a more orthodox Republican than it might appear.
The Republican Party in the 1920s favoured high tariffs and a hard dollar via the gold standard, sought most of their votes from White Anglo-Saxon Protestants (WASPs) aggrieved at the high levels of (often Roman Catholic) immigration from Ireland and eastern Europe and refused to sign up to the League of Nations.
Such instincts became a minority position within the party after 1945 but they were never eradicated entirely. Much of the rhetoric associated with Mr Trump was articulated by Pat Buchanan, who served in the Nixon and Reagan administrations, in both of his failed bids for the Republican presidential nomination in 1992 and 1996. It also remains to be seen whether the new President intends to push his apparent programme much further than a wall on the Mexican border. His opposition will stop certain sorts of new free trade agreements being struck, but he appears to be positively enthusiastic about others, such as an accord with a post-Brexit United Kingdom.
In most other regards, such as his strong support for sweeping tax cuts, his dislike for government spending beyond the Pentagon and calls for regulation to be rolled back, Mr Trump is an extremely mainstream Republican. And it is those spheres where he will end up being most effective - and end up being assessed by the electorate - because Republicans in Congress agree with him in these areas so will make them their priority items, while quietly stalling other initiatives of his that they dislike.
Political Style: On this one, Trump is truly one of a kind
The 1992 Bill Clinton campaign is remembered for its assertion that ‘it’s the economy, stupid’ which was all that mattered. In 2017, one could equally contend that ‘it’s the tweeting, stupid’ that sums up what is truly original about Mr Trump as a political actor. His presentational style has no obvious precedent in American history or internationally (Silvio Berlusconi is probably the closest equivalent but he did not have access to nuclear weapons). His communications ‘strategy’ seems to consist of not merely ignoring the conventional media but actively attacking it and deploying social media as an alternative means of delivering his message to the American people. This is wholly new terrain.
The early indications are that he intends to stick with his preferred approach. Presidents normally try to lower expectations of what they can do, but ‘the Donald’, not content with promising to ‘Make America Great Again’, has travelled beyond that to pledge that it will be “greater than ever before”.
Republicans are rarely post-modernists but the 45th President appears to have an exceptionally post-modern outlook on what constitutes ‘the truth’ (or ‘alternative facts’ as this is now to be known). No political leader anywhere has engaged in Twitter with anything like the level of aggression or on the range of subjects that Mr Trump has shown a willingness to opine upon. It is #wildstuffindeed.
It is this aspect of the Trump brand and phenomenon that has official Washington (Republican as well as Democrat) truly terrified. No one knows if it will last, how American citizens will respond to it and what the consequences of it might be. It will manifestly have an impact on both the conduct of domestic politics and in the global policy arena. On this one, the US President is truly one of a kind.
Tim Hames
Director General, BVCA
