Trump Stumped? The President cannot advance his agenda but that does not ensure his defeat

These are the dog days of August in Washington, D.C. as well as Whitehall and Westminster. For the Trump Administration, even more than its UK equivalent, life appears to be something less than a vacation. The President finds himself accused of ambivalence towards white supremacists at home and is engaged in an escalating war of words, and perhaps more, with North Korea.
After almost seven months in office, his sole domestic achievement of note has been ensuring that one strongly conservative Supreme Court Justice (the late Anton Scalia) has been replaced by a similar individual (Neil Gorsuch) but even that required the Senate to depart from its normal rules to make happen. His attempts to repeal, never mind replace, Obamacare are in disarray as his party cannot achieve a consensus on an alternative. Hopes for sweeping tax cuts are rapidly being scaled back to something rather more modest. He appears to have either fired or publicly attacked many of those whom he chose to serve with him in the White House or in the Cabinet. His approval rating is at 38%, a record low at this stage in any tenure. And he has a Special Counsel investigating the connections between himself, his family and his campaign and Russian agents seeking to influence the outcome of the 2016 election.
Foreign policy, well beyond the Korean Peninsula, does not seem to be in order either with much of the world deciding that it will have to do without American leadership. Most speculation about him is whether or not he will succeed in serving a full term, not win a second one.
None of this looks especially encouraging. Yet it is should not be considered especially surprising. Donald Trump’s difficulties have been there from the moment that he won his unexpected victory last November. By themselves, however, they are not automatically fatal.
Domestic politics: The Art of the Deal meets the realities of Washington
The Trump Administration’s failure to dominate domestic politics reflects the fundamental realities of the US Constitution and the subtle politics of the institutions created by the founding fathers. The blunt truth is that there are not the numbers in Congress to sustain a radical agenda of reform. The Republicans have a comfortable majority in the House of Representatives (240-194 with one vacancy that is likely to return to Republican control) but a much smaller margin in the Senate (52-46 with two independents who are aligned with the Democrats on almost every issue).
These figures are compounded by the very different character of the two chambers. The House consists of 435 members. Many of them represent districts which are somewhat uniform in the nature of their electorates. The vast majority are safe for one party or the other in almost all circumstances. If a Republican is to be defeated, therefore, it is more likely to occur through the internal primary election if a challenger can attack them for being insufficiently conservative and having ‘sold out’ to the norms of Washington. This means that a sizeable faction of the House Republicans are purist conservatives, unwilling to compromise in any significant degree in order to enact legislation. It is from this hard right component that the President has found most of his difficulties in assembling a majority in the House of Representatives as he attempts to take Obamacare off the statute book.
The challenge in the Senate is completely the opposite. As senators represent whole states, many of which are extremely diverse, the incentives and the logic is often to reach out to the centre. As a senator serves a six-year term, they can be quite relaxed about short-term party pressure if they are not destined to face the voters again for a lengthy period of time. The Senate has also developed a set of highly distinctive rules which are designed to protect minorities and indeed individual figures. It has thus been the moderates among the Senate Republicans who have been most reluctant to be shot of Obamacare without knowing what will be its successor.
In a similar spirit, while there are many House Republicans who would happily vote for massive tax cuts as a matter of principle, no such position will be embraced in the Senate without a clear plan for offsetting the cost of such a blueprint either by other tax increases elsewhere or politically challenging cuts in spending. All of this means that even if the President were a more sophisticated operator (which he is not), then he would always have struggled to assemble the coalition within Republican ranks to reshape the US health system and he will have to settle for a much more limited set of tax measures than he may wish to see and which he left the markets believing, at the outset of 2017, that he would deliver.
Foreign policy: operating in a world with limitations on the level of American influence
The Trump White House has put less emphasis on foreign policy than domestic politics, although this is entirely normal for a first term administration. The President himself has had limited engagement with other actors and where this has occurred it has neither been consistent not obviously effective.
The Trump style is to place enormous importance of his personal interplay with other actors in the belief that this can take precedence over other institutional factors or calculations about interest and influence. The principal example of this is North Korea where the Chinese President alternates between being described as a ‘terrific guy’ to being condemned on Twitter for ‘doing nothing’ to compel Pyongyang to abandon its nuclear ambitions. A form of stalemate seems to be the result.
The truth, perhaps unfortunately, is that the President does not have the international resources that he needs in order to impose himself on others. The US share of global GDP is slowly but surely edging downwards. We are some distance from a multi-polar international order but equally we do not have the unipolar regime that appeared to have been created after the Cold War but before the US became ensnared in the quicksand of Iraq. Few other nations conceive that Americans have any enthusiasm for repeating those sorts of intense commitments or playing the world policeman more broadly. In addition to which, the international trade network can no longer be commanded by a President. Mr Trump thus finds himself in a place not dissimilar to that of Lyndon Johnson during the Vietnam War who once lamented that “the only power I have is nuclear and I can’t even use that.”
And yet it may not matter
None of this may be as consequential as it might appear to be. It does not doom Mr Trump to sure defeat. His approval rating at 38% is low but not catastrophic. Besides which, it was only 38% on the day that he was elected and when he secured 46% of the popular vote and an Electoral College victory.
The Republicans are theoretically vulnerable in the 2018 mid-term elections but could be saved by two factors. First, the turnout is always lower than in presidential election years and the voters who do participate are disproportionately white, elderly, affluent, rural and religious, all of which tends to assist Republicans, particularly in the House of Representatives.
Second, only one-third of the Senate is elected every two years and next November, of the 34 states that will have contests, 25 are being defended by Democrats or pro-Democrat independents and a mere nine by Republicans, and all are based in the more Trump-friendly parts of the US (the South and the Prairie/Mountain West).
When it comes to 2020, what the President requires for re-election is for his base to remain loyal and be willing to come out in substantial numbers, for the economy to be in reasonably strong shape (even if this is not due to any action on his part) and for the Democrats to nominate a fringe leftist candidate. All three conditions could be satisfied. Unless there is a killer e-mail or credible testimony from an ex-ally that directly links Mr Trump personally with a Russian conspiracy, then his approval ratings will need to fall to lower than 38% before it can be assumed that he will be out in four years.
Tim Hames
Director General, BVCA