Trump Could Truly Have Become the Greatest American President
Trump was poised five years ago to be the most productive and bipartisan president in American history, only he didn’t seem to notice
The maxim that Donald Trump can do whatever he wants without losing his base (or the presidency) is bandied about ad nauseam. It has long faded from an object of incredulous liberal contempt and become a truism of life in modern-day America, serving as a point of pride for the GOP and a point of bewilderment for everyone else. Love it or hate it, We The People acknowledge a truth that is self-evident, that President Trump could shoot a citizen on 5th Avenue and get away with it. In fact, his base would probably love him all the more.
But what if he had stood on 5th Avenue and…participated in a protest of police violence? Or signed an executive order supporting single-payer healthcare? Or announced he would give into Nancy Pelosi’s demands on the federal budget?
I suspect his base would still follow right along.
Media and other pundits on the left and right regularly insisted throughout Trump’s presidency, with each new scandal or policy move, that the principle of his omnipotence was being tested. When Trump was accused of paying off a porn star after an affair during his wife’s pregnancy; when he asked on national television for China to help dig up dirt on Joe Biden; when the New York Times revealed he had paid more in taxes to China than to the United States; when his supporters assaulted the Capitol in January of this year and Trump insisted they were good patriots: these were all tests of the 5th Avenue Axiom that Trump passed with flying colors.
Yet are outrages like these truly the tests of Trump’s unyielding popularity with his base?
Trump certainly wishes to be viewed as America’s best-ever president, and in fact already declared himself as such early in his presidency. He claims to have done more in his first 100 days, first year, first four years than any other previous president. When he gets specific, he has done the most for Black Americans, done the most for women, for the LGBTQ community, for tax and healthcare reform, for the military, for the U.S. global reputation.
On one hand, Trump regularly doubled down on his base with policy and campaign actions and gleefully alienated and insulted huge voter blocs. This happened especially at times of crisis, such as his inability to admit masks can help prevent Covid deaths, Puerto Rico was slammed by hurricane Maria, or that the Black community has a right to protest systemic racism.
Yet there is continual evidence that he genuinely wishes to achieve broader popularity and be hailed by groups who criticize him. Beyond general rhetoric about having the support of all Americans, there were, for example, reports of Trump’s total shock that his Bible photo stunt in front of St. John’s Episcopal Church on June 1, 2020 didn’t resonate with the people; and of his hurt two months prior when he was genuinely trying to help develop therapeutics but ended up being ridiculed about comments regarding sunlight or bleach stopping the Coronavirus. As much as Trump derides RINOs, Never-Trumpers and the Fake News Media, he keeps coming back to the masses wishing to earn their accolades and feed his ego.
His ego is bigger than his base.
Regarding both presidential elections, he balanced the paradox of insisting he was beset on all sides by enemies, with the certainty that he is a beloved American darling who could not possibly lose. His campaign insisted last fall, in the face of data that his strategy was to drive out his base and suppress minority votes, that Trump had built an even larger coalition than in 2016 and would win by a larger margin. In interviews and press conferences, Trump’s hostility to the media was peppered with instances in which he seemed genuinely aggrieved, wishing journalists would come around to treating him fairly and get along with him.
Perhaps the most frustrating element of Trump’s presidency was how easy it would have been for him to win the admiration of groups that have turned out to be his greatest detractors. “Liberal” media outlets were, for a long time, first in line to adore Trump for finally being Presidential in important moments, such as during his first State of the Union address, when he traveled to Texas after hurricane Harvey, or when he became the first American president to step foot in North Korea. The potential long existed for Trump to win over his detractors simply by acting human, rising above the ad hominem insults, and — even better — throwing in a few left-leaning policy priorities.
After Trump’s election Democratic Congressional leaders insisted they would try to work with him, largely because it was so uncertain how the GOP would treat Trump and what his governing coalition would look like — early on it seemed possible Congressional Republicans, many of whom spoke out against Trump during the 2016 campaign, might obstruct him. Some pundits predicted Trump would threaten the GOP with liberal policies if they didn’t support him — or even that he was a Democratic mole. Trump ran on being an unusual Republican, interfering with a business-as-usual Washington, D.C., wishing to upset Republican politics as much as Democratic. He promised things other GOP candidates didn’t: protecting the Social Security safety net, standing up to Wall Street and the wealthy who abuse tax loopholes, and engaging in economic protectionism. Pundits on both the Left and Right continue to suggest how different Trump’s presidency would have been if his first legislation priority were an infrastructure bill, rather than rescinding the Affordable Care Act and lowering taxes. Even in his last year, Trump was happy to negotiate Covid measures with Nancy Pelosi and thus allow the Democrat-controlled House to get much of the glory when assistance aid passed. Trump also threw his weight behind Democratic insistence that the December stimulus checks be a full $2000.
Trump was a registered Democrat for a period, and even donated to campaigns of Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, Andrew Cuomo, John Kerry, Chuck Schumer, Harry Reid, and Rahm Emanuel. His inherent nonpartisan tendencies could have led him to taking on major paradigm-shifting legislation that America has needed for a long time, including gun control measures and immigration reform. Trump spoke out in the past in favor of Democrats’ economic policies, the value of immigrant labor, and his pro-choice abortion stance.
It is odd and unaccountable how frightened Trump turned out to be of the Republican establishment, given his immediate success at taking control of it. Perhaps that control was not so strong at first as it has seemed, but Trump likely did not need to be so conciliatory toward the NRA or other far-right interest groups. Polarization has made legislation more and more difficult over the last few decades, with measures that both parties support — like infrastructure spending and lowering pharmaceutical costs — impossible to pass either because each party demands full credit or refuses to cooperate with any legislation that smells of the other party. If Nancy Pelosi’s House passed a law to carve Mitch McConnell into Mount Rushmore, McConnell would have refused to bring it up for a vote in the Senate.
Here is where Trump’s 5th Avenue Axiom would receive its true test, and I think this is a test he would have passed. If Trump did it correctly, policies like expanded gun background checks, corporate minimum taxes or increases to legal immigration would not smack of liberalism. Trump was genuinely the only figure in recent American politics who could have managed important and long-needed changes to America, given that his base would follow him anywhere (after all, many of Trump’s most ardent supporters were not very political before his candidacy, and are loyal to him rather than to party-line GOP priorities) and given that leftist figures supposedly suffering from “Trump Derangement Syndrome” — who will criticize him no matter what — only feel that way because of how Trump consistently behaves. Just like GOP figures like Ted Cruz and Lindsay Graham shifted from critics to sycophants, Democratic swamp creatures would have adapted to an administration in which Trump allowed them to get things done.
Trump maintains this stance of antagonizing the Left because he thinks it’s the surest thing to get him cheers at his rallies, but he could so very easily have racked up the largest support of any president by leaning into liberal notions — notions which I suspect he actually agrees with. Reports say Trump was “genuinely horrified” at the video of George Floyd’s death — why couldn’t he just be transparent about that? How easy it would be to make America love him by saying Russia is bad! Coronavirus is dangerous! Racism is bad! I think Trump could have regularly made poor governance decisions, but still speak in a way that supports the average person’s need for leadership, and score huge victories in approval polls. Given how many left-leaning voters were turned off by Hillary Clinton’s supposedly smug elitism, I don’t think Trump would have struggled to win them over with a more politically central charming populism. Think of how embarrassed Democratic politicians would be at how easily Trump could get liberals on his side while maintaining his favorability among the Right. Trump could build the largest political coalition the modern nation has ever seen, and this would majorly stroke his ego, right? But instead he and his campaign settled for pretending they had that coalition and doing nothing to create it. Trump loved to say during his presidency he could do whatever he wanted, both in the sense that the Constitution gave him the power, and in sense that his base is endlessly accommodating. Yet he never truly tested this principle because he was seemingly too afraid to let the “everything he wants to do” slip into Left-leaning territory. The true test would be to get away with doing liberal things. Could he have gotten away with banning assault rifles? Giving DACA recipients citizenship? Yeah, probably.
Easing up abortion restrictions is the most likely bridge too far with Trump’s base, but one can even imagine success in this sector for a Trump willing to patiently explain the science of gestation and the humanitarian angle to skeptical supporters. Research shows that strategies of teaching sex ed and making contraception available to young people reduces abortion, and this might finally resonate with the anti-abortion crowd coming from a source like Trump. Or, more cynically, his base might do its own mental gymnastics to excuse abortion protections like they excuse Trump’s marital infidelities and inappropriate speech about women. If America has learned anything these last years, it’s not been about Trump, but our own citizen’s capacity for depravity. Trump’s supporters have followed him gleefully to every new depravity; they’ve been quick to believe it was necessary and right to put non-citizen children in cages, block public health measures during a pandemic, and denounce military heroes and conservative icons — all things they would not have liked before Trump ran for president and never would have allowed Obama to get away with. I think this shows how little Trump’s base cared about the principles of these decisions, and only about the man making them.
Commentators from all political angles have been confused and critical towards Trump’s insistence on catering ever more narrowly to his base in 2020 (and still today), refusing to handle the pandemic or police violence demonstrations in order to inflame problems in ways attractive to supporters. Somewhere, a political calculus may have been done that proved this was the best strategy to receive the greatest number of votes. Republican strategists certainly learned a similar lesson in 2016 when Trump reversed their attempts to create a big tent conservatism, and proved more successful than Mitt Romney or John McCain. One might be inclined to say the base is his comfort zone and he wishes to reward it, yet it is telling that Trump clearly does not himself trust the 5th Avenue Axiom, because if he did he would expect his base to stay strong at his side as he advocated for mask wearing and social justice reforms. In other words, there are many potential reasons for Trump’s refusals to govern responsibly, and although a petulant, lazy and ignorant ego-fueled personality might be behind it, I think he himself does not recognize his own power.
We can’t know how Biden would have fared in the election if Covid-19 and the summer racial justice protests had not occurred, but it does seem that the impeachment process did not harm Trump’s reputation and in fact may have resulted in more people souring on the Democrats. There likely never was a point of no return for Trump, until perhaps the start of absentee and early voting last September. Trump’s team did present a softer president at the Republican National Convention in August, airing video of an immigrant naturalization ceremony, for instance, and Trump being compassionate — and did not worry this would conflict with the image the base loves of a hardcore anti-immigrate strongman. There is much irony and hypocrisy in the contradictions Trump’s base embraces, but the point here is not to knock these contradictions but to underscore how such ideological flexibility continues to allow Trump to get away with a lot. It’s important to note that Left-leaning ballot initiatives have been doing well in GOP strongholds in the last few years, such as Florida voters overwhelmingly increasing the minimum wage and marijuana legalization passing in Montana, Mississippi, and South Dakota, which suggests that right-leaning voters only really care about the culture wars in the context of attacking Blue states.
Trump’s response to the January insurrection is another, unfortunate instance of doubling down on his base, and that base’s willingness to go along with Trump has led to a sea change in the GOP’s ethical and policy paradigms. Now, if not before, Trump has reached a place where Leftward moves will get him canceled, by rally crowds who won’t even let him urge Covid vaccinations. As Trump eyeballs the 2024 presidential election, he is only moving ever rightward and ever closer to authoritarianism, and one suspects he realizes he is stuck in this path, pulled and twisted by the gravitational mass of political supporters addicted to this authoritarian trajectory — it’s no longer good enough to them for Trump to stand still, and in fact some broke from Trump when he ultimately allowed a transfer of power to Biden. I suspect that this man who is famous for speaking his mind may actually have been doing nothing of the sort for a few years now, having to keep truths to himself that his base might not like. The big news of 2021 is the ironclad control Trump continues to have on the GOP, but I think what is really happening is that Trump has lost control of himself.
The real question now is whether Biden faces a similar situation: will the country’s desperation to move away from Trump facilitate a complacency with anything the new president might do, even if that involves taking a moderate stance on Trump-era policies? This seemed the case after the inauguration, but liberals never shied away from attacking Biden for moving too slowly to undo environmental and immigration policies, and they certainly cut him no slack for the situation in Afghanistan that Trump laid the groundwork for. For their part, Republican lawmakers repel Biden’s attempts to give into them, the strategy that would have done so well for Trump. Instead, it appears to be the case that nothing Biden does will please anybody, a surprising coda to the Trump presidency.
