The Ordinary Presidency of Donald J. Trump

Jon Herbert, Trevor McCrisken, Andrew Wroe

The Ordinary Presidency of Donald J. Trump

Palgrave Studies in Political Leadership

ISBN 978-3-030-04942-3 ISBN 978-3-030-04943-0 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-04943-0
Library of Congress Control Number: 2018965228
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2019

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Copyright	The Editor(s) (if applicable)   and The Author(s) 2019

Acknowledgements
Many people contribute to the writing of a book, not just the authors.
The book’s central thesis received a particularly strong grilling at the UK
Political Studies Association American Politics Group’s annual conference
at the University of Oxford in January 2018. The “peace through
strength” argument of the foreign policy chapter received helpful comments
and suggestions when presented at the BISA US Foreign Policy
Working Group conference at Liverpool John Moores University and at
a joint workshop in Oxford between the Miller Center of Public Affairs
at the University of Virginia and the Rothermere American Institute,
both in September 2018. The book is much stronger as a result of those interrogations.

We would like to thank all those that have read parts or the whole of
the manuscript and/or listened to us discussing Mr. Trump ad nauseam
for the past two years. These include Ivan Wroe, Tom Watts, Rubrick
Biegon, Edward Ashbee, Tom Wraight, Ben Gannon, Jon Parker,
Michael Tappin, the anonymous Palgrave reviewer and other colleagues
in our departments at Keele, Warwick and Kent. We would also like to
thank Rob Singh who was instrumental in getting this project off the
ground. Amanda Gosling requires special thanks, not only for reading
the manuscript several times, but also for contributing to the statistical
analysis in Chapter 4.

Coauthoring with two other people brings with it various challenges,
including how to make sure you’re not undoing the good work that
one of your colleagues has just spent hours drafting. We have genuinely
enjoyed working with each other, however, and each of us believes this
book is stronger throughout for our combined energy, dedication and,
hopefully, insights.

The staff at Palgrave Macmillan have done a sterling job in guiding
this book to publication. Ambra Finotello, Palgrave’s editor on our side
of the pond, was extremely enthusiastic about the project and picked it
up. Michelle Chen then took control on the American side and has displayed
exquisite professionalism in the face of our sometime tardiness.
John Stegner has guided the manuscript through the production process
with equal professionalism. Thank you for answering our many queries
with good grace and for your steady hand on the production tiller.
Each of our families deserves a special mention, not least for their
patience as we spent many hours away from them watching Trump’s
presidency unfold, scratching our heads as we tried to figure out what it
all meant, and writing and rewriting the chapters of our book. Rebecca
Elliott, Jackie Clarke and Amanda Gosling can have us back now, as can
all our children to whom we have dedicated this book.
While everyone above has helped make the book better than it
would otherwise have been, we alone, of course, are responsible for its limitations.

October 2018 Jon Herbert

Trevor McCrisken

Andrew Wroe

Introduction

The Ordinary Presidency of the Extraordinary Donald J. Trump

“Today, I stand before the United Nations General Assembly to share the
extraordinary progress we’ve made. In less than two years, my administration
has accomplished more than almost any administration in the history
of our country…. So true.” Donald J. Trump address at 73rd Session
of the United Nations General Assembly Annual General Debate in New
York City, September 25, 2018.

Donald J. Trump has a very high opinion of himself and elicits the most

extreme opinions in others. Almost no one is coolly objective on the

man or his presidency. Some regard him as a disruptor and outsider

who has challenged the cozy status quo of entrenched special interests

and a corrupt political system that served the elites not the masses. In

this view, he speaks truth to power on behalf of the millions of forgotten,

downtrodden and economically insecure Americans whose

jobs disappeared or are being threatened by a globalized marketplace

in goods, services and the means of production. Trump has also rallied

these “left-behinds” in the face of an alleged immigrant tide that

is submerging traditional American values and culture, proliferating

crime and threatening national security. He has, his cheerleaders argue,

broken the mold of American politics by constructing a new winning

election coalition of God-fearing, culturally conservative, white working-

class voters and by remaking the Republican Party in his image. The

rock-solid backing of party supporters, and especially its activists, instils

fear, respect and discipline in the Republican congressional caucus,

which has been harnessed to achieve a string of ground-breaking policy

triumphs on the economy, tax cuts, deregulation, immigration, security

and more. His challenge to the established order extends beyond

America’s shores and includes his attacks on globalist international

organizations such as the United Nations, NATO and the International

Criminal Court as well as hated multinational environmental and trade

agreements including the Paris Agreement on Climate Change and the

Trans-Pacific Partnership. According to his admirers, he has succeeded

in his pledge to Make America Great Again at home and abroad.

To Trump’s supporters, his outsiderness, populism, nationalism,

America First patriotism and rebellious disruption are celebrated in

themselves and held up as reasons for his many extraordinary accomplishments.

To his detractors, however, these characteristics are precisely

what they fear. They see a deeply flawed character wholly unsuited to

the job of president—mendacious, narcissistic, quickly bored and

distracted, misogynistic and ethnocentric, thin skinned and easily

provoked, stunningly ill-informed yet utterly convinced of his own brilliance

and intelligence. They believe he is incapable of remedying his

ignorance in part because he does not recognize it and further because

he cannot assimilate new information into his long-fixed worldview.

His character flaws interact with his politics in most unappealing ways:

An unapologetic racist playing on the base fears of vulnerable citizens,

offering simplistic yet dangerous solutions to inordinately complex public

policy problems; a bombastic, undiplomatic ignoramus lumbering

across the world-stage upending decades-old and even centuries-old alliances

and the international organizations that America built and which

have sustained its dominance, all while cozying up to dictators and

demagogues and affronting supposed friends and allies.

Perhaps even worse, according to critics, is Trump’s complete disdain

for democratic institutions, structures and processes. At stake, they

argue, is nothing less than America’s constitutional democracy itself.

Anyone or anything that threatens, even minimally, Trump’s status and

power is roundly attacked in the most vicious terms. His assaults on an

inquisitive and robust media holding power to account are emblematic

of the way Trump deals with any democratic opposition: They are belittled

and delegitimized. He will trash anything and anyone that stands

in his way. He puts his own ends before the democratic health of the

United States. This is not an America First presidency, but a Trump

First presidency. The media is thus labeled the “enemy of the American

people” and the journalists who staff it are “horrible, horrendous people”

promulgating “fake and disgusting news” based on “fictional”

anonymous sources. Investigating the internal deliberations of government

is “unpatriotic” and puts people’s lives at risk. The freedom of the

press to write whatever it wants is “disgusting…and someone should

look into it” and libel laws need “opening up” to allow Trump and others

to sue more easily. No institution or individual, save his immediate

family, seems safe from Trump’s democracy-threatening invective.

While these two views of Trump are polar opposites, they share a

common assumption: that Trump’s presidency is extraordinary. In the

one view, it is extraordinarily good; in the other, extraordinarily bad; in

both, extraordinarily different from any previous presidency. This book

challenges these assumptions. The argument here and in the following

pages is that Trump may well be an extraordinary individual, but that

his is nonetheless an ordinary presidency. Before setting out what this

seemingly counter-intuitive claim means, it is important to be clear

about what it does not mean. This book does not claim that Trump is

an ordinary president, but rather that his presidency is ordinary. Indeed,

in the history of the United States, it is unlikely that there has been a

more unusual, unorthodox, unconventional, unordinary president.

On practically every criterion, Trump is an extraordinary man and an

extraordinary president. It would be futile to argue otherwise, and readers

will not find that argument made here.

To understand how and why Trump’s presidency is ordinary it is useful

to think about the way he approaches and executes this most difficult

of jobs—what we call the methodology of the president—and to

contrast this with the outcomes or accomplishments of his presidency.

It is common and useful in many walks of life to contrast style and

substance, process and policy, words and deeds, rhetoric and action, and

promises made and promises kept. It is useful here, too. In each of these

binary pairs, it is the former that speaks to Trump’s methodology and

underpins his extraordinariness. In style, process, words, rhetoric and

promises made, Trump is a most extraordinary president. But in substance,

policy, deeds, action and promises kept, Trump’s presidency is

not extraordinary. Indeed, it is ordinary—largely conventional, orthodox

and conservative, rather than revolutionary or radical. Consider

this assessment by Peter Baker, the New York Times White House correspondent

and respected Trump watcher, at the end of the president’s

first year in office:

[Trump] has spent much of his first year in office defying the conventions

and norms established by the previous 44 [presidents], and transforming

the presidency in ways that were once unimaginable. Under Mr Trump,

it has become a blunt instrument to advance personal, policy and political

goals. He has revolutionized the way presidents deal with the world

beyond 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, dispensing with the carefully modulated

messaging of past chief executives in favor of no-holds-barred, crystal-

breaking, us-against-them, damn-the-consequences blasts borne out of

gut and grievance. (Baker 2017)

Table of Contents

1 Introduction: The Ordinary Presidency

of the Extraordinary Donald J. Trump 1

2 A Trump Revolution? 13

3 Trump’s Electoral Politics 49

4 Trump the Ordinary Republican 71

5 Trump, the Media and the Public 103

6 Trump in the White House 135

7 Trump and Congress 157

8 Trump’s Ordinary Foreign Policy 185

9 Conclusion: Extraordinary President, Ordinary

Presidency 215

Appendix 223

Bibliography 225

Index 237