Trump's Own Party

The most consequential aspect of President Trump—like the most consequential aspect of Candidate Trump—has been his relentless shattering of norms: norms of honesty, decency, diversity, strategy, diplomacy and democracy, norms of what presidents are supposed to say and do when the world is and isn’t watching. As I keep arguing in these periodic Trump reviews, it’s a mistake to describe his all-caps rage-tweeting or his endorsement of an accused child molester or his threats to wipe out “Little Rocket Man” as unpresidential, because he’s the president. He’s by definition presidential. The norms he’s shattered are by definition no longer norms. His erratic behavior isn’t normal, but it’s inevitably becoming normalized, a predictably unpredictable feature of our political landscape.

It’s how we live now, checking our phones in the morning to get a read on the president’s mood. The American economy is still strong, and he hasn’t started any new wars, so pundits have focused a lot of their hand-wringing on the effect his norm-shattering will have on future leaders, who will be able to cite the Trump precedent if they want to hide their tax returns or use their office to promote their businesses or fire FBI directors who investigate them. But Trump still has three years left in his term. And the norms he’s shattered can’t constrain his behavior now that he’s shattered them.

If the big story of the Trump era is Trump and his unconventional approach to the presidency, two related substories will determine how the big story ends. The first is the intense personal and institutional pushback to Trump—from the otherwise fractious Democratic Party; the independent media; independent judges; special counsel Robert Mueller; advocates for immigrants, voting rights, the poor, the disabled, the environment and other #Resistance causes; and ordinary citizens, who have made Trump the least popular first-year president in the modern era.

The second substory is the sometimes grudging but consistent support—the critics call it complicity—that Trump has enjoyed from the Republicans who control Congress. The uneasy marriage of convenience between Trump and the congressional GOP explains his two big legislative victories, the confirmation of Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch and last month’s $1.5 trillion tax cut. It also explains Capitol Hill’s see-no-evil approach to investigating activities that would have triggered endless outrage and probable impeachment hearings in a Hillary Clinton administration.

In fact, this dynamic explains a lot about politics in the Trump era. Trump’s job security depends on support from GOP legislators. Their job security depends on Trump’s base showing up to support them in 2018, and on Trump improving his approval ratings enough to avert a Democratic wave that would bounce them out even if his base does show up to support them in 2018.

So after campaigning as an anti-establishment populist, Trump has mostly governed as a partisan corporatist, earning loyalty points from congressional Republicans by stocking his administration with movement conservatives and embracing their unpopular agenda, ditching his promises to protect Medicaid and close tax loopholes for hedge funds while consistently siding with business owners and investors over workers and consumers. Congressional Republicans, even those who once called him unfit to serve, have mostly ignored his antics and even his sporadic attacks on them, kissing his ring in public even as they roll their eyes in private. They’d prefer their tax cuts without the white nationalist retweets, but it’s a package deal.

Last month, Senator Lindsey Graham leapt to Trump’s defense on cable TV, denouncing “this endless, endless attempt to label the guy as some kind of kook not fit to be president.” He might have been thinking of an attempt by one Senator Lindsey Graham, who said of Trump in February 2016: “I think he’s a kook. I think he’s crazy. I think he’s unfit for office.” Senator Marco Rubio, who called Trump “dangerous” and a “con man” during the campaign, has also boarded the Trump train. So has Senator Ted Cruz, who refused to endorse Trump at the Republican convention after Trump mocked his wife’s looks, implicated his father in the JFK assassination and labeled him “Lying Ted.” The Never Trump movement, to the extent it is a movement at all, consists of a few conservative intellectuals, not Republican politicians. The Republican Party is now undeniably Trump’s party.

This is one of the crucial developments of 2017, because a few Republican politicians who decided to resist Trump substantively could have become a real check on his power. A few Capitol Hill Republicans have resisted Trump rhetorically, notably retiring senators Jeff Flake, who denounced the president as a disgrace to his office, and Bob Corker, who bemoaned the lack of “adult day care” in the White House, but they have not used their considerable leverage to try to change his behavior. With Democrats voting in lockstep against many Trump nominees and most of the Trump agenda, any Republican senator could have demanded, say, that he release his tax returns in exchange for their vote on his tax bill, or that the bill include some kind of protection for Mueller against presidential interference, or for that matter that Trump defray the costs of his constant jaunts to his private clubs. But Republicans have made it pretty clear that they don’t plan to stand up to Trump. None has pushed for more aggressive investigations of his activities, and some have actively shielded him from investigations, while calling for investigations of his rivals. And while White House aides have often leaked their dismay about Trump’s defense of neo-Nazis after Charlottesville, or his attacks on the FBI and the intelligence community, or his uninterest in briefings that have more than one page or don’t flatter his ego enough, none of those aides has resigned in protest.