[Watch Whole Hog Politics live: Join us today at 9 a.m. ET at TheHill.com as Chris Stirewalt and host Bill Sammon break down this week's political news and answer questions from a live online audience.]
The premise of the first year of the second Trump administration was a kind of old-school popular front. A coalition of sometimes overlapping but often disparate interest groups — food purity zealots, tech lords, foreign policy isolationists, anti-antisemites, election conspiracy theorists, Wall Streeters, industrial policy enthusiasts, Catholic integralists, blood-and-soil nationalists and so on — arrayed around the idea of smashing the existing order.
Now, with America back at war in the Middle East and the face of the administration's program of mass-deportation fired, we find Team Trump confronting the limits of coalitional politics.
This is, to be sure, true of every new administration. Unity is more essential and easier to achieve during elections when the enemy is in plain sight and harder to maintain once the work of governance begins. But this isn't a brand-new administration. And like the only other nonconsecutive president, his fellow New Yorker Grover Cleveland, President Trump returned to office having learned, and overlearned, some lessons.
In his first term, the Trump administration was chaotic, springing leaks constantly, abrupt personnel changes and policy reversals. We all know the stories of painstakingly crafted deals with Congress blown up by an early morning tweet. It was a time of "we'll see what happens." It was the age of Anthony Scaramucci.
The pivotal moment in the first year of the first administration came that summer when the president couldn't manage his response to a white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Va. that ended with the killing of a counterprotester. The public outrage spurred blowback, some publicly aired, within the administration and began a long trail of reversals and accommodations.
The tax cut Trump signed in December of that year and the three Supreme Court confirmations that were the highlights of his first presidency were the products of cooperation with Republicans in Congress and a president working within some broadly set guardrails. He would still run off the road sometimes, but prior to his mishandling of the coronavirus pandemic, Trump and Washington had figured out a way to coexist. That included sometimes firing Cabinet secretaries who had private jet problems or ethical quagmires — occasional nods to political reality.
The idea in the second term was that Trump had a seasoned, professional team led by White House chief of staff Susie Wiles that could not only get the president what he wanted, but maintain order within the crazy quilt of ideologies stitched together in his administration.
In the first year there was the epic showdown between Elon Musk and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent that preceded what now seems to have been the inevitable foundering of the DOGE effort. But, somehow, an administration that stretched from the hawkish Secretary of State Marco Rubio to the ultra-dove Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard didn't spring many leaks.
And Trump certainly had a free hand. Not only did he get almost every controversial nominee through the Senate, pace Matt Gaetz, he had a Cabinet full of cheerful salesmen and a Congress unwilling to offer much, if any resistance.
The lesson of the chaos of the first term was that unity was strength and that success depended on never giving in and never backing down. It was an environment in which ambitious self-promoters and those with radical policies could prosper.
Kristi Noem certainly did. In the first Trump administration, it would not have taken more than a year for someone — the attorney general, the FBI director, the secretary of Defense — to be clashing with Noem and Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff and evangelist for mass deportations. Long before the killings of two protesters in Minneapolis, long before the videos of Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers smashing in car windows, long before the front-page stories about her relationship with Corey Lewandowski, there would have been pushback from the Senate, too.
Part of the reason that Noem avoided that was because the people in the positions most likely to have clashed with her would never have had those jobs — or anything like them — in any other Republican administration and lacked standing and the reputational gravity to push back. They are creations of the president, and therefore unlikely to argue. Plus, they have their own screwups to worry about.
But it's also because of that popular front premise. If you care deeply about crypto policy or the banning of food dyes or invading Greenland or disclosing the existence of extraterrestrials or whatever else, the promise of Trump 2.0 was that there would be next to no limits on what might be done as long as you stayed on the team. Why pick a fight with someone else over their passion project if it might jeopardize your own?
But not all passion projects are created equal. Long before Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.) wrote Noem's political obituary in her Senate hearing this week, the events that would necessitate her ouster were set in motion. Rubio's effort to remake America First as an interventionist, not isolationist, idea has already toppled one foreign government in Venezuela and has two more, in Iran and Cuba, on the ropes.
Who knows how any of that will end, but when you have a shooting war going on, the foibles and failures of Cabinet officials start to look unaffordable. Even more so in a midterm election year that's looking brutal for the party in power. There are defense appropriations to get through. There's a logjam on Department of Homeland Security (DHS) funding — funding for an agency that does counterterrorism work. (This is also, by the way, not a great time to be an FBI director most famous for crashing an Olympic hockey beer bash.)
Trump's choice for Noem's replacement, Oklahoma Republican Sen. Markwayne Mullin, is a reality-based choice. He can quickly win Senate approval and is widely respected by his colleagues as a competent and honest person. He will never have to testify about the purpose of the bedroom cabin on a DHS jet and he will not pick losing fights with governors.
We can't call them guardrails yet, but it may be the start of something.
[Programming alert: Watch The Hill Sunday with Chris Stirewalt — As the fighting in Iran stretches into its second week — are we a nation at war? We'll have the latest from reporters in the region and hear from the highest-ranking Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee, Rep. Adam Smith (Wash.). We'll also talk with the top House appropriator, Republican Rep. Tom Cole (Okla.), on the funding fight over Homeland Security and what the partial shutdown might mean for what's unfolding in the Middle East. And, as always, we'll be sure to cover all the latest political news with expert analysis from our best-in-the-business panel of journalists. Be sure to catch us on NewsNation at 10 a.m. ET / 9 a.m. CT or your local CW station.]
No comments:
Post a Comment
Keep a civil tongue.