The Trump Conundrum
by Professor John Kane
Scholars of leadership are inevitably required to judge the judgments of the leaders they study, first to understand how and why they were made and second to assess their quality. To make sense of any particular judgment, scholars must project themselves mentally into the world as it presents itself to the decision-maker, even while keeping the intellectual distance necessary for assessing the quality of the judgment. This is challenging at the best of times and even more so in the case of Donald Trump, whose perceptions of the world and his place within it seem bewilderingly resistant to penetration. Yet certain common conditions of leadership can help us understand his choices.
All leaders confront two distinct but interrelated tasks:
- Securing and sustaining the supportive ground of their leadership in terms of constituencies, lieutenants, backers and so on; and,
- Securing at least some of the goals and objectives that their supporters expect and/or have been promised. Failure in either task will generally tend toward failure in the other. (The former Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s fall in 2010 came from a too-intense focus on task 2 at the neglect, and indeed dereliction, of task 1.)
Analysis of how a leader manages these twin tasks usually deploys the ‘rational actor’ model, which allegedly renders leadership behaviour understandable if not predictable. This does not imply assent to the rationality or reasonableness of particular political programs, but only to the fact that leaders must recognise and negotiate the ‘situational logic’ of their political positions if they are to survive.
Trump’s recent erratic behaviour may seem to raise doubts about how far the rational actor model applies in his case. His allegedly narcissistic personality has been often criticised, but of late his very sanity has been questioned. Does he even know what he’s doing or saying? True, Donald has intentionally played the card of wild unpredictability from the start, and to great effect, first to trounce his rivals for the Republican nomination and, second to defeat the ‘assured’ presidential candidate, Hillary Clinton. But it was half-anticipated that the blustering showmanship and divisive rhetoric of the campaign would fade on his assumption of high office, that he would become more ‘presidential’ − which is to say more dignified, predictable and conformable to long-established presidential norms.
But Donald has resisted the blandishments of ‘the establishment’, and even the admonishments of his dearest daughter and son-in-law, and remained obstinately, wildly Donald. The question for the analyst is whether this behaviour connotes some comprehensible strategy or is symptomatic of incipient lunacy. In other words, is he crazy-like-a-fox or just crazy?
Trump’s actions remain at least partly understandable in terms of structural logic. The path one chooses to secure power — the constituency-building phase — tends to delimit what one can do with power once achieved. Donald’s path involved mobilising two distinct sets of voter, first dyed-in-the-wool Republicans who would never vote for a Democrat whatever happened, and second a narrow band of so-called Obama-Trump voters — mostly white working class people who voted for Obama in the previous two elections but moved to Trump in 2016. The notorious means that Trump employed for mobilisation were extravagant promises to control immigration (Muslim or Mexican), to repeal Obamacare and replace it with something superior, to ‘make America great again’ through abandoning allegedly unfavourable trade deals and clamping down on China, to re-found the bases of American manufacturing industry via vast infrastructure spending, and to ‘drain the swamp’ of a Washington grown indifferent to the sufferings of common people (oh, yes, and to send Hillary to jail for her crimes).
Trump, in other words, employed classic divisive xenophobic-populist rhetoric to gain the presidency, thus defining the famous ‘base’ upon whose continuing support his presidency relies but also inevitably tying him in problematic ways once in power. It was a problem, for instance, that his curious mix of policies sat uncomfortably with leading congressional Republicans, many of whom had opposed his candidature. Their demand that he ‘become more presidential’ implied broadening his base by adopting and supporting their own goals and ‘conservative’ perspectives. Alternatively, he might have attempted to ‘govern for all Americans’ by reaching out to the Democrats, in effect reclaiming the classic middle ground that has disappeared from American politics and governing from the broad centre. This possible choice was a critical test for Trump which he clearly flunked.
To be sure, broadening the base would have required a shift from divisive policies, with the obvious danger of alienating the only backers of whom he could be really sure. Establishment Republicans supported, for instance, the trade policies that Trumpian rhetoric condemned; their ‘education’ of Trump as to the consequences for American farmers of abandoning NAFTA put him in an uncomfortable position with his base, as did their obvious reluctance to fund his Mexican ‘wall.’ An even more telling blow came when a policy on which Trump and congressional Republicans actually agreed — the repeal and replacement of Obamacare — came to nought through Republican ill-preparedness and internal divisions, denying Trump a symbolic legislative victory.
It remained theoretically open to Trump to steal a march on the Republican Party (whose flag he bore only as a convenience) by making positive approaches to the Democrats on health care reform and/or infrastructure spending, upon both of which they had indicated a willingness to negotiate. With the cooperation of swinging Republicans, this could potentially have satisfied the more vociferous part of his base regarding key hopes and promises while simultaneously expanding his presidential constituency. Given that polls show that most ordinary Republican voters have remained doggedly loyal to him throughout his recent travails, he could probably have counted on them as well. But this road required visionary initiative and some courage and he did not take it. Contemplating why he did not seems to bring us inexorably up against the issue of fundamental character.
Especially since the tragic Charlottesville episode, speculation has been rife about who Donald Trump is in his deepest being. Relevant here is the lingering question of why he chose to tilt at the presidency in the first place, whether it was a serious bid for power or only a showman’s desire for publicity.
Whatever the answer, it was certain that someone of Trump’s temperament would not decline the chance of victory when it presented itself. But the joke that went round after that victory was about the dog who caught the car: what now? And there certainly seemed to be a complete lack of preparedness or vision of what might reasonably be accomplished in the short or medium term. The chaotic first six months of the administration − with its rapid attrition of key personnel, its infighting among advisors, its perpetual leaking of damaging information, its failure to make strategic appointments, its entrapment in the ‘Russian question’ — seemed to denote no fixed star of administrative orientation, with Trump and his obsessive, instinctively reactive tweeting a principal contributor to the disorder.
A generous assessment would thus be of a man simply out of his depth, and apparently incapable of growing into the role.
And yet, beneath the chaos and confusion was the fact of innumerable fox-guarding-the-henhouse appointments to key departments and to federal courts that betrayed an implacable anti-government, anti-environment, anti-public education, anti-regulation, anti-civil rights ideological perspective (a dismantling of the ‘deep state’ so hated by alt-Right people like the lately departed Steve Bannon). Then there was the praise for Putin and Duterte and the pardon for Sheriff Arpaio, who for years pursued a policy of racist vigilantism in Maricopa County, Arizona − not to mention his profound difficulty in clearly condemning Nazism and the KKK after the Virginia incident. Insofar as there existed a ‘serious’ Trump and not just an incompetent one, he seemed seriously scary. The soul of Donald revealed in action and speech appeared narrow, prejudiced, vindictive and as actually authoritarian as his famous rallies often indicated.
This does not imply that he’s (technically) crazy, but his is not a character capable of perceiving and grasping an opportunity to suture the fractured ground of American politics. Having failed or refused to grow his constituency, he was forced inexorably back on his faithful base, that third-or-so of Americans who share many of his prejudices and whose contempt for both ‘liberals’ and for politics-as-usual seems to know no bounds.
Rational calculation remained in play, for his open attacks on the Republican leadership of congress were clearly intended to tar them with the blame for his failure to deliver on promised policies, and for likely losses in the 2018 mid-terms, in the knowledge that his base trusted him far more than the professional politicians. And indeed Trump’s strategy left the Republicans between a rock and a hard place with respect to their legislative and electoral goals, and the Democrats eagerly assessing their chances.
The question inevitably recurs: can Trump last, and if not, how will he go? Certainly, a palpable sense grew over the past weeks that a tipping point had been reached from which no real recovery was possible. The Trump circus had definitely ceased to be amusing. Even late night talk show hosts and comedians seemed baffled. Trump remains president, at least for now, but his leadership has narrowed to that of his small, steadily eroding base, and there seems little chance that he can expand it significantly from there.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
PROFESSOR JOHN KANE
John Kane is Professor in the School of Government and International Relations at Griffith University, Brisbane.
John attained his PhD at the London School of Economics and and teaches in political theory, political leadership and US foreign policy and is a researcher in Griffith’s Centre for Governance and Public Policy.
He has published widely, been awarded numerous research grants, and four times been Visiting Professor to Yale University. He is the author of The Politics of Moral Capital (Cambridge UP) and Between Virtue and Power: The Persistent Moral Dilemma of US Foreign Policy (Yale UP). He is also co-author (with Haig Patapan) of The Democratic Leader: How Democracy Defines, Empowers and Limits its Leaders (Oxford UP).
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