According to developmental guidelines provided by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the one-year mark is a milestone for the processes of rapid assimilation of information, growing dexterity, and a dawning awareness of the nature of the surrounding world. In short, of learning. Were we to apply this standard to Presidential Administrations, however, we would have to conclude that the incumbent is significantly behind the curve.
The surreal ritual of Donald Trump’s Inauguration as President of the United States, now one year behind us, was greeted by great swaths of anxiety, disdain, and, despite official pronouncements, a crowd smaller than its predecessors on the National Mall. To an extent that seemed comical at the time, and unbelievable in retrospect, the balming narrative about the coming Trump Presidency was that he would grow into the position—an argument that even Barack Obama, perhaps disingenuously, promoted. Yet there was no reason to believe that, after decades of bloviating and prevaricating, Donald Trump would become anything other than a more powerful version of who he’d always been. The optimists have, for the most part, been proved wrong, though the absence of a nuclear exchange in the first three hundred and sixty-five days of the Trump era likely beats the odds of the most pessimistic assessments of what he might have caused once in office. Most crucially, there is little to point to an increased willingness to listen or learn from his new surroundings.
The outset of this era was met by urgent demands that Trump and his excesses not be “normalized.” His defenders dismissed this concern as so much liberal hysteria, and tried to retrofit him into the political styles of various predecessors. Over the course of the year, we’ve split the difference. The bleating alarms and the blinking indicators of danger persist; we have not mistaken this for normalcy. Yet the sheer scale of Trump’s offenses has made these irregularities almost ambient. (Our eyes may have adjusted to the dark, but we don’t confuse it with daylight.) A partial reflection on the past year would include grand-scale insults to democracy (firing the F.B.I. director James Comey, and bragging about it to Russian diplomats in the Oval Office; serial attacks from the White House and its media surrogates on the integrity of the F.B.I. and of the special counsel Robert Mueller; the baseless accusation that President Obama had wiretapped Trump Tower; the creation of an Orwellian voter-integrity commission); destructive policy prerogatives (the exit from the Paris climate accords; multiple iterations of a travel ban directed at Muslims; a pledge at the United Nations to “totally destroy” North Korea if it threatened the United States); bizarre provocations (a random crusade against N.F.L. players and the Golden State Warriors; retweeting right-wing extremists in the wake of terrorist attacks in London; refusing to shake Angela Merkel’s hand); and a greatest-hits compilation of actions that, irrespective of the Presidential physician’s report, provoked worries about the mental state of the Commander-in-Chief (the suspicion that Barack Obama was not born in the United States; the not-normal fixation on the size of the Inauguration crowd and the Electoral College tallies; the Twitter brinksmanship with Kim Jong Un.)
The displays of ineptitude and of racism—the bungled response to Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico; the absurd evenhandedness of comments on Nazis and anti-Fascist protesters in Charlottesville; the “shithole” affair—blur against the general backdrop of abnormalities occurring at a pace faster than we can fully countenance. The most damning statement that can be made in this regard is that every failure, unwarranted indulgence, attack, calamity, and corrosion could occur again, and in the same way, without a scintilla of gleaned wisdom weighing on Trump’s conscience—or on the conscience of the Republican Party, which has largely abetted him in his efforts. If the purpose of history is to provide an instructive understanding of the patterns that inform the present, then this Administration is not simply ahistorical, it is anti-historical—a “Groundhog Day” version of national affairs.
There are, of course, counter-arguments: about the economy—note Trump’s incessant recitation of the low unemployment rates—and tax reform and deregulation and, um, Neil Gorsuch. Also, ISIS, and a few et ceteras, mostly relating to the way that Trump has stuck it to the snowflake libtards. The Republican establishment and the President’s electoral base, which have been at odds virtually since the inception of his candidacy, nonetheless share a common view that the forty-fifth President and his shortcomings are less important than the potential for achieving favorable policy outcomes. Yet this should be thought of as the payday-loan theory of the Trump Presidency: the immediate yield does not justify the vast and compounding debt that will continue for years to come. Amid staggering income inequality, a portion of the Trump-voting public has been seduced into the belief that even more money accumulating in the pockets of the highest-income earners will be beneficial to them. More fundamentally, the corruption of democratic institutions, the mainlining of racism and misogyny, and the fraying of alliances will rebound in ways that are difficult to predict in coming years. The bedrock elements of Trump’s support, which have thus far provided him with a floor in his polling numbers, have settled on a strategy that is the equivalent of selling one’s car in order to afford new tires.
Amid this dismal arcade of current events, the incessant pinging of crises, the pinballing from one collapsed norm to the next, it can be difficult to discern even the most persistent patterns. But it’s still hard to miss that the one through line in this mad era has been the rebellion against checks on Presidential authority and the assault on the institutions that provide them. In Federalist No. 51, James Madison famously pondered the circumstances that warrant a government in which “ambition must be made to counteract ambition.” As he noted, “If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.”
We have witnessed a great deal of ambition during the past year, most of it untethered from any broader societal concern. Neither Trump’s temperament nor the Administration he leads reflects Madison’s concern with self-control. We are not dealing with angels but with a government that has thus far been insufficiently checked and whose outlook, inclinations, and objectives remain perilously unbalanced.
