Stiff as a wet noodle...

Trump, the indecisive

The president speaks boldly about issues like trade, taxes, immigration, health care and climate change. But what exactly will he do?

By EMILY HOLDEN, ANDREW RESTUCCIA, AARON LORENZO and TED HESSON

President Donald Trump has threatened to pull out of NAFTA, the Paris climate agreement and the Iranian nuclear deal — unless he opts to stay. He decided to revoke legal protections for the Dreamers, then urged Congress hours later to enact new ones. And he has repeatedly demanded that lawmakers enact major legislation on health care, tax reform and a $1 trillion infrastructure plan — without making it clear what he wants the final product to look like.

Of all the factors that have made the president’s first year so turbulent, one of the most important has been Trump himself: Combining quick mood shifts, a rancorous White House staff and his own fuzziness on the details, the self-proclaimed dealmaker has left his options way open on a range of contentious decisions — while inducing whiplash in many of the political insiders, business leaders and even foreign governments with a stake in the outcomes.

Some business groups are making long-range decisions based on their best guesses of where the administration will land, while others try to outflank the White House by talking to key lawmakers before Trump does.

“It’s exhausting because there are so many places that you have to touch, so many different bases, because you never know who he’s listening to,” said Brian Wild, a Republican adviser to businesses on energy, tax, labor, transportation and health care at the law firm Brownstein Hyatt Farber Schreck. ”You never know who’s going to get the final 'yes.'”

One longtime GOP lobbyist added: “You would’ve never seen a situation with Bush or Obama when a position in the administration got flipped overnight. Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose, sometimes you get half a loaf, but rarely do you ever just change sides."

“I think he thinks of everything as a trial balloon,” the lobbyist said of Trump.

The flux is especially vexing for conservatives who were invigorated after Trump won but now worry that their years of pushing to lower tax rates and repeal former President Barack Obama’s health care law might have been in vain.

"Nobody is happy,” said another Republican lobbyist. “It's very likely that at the end of the year, we'll be left with Obamacare and the same tax code."

White House spokespeople rejected the idea that the president has waffled on policy issues, saying he’s been “abundantly clear” that he’ll leave the Paris agreement if he doesn’t get a better deal and has been “very clear” he wants Congress to act on immigration.

“President Trump was put into office precisely because he isn't beholden to lobbyists and special interests,” White House spokeswoman Kelly Love said. "If they're upset that they can't stroll into the White House and drive administration policy anymore, that's a badge of honor for a president who was elected to drain the swamp. This president makes his decisions based on what's best for Main Street, not K Street."

But the frustration has repercussions far beyond the Beltway. As tax talks between the White House and lawmakers stall, more than half of CEOs surveyed by Business Roundtable said they would have to shelve plans to hire and invest more if an already long-delayed overhaul doesn’t move through Congress.

The outcome of the tax debate will determine whether Guy Chemical Co. in Somerset, Pennsylvania, can buy extra equipment, hire 10 new employees and give raises to existing staff, company President Guy Berkebile said. But Berkebile, who was recently in Washington to urge lawmakers to lower business tax rates, said he’s not getting his hopes up.

“I am already thinking what I will do with the extra money at Guy Chemical if business taxes are lowered,” he said. “If tax reform does not get done, I will continue to grind away with the same typical investment I have put back into my company over the past 10 years.”

The details of what Trump wants in a tax overhaul are still in flux, complicating his sales pitch to conservative Republicans. The uncertainty includes whether the White House will insist on his oft-stated desire to cut the corporate tax rate to 15 percent, down from 35 percent. ("I hope it’s going to be 15 percent," Trump told reporters Sunday, amid reports that negotiators had settled on a compromise of 20 percent.)

On health care, Trump has spent the entire year pushing Congress to repeal Obamacare but has offered vague, often contradictory clues about what he wants to see take its place. At times he’s promised “insurance for everybody,” supported a House Republican bill that guaranteed nothing of the sort, or mused about letting Obama’s system “explode” on its own or moving on to other issues like taxes.

Trump’s tough talk on trade has also left industries he’s vowed to support hanging.

The United Steelworkers Union complains that foreign steel imports have “skyrocketed” since April, when the White House suggested the U.S. might limit them for national security reasons. Data from the American Iron and Steel Institute show that steel imports jumped more than 21 percent in the three months following the announcement versus the first three months of the year.

The Commerce Department was supposed to issue recommendations at the beginning of June but has delayed them indefinitely.

Vagueness and wishy-washiness might seem unlikely problems for Trump, who’s shown no reluctance to speak his mind and often expresses his thoughts in the most caustic terms — including using the epithet “Rocket Man” last week for North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. He’s spent years espousing certain consistently held policy beliefs, such as his charge that “stupid” trade deals are letting other countries rip off the U.S.

But that doesn’t make it any easier to predict the details of what Trump will decide as president, especially on the myriad issues where he’s offered no well-formed opinion. And he’s changed his mind on a host of issues — such as endorsing an influx of new U.S. troops to Afghanistan after previously calling for a pullout. Or holding a Rose Garden celebration in May after the House passed a bill to repeal Obamacare, only to describe the same bill as “mean” a month later in a meeting with Republican senators. Or deciding in early September to end the Obama-era program that prevented deportations for thousands of young undocumented immigrants who were brought to the United States as children — only to say hours later that he has “love for these people” and wants Congress to “help them.”

“Does anybody really want to throw out good, educated and accomplished young people who have jobs, some serving in the military?” he tweeted about the so-called Dreamers a week later. “Really!”

Despite those kind words, 29-year-old Dallas systems engineer Erik Burgos said Trump's decision threatens to turn his world upside down.

“A lot of uncertainty and fear starts to creep in,” said Burgos, who was brought to the U.S. from Mexico at age 2 and later enrolled for protection under the Obama program. After Trump's announcement, Burgos postponed his plans to purchase a house and wonders whether Congress will find a fix before his permit expires.

Still, he said, Trump’s unpredictability gives him “a glimmer of hope” that his ability to work legally will continue.

Trump is different from most politicians, said Wild, who previously served as an adviser to top Republicans such as then-House Majority Whip Kevin McCarthy and former Speaker John Boehner.

“Typically, all these candidates build out a pretty profound policy notebook throughout the campaign, and then when they get elected they’re implementing that,” Wild said. But with Trump and his aides, “they’re kind of building this policy notebook in real time.”

The second Republican lobbyist also blamed congressional leaders for the uncertainty on many policy fronts, noting that House Speaker Paul Ryan and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell have had trouble controlling their divided Republican caucuses on issues like health care.

White House aides insist that the lack of policy detail is sometimes strategic — though they acknowledge that Trump sees himself as a dealmaker, not an ideologue, and is apt to change his mind. A detailed set of legislative principles on issues such as tax reform and infrastructure could draw attacks not just from Democrats but also from conservatives who are essential to the passage of any bill. And having learned from the earlier collapse of Obamacare repeal efforts, the White House is eager to let Congress take the lead so Trump won't have the sole blame if a bill fails.

Wiggle room exists even in some of Trump’s most starkly ideological decisions, on issues he alone controls.

In June, for example, he announced that the U.S. would withdraw from the 2015 Paris climate agreement, a decision championed by his most staunchly nationalist advisers. But he also said his administration would “begin negotiations” to either re-enter the nearly 200-nation accord or join an entirely new deal.

“So we’re getting out,” Trump said at the time. “But we will start to negotiate, and we will see if we can make a deal that’s fair. And if we can, that’s great. And if we can’t, that’s fine.”

Since then, international diplomats have been left in the dark about what precisely the United States wants. (Some have even groused privately that Trump should just pull the trigger and leave.) Many people missed the nuance in June about possibly remaining in the deal, until that detail provoked a welter of confusing news headlines recently following an international meeting of energy ministers in Montreal.

Despite all the back-and-forth, high-ranking officials only last week had a meeting on aligning their messaging on climate change.

Similar ambiguity reigns about Obama’s 2015 nuclear deal with Iran, which Trump denounced at the United Nations last week as “one of the worst and most one-sided transactions the United States has ever entered into.” He later said he had decided whether to exit the agreement — but refused to tell anybody, including British Prime Minister Theresa May, what his verdict was.

Trump has also threatened to withdraw from NAFTA unless Mexico and Canada agree to new terms and has raised the idea of a “sunset” provision, in which the agreement would terminate after five years unless the countries agreed to renew the terms.

Such a withdrawal “could endanger literally hundreds of thousands of jobs” and damage security cooperation among the countries, argued John Murphy, senior vice president for international policy at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Republican leaders in Congress have expressed alarm about the idea too. But a month after formal talks among the three nations began, it’s unclear where the discussions are headed.

"In our trading relationships, we need certainty and security about what the terms of trade are going to be going forward, over multiple years,” Murphy said. “Investments are made on the basis of that kind of certainty, and economic growth and job creation flow from it."

U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer said the countries are “moving at warp speed” to try to strike a deal by the end of the year, but he couldn’t guarantee it would happen.

“We don't know whether we're going to get to a conclusion,” Lighthizer said. “That's the problem. We're running very quickly somewhere."

In one key domestic policy, Trump has repeatedly pledged a big-ticket plan to rebuild the nation’s roads and bridges — and demanded in a tweet last month that Republican leaders “get back to work” and put “a great Infrastructure Bill on my desk for signing.” But his administration hasn’t offered much detail on what such a package would entail, aside from a six-page outline it issued last spring. Nor has it been clear how Trump would dole out his proposed $200 billion in new federal infrastructure spending, although Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao said in May that some of the money would go to projects meant to “lift the American spirit.”

Marcia Hale, president of the advocacy group Building America’s Future, said the administration has done more behind the scenes on infrastructure than may be apparent — though she acknowledged that it has “been a little more, shall we say, hectic than even some of the most recent administrations, and a little less predictable.”

“You always know with this administration that things could change quickly, or policies could change quickly, or allegiances could change quickly,” Hale said. “So you just go with the flow.”

Despite the confusion, some people trying to persuade the administration have found at least one common theme they can use for making their arguments.

“We’re telling our clients that ... any argument that has a jobs impact has to be framed as a jobs argument,” said Stewart Verdery, CEO of the Republican lobbying firm Monument Policy Group, who has represented tech companies including Amazon and Microsoft. “An intellectual argument, a fairness argument, even a federal spending argument is not nearly as powerful as a jobs argument.”