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Trump's what-if presidency

The president delivered a State of the Union that suggested an alternate political reality.

By JOHN F. HARRIS and MATTHEW NUSSBAUM

President Donald Trump stood before Congress and the nation Tuesday night and invited people to imagine an alternate universe.

Think of it as the What-If Presidency.

What if he had not spent a year compulsively lashing his opponents and taking steel wool to the country’s cultural, ideological and racial wounds? What if a special prosecutor did not have his sights locked on the administration over possible electoral collusion with Russia and obstruction of justice?

And what if—perhaps the biggest stretch of all—Trump somehow brought to heel the impulsiveness and improvisation that define his politics and replaced these, even partly, with strategic purpose?

The 80 minutes Trump stood at the House Speaker’s lectern suggest an answer: He would be in a commanding position in American politics after one year in power, with his own party firmly locked down and Democrats on the defensive.

The speech also illuminated how well-positioned he would be to fortify his standing in the year ahead.

Whether by accident or design, Trump is presiding over a strong economy—the kind that historically rewards incumbents lavishly—and his recent legislative victory overhauling the tax code has made him the toast of C-suites on Wall Street and beyond. Through a mix of intimidation and accommodation, a man who spent most of his adult life with no consistent partisan allegiances has turned the Republican Party into his tool, as GOP cheers during Tuesday’s speech and cable TV air kisses afterward indicated.

With some artful deal-cutting, Trump also would have a strong chance to expand his base with an agreement on immigration and an even more potent trillion-dollar-plus infrastructure program that would power jobs and likely deepen support in the Midwestern industrial states that Trump snatched from the Democratic column in 2016 to claim the presidency.

Okay, now. Time to snap out of it.

The upbeat view of Trump’s potential—as demonstrated by a flag-waving pep rally-esque State of the Union that slathered praise on a long roster of constituencies and target groups but seemed to avoid (at least by Trump standards) gratuitously offending others—requires willfully ignoring other political and psychological realities.

The political reality is that the vision of Trump and Trumpism on display in the State of the Union is not one voters see more than occasionally. If it were the norm, rather than the exception, it is hard to imagine Republicans losing big in Virginia and Alabama as they did in November, or that Trump’s average approval rating would be 40.1 percent, or that that many of the same Republicans who were clapping along in the House chamber would be privately saying they pray Trump is somehow not again on the ballot of 2020.

The psychological reality, as many of the Republicans tied most closely to Trump well know, is that he could not stay in State of the Union mode—or stay away from Twitter tirades—if he tried.

Trump may have been disciplined during the State of the Union speech, said a senior GOP leadership aide on Capitol Hill – but, this person added, “None of that matters if he goes back and tweets crazy shit.”

“I’d say there’s a good amount that he’s actually accomplished,” said the aide, who readily acknowledged that Trump’s own antics have overshadowed much of his agenda. “The issue is that no one can ever focus on any of that because we’re consumed by distractions over his Twitter, his erratic public remarks, the discord on the personnel level and the Russia investigation all have combined into basically a media firestorm every other day about something that the Trump White House is doing.”

The question to be answered in coming days is whether the State of the Union speech represents a passing rhetorical shift—some speechwriter’s notion of the appropriate tone for this occasion—or a more significant shift in strategy.

Trump mentioned the word “together”—Americans coming together, the two parties coming together, and so on—13 times.

And while some Democrats rolled their eyes at appeals for bipartisanship from a president who insults opponents with such ease, the reality is that party leaders, including Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer, have repeatedly signaled their willingness to strike bargains with Trump on immigration and infrastructure.

Yet Schumer can’t compromise without worrying about backlash on the left as his party tries to recapture one or both chambers of Congress, and House Speaker Paul Ryan can’t negotiate a deal on immigration and the status of “Dreamers” without potentially enraging his right flank.

But thanks to his unusual connection with supporters Trump has uncommon freedom, as illustrated by the speech. He massaged rightwing erogenous zones—lower taxes, conservative judges, support for “beautiful coal,” and elimination of the Obamacare individual mandate. He pivoted with ease to words that from any other Republican president would soothe Democratic ears—record-low unemployment for African-Americans and Hispanics, turning away from “decades of unfair trade deals that sacrificed our prosperity and shipped away our companies, our jobs, and our nation’s wealth.”

He is still Teflon Don—the man who infamously bragged during the 2016 campaign that he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and not lose support from his base. Or, as Tennessee Republican Sen. Lamar Alexander observed in an interview: “President Trump has the opportunity to be Nixon to China on immigration. Because I think if he says this should be the legal status of these Dreamers, they should have some day … citizenship, this is sufficient border security. I think the country is more likely to accept that. So he may be able to do what President Bush and President Obama tried to do but couldn’t.”

Tevi Troy, who served in George W. Bush’s administration and has written two books on the presidency, said the State of the Union speech not only highlighted a presidency that might have been but what could still be.

“Americans like results,” Troy said. “So if the results are good and continue to be good, you might see some people change their minds.”

Americans may change their minds, and Trump may sometimes change his tone, but if there is one lesson of history it is that presidents do not change the fundamental character that shapes their politics. Pondering a what-if presidency is like speculating on what Richard Nixon’s presidency would have been like if he had been less obsessive and paranoid—traits closely linked with the careful plotting and ceaseless ambition that carried him to the White House in the first place.

Or like speculating on Bill Clinton’s presidency if he could have tamed his weakness of the flesh—a side of him that always seemed to reside in close proximity with the part of his psyche that hungered for approval and made him a deft politician.

“You can say yes, but for the tweets and calling Haiti a shithole and being insensitive after Charlottesville and after attacking civil servants on a Twitter account and after completely conflating his private financial interests with policy making in the White House, if all those things were off the table, yes maybe he could have had a successful presidency,” said Tim O’Brien, who wrote the 2005 biography of Trump, “TrumpNation” and now serves as publisher at Bloomberg View. “But the reality is none of those things are off the table because that’s part and parcel of who he is as a human being.”

“The things that you have to strip away from him to make him an effective leader to a broad part of the public are so elemental to who he is that if you were to strip them away, he’d no longer be Donald Trump.”