President Trumps First Term
His campaign tells us a lot about what kind of Commander-in-Chief he would be.
Evan Osnos
On the morning of January 20, 2017, the President-elect is to visit Barack Obama at the White House for coffee, before they share a limousineObama seated on the right, his successor on the leftfor the ride to the Capitol, where the Inauguration will take place, on the west front terrace, at noon.
Donald Trump will be five months short of seventy-one. If he wins the election, he will be Americas oldest first-term President, seven months older than Ronald Reagan was at his swearing-in. Reagan used humor to deflect attention from his agein 1984, he promised not to exploit, for political purposes, my opponents youth and inexperience. Trump favors a different strategy: for months, his advisers promoted a theory that his Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton, who is sixty-eight, has a secret brain illness and is unable to climb stairs or sit upright without help, and, in speeches, Trump asked whether she had the mental and physical stamina for the Presidency.
The full spectacle of Trumps campaignthe compulsive feuds and slurs, the detachment from established factshas demanded so much attention that it is easy to overlook a process with more enduring consequences: his bureaucratic march toward actually assuming power. On August 1st, members of his transition team moved into 1717 Pennsylvania Avenue, a thirteen-story office building a block from the White House. The team is led by Governor Chris Christie, of New Jersey, and includes several of his political confidants, such as his former law partner William Palatucci. As of August, under a new federal program designed to accelerate Presidential transitions, Trumps staff was eligible to apply for security clearances, so that they could receive classified briefings immediately after Election Day. They began the process of selecting Cabinet officials, charting policy moves, and meeting with current White House officials to plan the handover of the Departments of Defense, State, Homeland Security, and other agencies.
Trump aides are organizing what one Republican close to the campaign calls the First Day Project. Trump spends several hours signing papersand erases the Obama Presidency, he said. Stephen Moore, an official campaign adviser who is a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation, explained, We want to identify maybe twenty-five executive orders that Trump could sign literally the first day in office. The idea is inspired by Reagans first week in the White House, in which he took steps to deregulate energy prices, as he had promised during his campaign. Trumps transition team is identifying executive orders issued by Obama, which can be undone. Thats a problem I dont think the left really understood about executive orders, Moore said. If you govern by executive orders, then the next President can come in and overturn them.
That is partly exaggeration; rescinding an order that is beyond the rulemaking stage can take a year or more. But signing executive orders starts the process, and Trumps advisers are weighing several options for the First Day Project: He can renounce the Paris Agreement on greenhouse-gas emissions, much as George W. Bush, in 2002, unsigned American support for the International Criminal Court. He can re-start exploration of the Keystone pipeline, suspend the Syrian refugee program, and direct the Commerce Department to bring trade cases against China. Or, to loosen restrictions on gun purchases, he can relax background checks.
But those are secondary issues; whatever else Trump would do on January 20th, he would begin with a step (my first hour in office) to fulfill his central promise of radical change in American immigration. Anyone who has entered the United States illegally is subject to deportation, he told a crowd in Phoenix in August.
After more than a year of candidate Trump, Americans are almost desensitized to each new failing exhumed from his pastthe losing schemes and cheapskate cruelties, the discrimination and misogynymuch as they are to the daily indecencies of the present: the malice toward a grieving mother, the hidden tax records, the birther fiction and other lies. But where, in all that, is much talk of the future? By mid-September, Trump was in the final sprint of his campaign, having narrowed the gap behind Clinton in the popular vote from nine points, in August, to reach a virtual tie. His victory is no longer the stuff of dark comedy or fan fiction. It is fair to ask: What would he actually be like as a President?
Over the summer, I interviewed several dozen people about what the United States could expect from Donald Trumps first term. Campaign advisers shared his plans, his associates relayed conversations, and I consulted veterans of five Republican Administrations, along with economists, war gamers, historians, legal scholars, and political figures in Europe, Asia, and Latin America.
Most of the people I spoke with outside the campaign expected Trump to lose. But they also expected his impact to endure, and they identified examples of the ways in which he had already altered political chemistry far beyond the campaign. After seventy years of American efforts to stop the spread of nuclear weapons, Trump has suggested that South Korea and Japan might be wise to develop them. Returning from a recent visit to Seoul, Scott Sagan, a political-science professor at Stanford who is a nuclear-arms specialist, told me, These kinds of statements are having an effect. A number of political leaders, mostly from the very conservative sides of the parties, are openly calling for nuclear weapons.
Many of Trumps policy positions are fluid. He has adopted and abandoned (and, at times, adopted again) notions of arming some schoolteachers with guns, scrapping the H-1B visas admitting skilled foreign workers, and imposing a temporary total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States. He has said, Everything is negotiable, which, to some, suggests that Trump would be normalized by politics and constrained by the constitutional safeguards on his office. Randall Schweller, a political scientist at Ohio State University, told me, I think were just at a point in our history where hes probably the right guy for the job. Not perfect, but we need someone different, because theres such calcification in Washington. Americans are smart collectively, and if they vote for Trump I wouldnt worry.
Many from Trumps party say they do not expect him to fulfill some of his most often stated vows. According to a Quinnipiac poll in June, twelve months after he began pledging to build a big, beautiful, powerful wall on the southern border, only forty-two per cent of Republicans believed that he would achieve it.
But campaigns offer a surprisingly accurate preview of Presidencies. In 1984, the political scientist Michael Krukones tabulated the campaign pledges of all the Presidents from Woodrow Wilson to Jimmy Carter and found that they achieved seventy-three per cent of what they promised. Most recently, PolitiFact, a nonpartisan fact-checking site, has assessed more than five hundred promises made by Barack Obama during his campaigns and found that, to the irritation of his opponents, he has accomplished at least a compromised version of seventy per cent of them.
To turn intentions into policy, previous transition teams have produced confidential guides, known as promise books, that pull from the candidates words in order to shape the priorities of officials across the government. During the 2008 campaign, the Obama transition team distributed a memo to staff members on what qualifies as a promise. It explained, Words like will, would, create, ensure, increase, eliminate are good signals of specific policy commitments.
When Trump talks about what he will create and what he will eliminate, he doesnt depart from three core principles: in his view, America is doing too much to try to solve the worlds problems; trade agreements are damaging the country; and immigrants are detrimental to it. He wanders and hedges and doubles back, but he is governed by a strong instinct for self-preservation, and never strays too far from his essential positions. Roger Stone, a long-serving Trump adviser, told me it is a mistake to imagine that Trump does not mean to fulfill his most radical ideas. Maybe, in the end, the courts dont allow him to temporarily ban Muslims, Stone said. Thats finehe can ban anybody from Egypt, from Syria, from Libya, from Saudi Arabia. Hes a Reagan-type pragmatist.
William Antholis, a political scientist who directs the Miller Center, at the University of Virginia, pointed out that President Trump would have, at his disposal, the worlds largest company, staffed with 2.8 million civilians and 1.5 million military employees. Trump would have the opportunity to alter the Supreme Court, with one vacancy to fill immediately and others likely to follow. Three sitting Justices are in their late seventies or early eighties.
As for the Trump Organization, by law Trump could retain as much control or ownership as he wants, because Presidents are not bound by the same conflict-of-interest statute that restricts Cabinet officers and White House staff. Presidential decisions, especially on foreign policy, could strengthen or weaken his familys business, which includes controversial deals in Turkey, South Korea, Azerbaijan, and elsewhere. Trump would likely face pressure to adopt an arrangement akin to that of Michael Bloomberg, who, when he became mayor of New York City, withdrew from most management decisions for his company. Trump has said only that he plans to turn over the Trump Organizations day-to-day control to three of his adult children: Donald, Jr., Ivanka, and Eric.
As President, Trump would have the power to name some four thousand appointees, but he would face a unique problem: more than a hundred veteran Republican officials have vowed never to support him, and that has forced younger officials to decide whether they, too, will stay away or, instead, enter his Administration and try to moderate him. By September, the campaign was vetting four hundred people, and some had been invited to join the transition team. An analogy was making the rounds: Was Trump a manageable petty tyrant, in the mold of Silvio Berlusconi? Or was he something closer to Mussolini? And, if so, was he Mussolini in 1933 or in 1941?
Michael Chertoff served both Bush Presidentsas a U.S. Attorney in Bush, Sr.,s Administration, and then as Secretary of Homeland Security under George W. Bush. He was one of fifty senior Republican national-security officials who recently signed a letter declaring that Trump would be the most reckless President in American history. Chertoff told me that he has been approached for advice by younger Republicans who ask if joining Trump, after he has already been elected, would be regarded as patriotic, rather than political. I think anybody contemplating going in will have to have a very serious look in their own conscience, and make sure theyre not kidding themselves, Chertoff said.
Trumps Presidential plans are not shaped by ideology. He changed parties five times between 1999 and 2012, and, early on the campaign trail, he praised parts of Planned Parenthood (while opposing abortion), vowed to protect Social Security, and supported gay rights (while opposing same-sex marriage). He is governed, above all, by his faith in the ultimate power of transactionan encompassing perversion of realism that is less a preference for putting interests ahead of values than a belief that interests have no place for values.
Trump has relied heavily on the ideas of seasoned combatants. Newt Gingrich, who, as House Speaker in the nineties, pioneered many of the tactics that have come to define partisan warfare, is now a Trump adviser. Gingrich told me that he is urging Trump to give priority to an obscure but contentious conservative issueending lifetime tenure for federal employees. This would also galvanize Republicans and help mend rifts in the Party after a bitter election.
Getting permission to fire corrupt, incompetent, and dishonest workersthats the absolute showdown, Gingrich said. He assumes that federal employees unions would resist, thus producing, in his words, an ongoing war similar to the conflict that engulfed Madison, Wisconsin, in 2011, when Governor Scott Walker moved to limit public-sector employees collective-bargaining rights. After five months of protests, and a failed effort to recall the Governor and members of the state senate, Walker largely prevailed. Gingrich predicts that that chaotic dynamic can be brought to Washington. You have to end the civil-service permanent employment, he said. You start changing that and the public-employee unions will just come unglued.
What, exactly, can a President do? To prevent the ascent of what the Anti-Federalist Papers, in 1787, called a Caesar, Caligula, Nero, and Domitian in America, the founders gave Congress the power to make laws, and the Supreme Court the final word on the Constitution. But in the nineteen-thirties Congress was unable to mount a response to the rise of Nazi Germany, and during the Cold War the prospect of sudden nuclear attack further consolidated authority in the White House.
These checks are not gone completely, but theyre much weaker than I think most people assume, Eric Posner, a law professor at the University of Chicago, said. Congress has delegated a great deal of power to the President, Presidents have claimed power under the Constitution, and Congress has acquiesced. The courts, Posner added, are slow. If you have a President who is moving very quickly, the judiciary cant do much. A recent example of this would be the war on terror. The judiciary put constraints on President Bushbut it took a very long time.
Some of Trumps promises would be impossible to fulfill without the consent of Congress or the courts; namely, repealing Obamacare, cutting taxes, and opening up our libel laws that protect reporters, so that we can sue them and win lots of money. (In reality, there are no federal libel laws.) Even if Republicans retain control of Congress, they are unlikely to have the sixty votes in the Senate required to overcome a Democratic filibuster.
However, Trump could achieve many objectives on his own. A President has the unilateral authority to renegotiate a nuclear deal with Iran, to order a ban on Muslims, and to direct the Justice Department to give priority to certain offenses, with an eye to specific targets. During the campaign, he has accused Amazon of getting away with murder tax-wise, and vowed, if he wins, Oh, do they have problems.
Any of those actions could be contested in court. The American Civil Liberties Union has analyzed Trumps promises and concluded, in the words of the executive director, Anthony Romero, that they would violate the First, Fourth, Fifth, and Eighth Amendments to the Constitution. Romero has said that the A.C.L.U. would challenge and impede implementation of his proposals, but that strategy highlights the essential advantage of the President: the first move. The other branches are then presented with a fait accompli, according to a 1999 paper by the political scientists Terry M. Moe and William G. Howell. After the September 11th attacks, Bush signed an executive order authorizing warrantless surveillance of Americans by the National Security Agency, and, though lawmakers voiced concerns, and lawsuits were filed, the program continued until 2015, when Congress ordered an end to bulk phone-metadata collection. Similarly, Obama has used his powers to raise fuel-economy standards and temporarily ban energy exploration in parts of Alaska and the Arctic Ocean.
Modern Presidents have occasionally been constrained by isolated acts of disobedience by government officials. To confront terrorism, Trump has said, you have to take out their families, work on closing that Internet up in some ways, and use tactics that are frankly unthinkable and a hell of a lot worse than waterboarding. General Michael Hayden, a former head of the C.I.A. and of the National Security Agency, predicts that senior officers would refuse to carry out those proposals. You are required not to follow an unlawful order, he has said.
Donald Trump would be the first Commander-in-Chief with no prior experience in public office or at high levels of the military. As a candidate, he has said that he would not trust American intelligence officials (the people that have been doing it for our country) and declared, I know more about ISIS than the generals do. Once he became the nominee, Trump received his first batch of top-secret information. During a national intelligence briefing at his offices in New York, he was accompanied by retired Lieutenant General Michael Flynn, a senior adviser who reportedly kept interrupting the briefing with questions and comments until Christie asked him to calm down. (The campaign denied that account.) Trump later told a television interviewer that the briefers body language indicated that they were not happy with Obama.
Intelligence professionals faulted Trump for publicly discussing, and politicizing, a classified briefing. Several national-security officials told me that a determining factor in any Presidents approach would be his response to a shocksay, a crippling power outage that might be terrorism or might not. Would he or she be impetuous? Jim Woolsey, a Trump adviser who served as director of Central Intelligence from 1993 to 1995, asked. One thing you can be pretty sure of is that the first report is almost always wrong, at least partially. When the President of the United States says, I just got a reportthe United States military forces are under attack, it is very hard for anybody to stand in the way of that.
In Trump: Think Like a Billionaire (2004), Trump wrote that others are surprised by how quickly I make big decisions, but Ive learned to trust my instincts and not to overthink things. He added, The day I realized it can be smart to be shallow was, for me, a deep experience. He prides himself on vengeance and suspicion. If you do not get even, you are just a schmuck! he wrote, in 2007. Be paranoid, he said in 2000.
For many years, Trump has expressed curiosity about nuclear weapons. In 1984, still in his thirties, he told the Washington Post that he wanted to negotiate nuclear treaties with the Soviets. It would take an hour and a half to learn everything there is to learn about missiles, he said. I think I know most of it anyway. According to Bruce G. Blair, a research scholar at the Program on Science and Global Security, at Princeton, Trump encountered a U.S. nuclear-arms negotiator at a reception in 1990 and offered advice on how to cut a terrific deal with a Soviet counterpart. Trump told him to arrive late, stand over the Soviet negotiator, stick his finger in his chest, and say, Fuck you! Recently, a former Republican White House official whom Trump has called on for his insights told me, Honestly, the problem with Donald is he doesnt know what he doesnt know.
Shortly after taking the oath of office, Trump would be assigned a military aide who carries the forty-five-pound aluminum-and-leather briefcase that holds a manual for conducting nuclear war, according to Dan Zak, the author of Almighty, a new book on nuclear weapons. The briefcase, known in the White House as the football, contains menus of foreign targets: cities, arsenals, critical infrastructure. To launch an attack, Trump would first verify his identity to a commander in the Pentagons war room, by referring to codes on a one-of-a-kind I.D. card, known as the biscuit. (According to Zak, Jimmy Carter is rumored to have sent the biscuit to the dry cleaners accidentally. Bill Clinton allegedly misplaced the biscuit and didnt tell anyone for months.)
On rare occasions, a Presidents nuclear orders have been too unsettling for his staff to accept. In October, 1969, Richard Nixon told Secretary of Defense Melvin R. Laird to put nuclear forces on high alert. According to Sagan, the Stanford nuclear-arms specialist, Nixon hoped that the Soviets would suspect that he was willing to attack North Vietnam. Laird was appalled, and he tried an excuse: the alert would conflict with a scheduled military exercise. Sagan recalls, He understood that Richard Nixon believed in the so-called madman theory deterring aggression by encouraging Americas rivals to suspect that Nixon was irrational. But Mel Laird believed that the madman theory was pretty crazy, and that threatening to use nuclear weapons over something like Vietnam was not going to be effective, and might actually be dangerous. He tried to delay implementing the Presidents orders, in the hopes that Nixon would calm down. Nixon did that a lot; he would make an angry comment, and if you ignored it he wouldnt come back to it. In this instance, Nixon did not forget, and Laird eventually complied. The operation, hastily organized, went poorly: eighteen B-52s, loaded with nuclear weapons, flew toward the Soviet Union. Some came dangerously close to other aircraft, an incident that an after-action report ruled unsafe.
Later, another aide sought to interrupt Nixons control over nuclear weapons. During the final weeks of the Watergate scandal, in 1974, some of Nixons advisers regarded him as unsteady. James R. Schlesinger, who was Secretary of Defense at the time, issued a directive to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff that any emergency order coming from the president should be diverted to Schlesinger before any action was taken, according to James Carrolls House of War, a history of the Pentagon. The directive may have been illegal, but it remained in place. Because many Republicans are boycotting Trumps campaign, those who agree to join risk being viewed, as a former Cabinet secretary put it to me, as part of a staff full of Ollie Norths. (In 1987, testifying to Congress about his role in the Iran-Contra scandal, the White House aide Oliver L. North said, If the Commander-in-Chief tells this lieutenant-colonel to go stand in the corner and sit on his head, I will do so.)
Watching Trump on the campaign trail, Timothy Naftali, the former director of the Nixon Presidential Library, said, Trump tweets what Nixon knew not to say outside his inner circle, and we know what he said from the tapes. What Nixon would do is project onto situations the conspiracies that he would have concocted if in the same position. Nixon was convinced that the Democrats were spying on him. So he spied on them. To himself, he rationalized his actions by saying, Im only doing what my enemies are doing to me.
Nothing in the campaign has presented Trump with a broader range of new information than the realm of foreign affairs. Asked about the Quds Force, an Iranian paramilitary unit, he has expressed his view of the Kurds, an ethnic group. During a debate in December, 2015, a moderator requested his view of the nuclear triad, the cornerstone of American nuclear strategybombers, land-based missiles, and submarine-launched missilesand it became clear that Trump had no idea what the term meant. Trump replied, I think, to me, nuclear is just the power, the devastation is very important to me.
New Yorker
