Clinging to Normal

Needless to say, the last few days have been politically chaotic. President Trump's executive orders detaining refugees, immigrants, and travelers have had an immediate and startling impact. Protests have broken out across the country, and there are conflicting and disturbing reports about whether or to what extent immigration authorities have complied with court orders halting deportations of refugees and affected immigrants pending review. Most Democrats and some Republicans have criticized the order, though most elected Republicans have remained silent.

The backlash has dominated the news. Most media outlets that I have personally read are wondering about long-term fallout, and whether this will permanently poison Trump's relationship with his own party. There is an assumption from most corners that Trump has made a colossal blunder. It is all absolutely, maddeningly frustrating, because it shows exactly how slow the political establishment has been to adjust to Mr Trump's rise, and how far behind they remain in understanding his intentions.

The fact of the matter is that Donald Trump is President. He won the election, he was sworn in, and commands all the authority and awe the most powerful single position in history can bestow. His instincts tend toward domination, and he acts swiftly to demean and diminish those who criticize or challenge him. His party remains in control of the congress and most of the state governments in the country; a position they owe largely to the unexpected electoral success of Trump himself.

Trump has already shown a willingness to push the use of executive fiat to the limit and I suspect this is just a taste of what he has in store. On top of his immigration order, he has already reorganized the National Security Council to give his private political advisor, Steve Bannon, unprecedented access, and permitted the use of black sites and torture for holding detainees from foreign conflicts and counterterrorism actions. Rumors are already beginning to leak of a coming executive order that will gut protections for LGBT individuals interacting with the federal bureaucracy.

The chaos is not simply political clumsiness or slow adjustment on Trump's part. He may be boorish, have no intellectual curiosity, and glorify ignorance, but he is not a stupid man. The consequences of the immigration orders were predictable, and I believe they were predicted in the White House. He did it anyway because he knows that if he is intransigent enough and moves quickly enough there is no obvious way to keep him from doing it.

Consider, for a moment, what would have to happen to challenge his orders. The instinctive answer for anyone in the US is the courts. But a court order is, ultimately, a piece of paper. As we have already established, there is a great deal of uncertainty about whether current orders are being followed as we speak. If the president decides to simply ignore court orders challenging his executive ones, the power to censure him will reside entirely with a Congress that is held strongly by the party that owes him its majority, and stands to feel the wrath of his supporters should they oppose him too sternly. That party, I would remind the reader, has spent decades denigrating and de-legitimizing the courts as a bevy of anti-conservative activists and social engineers. The incentives for action are unfavorable.

This collection of circumstances gives Trump an unusually strong hand to simply wait out any backlash. His campaign was ultimately, if very narrowly, successful because it realized that one or two scandals can be crippling, but several dozen crowd each other out. Each controversy galvanizes some opposition, but the impacted parties do not consistently overlap. Before forceful, sustained opposition can congeal against a given policy, another distracts both activists and the public. For those not directly impacted, moral outrage is eroded over time by distance and fatigue. Compliance through inaction sets in, and Trump's policy continues through inertia.

All of this is to say that I find the level of blind faith we seem to be displaying in the institutional restraints on the president's power deeply troubling. There is nothing I've seen in his personal or professional life, in his campaign, or in his administration that suggests to me that Donald Trump has any respect for an institutional opposition to his positions. Should he choose to make that disrespect policy, a significant fraction of his own party both in the congress and the judiciary will have to decide to defy him for it to stop. At the moment, it is difficult for me to see how that happens.

Donald Trump's concept of power is such that he will stop pushing a particular policy or agenda when he is made to stop, and not before. That means any opposition to him will have to sustain itself for two years in sufficient force to overcome the heavily gerrymandered congressional maps across the country. It must above all remain focused. If it allows Trump to lead it on a controversy-of-the-day goose chase, it will stall and ultimately fail. Time will tell if it has the fortitude and attention span required to avoid that trap.