Why Does the President Seek Out Controversy?

In the last ten days, the situation in Puerto Rico has continued to degenerate into a full blown humanitarian crisis, the escalating war of words has continued with North Korea, and the president has chosen to use his public platform to talk about football players.

The goals and propriety of the silent protests by those players have been defended thoroughly and eloquently by a number of authors of color and I can add nothing of substance to their arguments, which are in my view unanswerable. Instead, I am using this space to express my exasperation with the Official Opinion of the political establishment that it is politically harmful to the president for him to court this sort of controversy.

President Trump has in this respect governed largely as he campaigned. His regular provocations come with a number of advantages for him, including the ability to control the content of the news cycle and consolidate his support. His pronouncements, whether they concern NFL players, his Democratic opposition, the Republican establishment, the Russia investigation, the 2016 election and his performance therein, or the news media, all have one thing in common - they are popular with the irreverent coalition of Republican voters who supported him most passionately. The fact that what he says is shocking and scandalous to the political establishment only serves to deepen their support, because they voted for him specifically to make that establishment uncomfortable.

The inexorable political logic of the current GOP is that, due to the combination of redistricting and the shifting political geography of the country, the overwhelming majority of Republican members of Congress have more to fear from their primaries than a general election. Given that the Republicans currently have a strong hold on most state governments as well as the Congress and presidency, that means that a majority of the Republican primary electorate is effectively running the country.

Trump is aware of that, as he is aware that he is much more popular with that segment of the populace than any other elected Republican. If he is to win the internal struggle for control of the party, he must maintain that popularity. With his presidency already chock full of reversals in the courts and defeats in the legislature - not to mention the cloud of investigation still hanging over his narrow victory in November - he needs to maintain his base to stay relevant.

It will be noticed that the moments that Trump chooses to pick loud, divisive fights are frequently those times when he has just suffered some embarrassment that he would very much like to avoid discussing. Last week the Senate failed, for the third time this year, to pass a bill repealing the Affordable Care Act. Soon thereafter the president unloaded on the NFL. The Secretary of Health and Human Services, Tom Price, resigned yesterday following revelations in the press that he used private jets to travel at taxpayer expense. This morning, the president decided to attack the mayor of San Juan in strongly personal terms when she criticized the administration's still-sluggish response to Hurricane Maria.

When Trump is confronted with situations that may incur the general disapproval of his base, he moves quickly to re-frame the issue on a partisan basis, or when that fails simply changing the subject to a partisan issue. Doing so makes it easy for his supporters to go back into their accustomed corners and attack familiar enemies, and in the process cements their bond with Trump himself. For that reason, such a re-framing increases his control over the party, as failure to defend whatever the president has said is cast among the faithful as a betrayal. The cumulative effect is to condition the base to view any criticism of Trump as inherently political and therefore suspect.The political difficulties of Senators Dean Heller and Jeff Flake are cases-in-point.

The frequency with which the president renews this cycle - scandalous statement/denial of the issue/fingerpointing/entrenchment - suggests that whether or not he is aware of the mechanism he understands that it is, from his point of view, effective. The fact that so many seasoned political observers seem to misread the actual effect it has is more perplexing. Until his opponents stop chasing him around the news cycle, they will continue to fail to break through with the general public. Such a breakthrough requires a consistent, unified message, and the discipline to keep delivering it in spite of intrusions from the issue of the week. Running around screaming about the Many Inanities of Donald J. Trump will not suffice.

A Political Argument for Single-Payer

Recently, Senator Bernie Sanders returned to what he does best - making a ruckus. This time, it came in the guise of his sponsoring a bill to create a Medicare-for-all single-payer healthcare system. In a triumph for Senator Sanders, the bill has 16 co-sponsors in the Senate, including potential presidential candidates Kamala Harris of California, Cory Booker of New Jersey, and Kirsten Gillibrand of New York. Its surprisingly wide backing, however, has made it that much more of a flashpoint among Democrats, who are sharply divided on the measure. 

Supporters say it is the logical outcome of the Democratic Party's philosophical statements on healthcare. Those who oppose it do so mostly on political grounds, saying the vast expansion of the role of the state in healthcare would hand Republicans a cudgel with which to hit Democrats in the coming midterm elections. Others point to the herculean effort required to acieve the Affordable Care Act and think it unwise to abandon the only successful attempt to reform health coverage in 50 years. A few Democrats (Joe Manchin comes immediately to mind) have actual philosophical issues with the concept of a single-payer plan, but they are not only a small but also a rapidly decreasing minority in the party, so I will simply note their existence and move on.

The merit of a single-payer health insurance system relative to the current one is a long subject in itself and one I intend to treat in the future. For the moment, I will focus on effectively addressing the political argument against advocating for it.

The first and most obvious counterargument is that the Republicans will accuse the Democrats of wanting "government-run healthcare" or "a government takeover" of healthcare regardless of whether the plan for which they advocate is single-payer or not. The GOP invoked that overheated rhetoric against what was a fundamentally conservative solution to the coverage problem in the Affordable Care Act. That party has fully subordinated its policy notions to political and ideological considerations. Under such circumstances, there is no logic at all to a position that claims a single-payer system is the correct policy but that one shouldn't advocate for it. 

If there was a plausible expectation that the Republicans could be brought to the table on some necessary patches in the Affordable Care Act and thereby set a precedent for cooperative improvements in the healthcare system, the argument against proposing single-payer, which might then put political pressure on otherwise willing partners to withdraw from talks, would have some force. But it took them eight years to develop a health policy more complicated than the word "no," and when they finally did so their abject surrender to political considerations made the bill itself so destructive and incoherent there weren't even enough Republicans willing to enact it. In spite of that colossal and embarrassing failure, they have persisted in the purely partisan attempt at repealing the ACA entirely instead of searching for middle ground.

If, at this late juncture, they have yet to accept the framework of the ACA as the basis for marginal improvements, then the Democratic Party has no reason to throw a sop to insurance companies by propping up the current system. The whole point of the ACA from a political point of view was to build consensus by keeping private insurance, but arranging the markets in such a way as to address the defect of insufficient coverage. But if such marginal improvements in the system of private insurance are too much for Republicans to stomach, why bother with private insurance at all, when our principles tell us that adequate health care ought to be a human right rather than a privilege?

Indeed, if the Republicans are determined to assault Democrats on the healthcare issue as power mad bureaucrats taking over the system, then single-payer is the only option that makes sense for them politically. Activists will applaud the party for taking a moral stand on the issue, and simply by hearing the issue debated openly instead of dismissed in hushed tones the public will become used to the idea. Taking the position would not only unify and energize much of the Democratic Party, but it would prepare the ground for the actual realization of a policy the vast majority of Democrats admit in private is the one they want.

The Republican Civil War

In recent weeks, it has become clear that the ongoing power struggle between the Republican and Democratic Parties is no longer the most important political conflict in the country. While the Democrats have a sufficient minority in the Senate to prevent it from doing much of anything, their ability to make policy is crippled by their lack of control of any branch of the national government and abject humiliation in state governments. They are therefore relegated to an important but secondary role until such a time as they can increase their electoral presence - or as we shall see, unless the president chooses to use them to bend the GOP to this will. Instead, the conflict that will have the most immediate bearing on the remainder of President Trump's current term of office is the ongoing civil war within the Republican Party.

Tensions, which have been evident since the days of the primary campaign, boiled over this week when Trump shocked his party by agreeing to a Democratic proposal to tie a temporary raise in the debt ceiling to hurricane relief. His doing so compromised the entire Republican negotiating position both now and in December, and congressional Republicans were correspondingly shocked and angry. One reporter noted that Republican staffers he spoke to used the "full range of expletives" to describe the deal.

Trump's move seems random and erratic, and certainly blows up the tidy partisan loyalties to which one expects adherence in modern Washington. It is, however, only a reflection on the fact that Trump is not and never has been a Republican in the traditional sense, and ultimately either he or the party establishment will have to assert control over the apparatus of that party. Republicans look at this deal and see a total capitulation, but that characterization is only true if one assumes that Trump values what he has given up relative to what he has gotten in return.

What he got, in terms of Republican policy, was less than nothing. But what he got in terms of his own prestige was a spat of flattering coverage that presented him, for the first time since his inauguration, in a bipartisan light. Arcane budgetary issues like the debt ceiling, and the sort of concessions that Democrats will wrest from Republicans in exchange for a raise later on, do not interest him. He was hungry for an accomplishment after months of sustained disappointment, and can now claim that he averted a messy partisan showdown over a disaster relief bill.

On a broader scale, I have gotten the distinct impression that the firing of Reince Priebus as Chief of Staff and his replacement with John Kelly has lulled the Republican establishment into a false sense of security with respect to Trump. The later ousting of extreme right wing voices like Steve Bannon and Sebastian Gorka seemed to encourage the Party in its persistent delusion that it can harness and control Trump to its own ends. Trump is a man accustomed to getting his way, and his core attitudes are much closer to the Bannons of the world than the Kellys and Paul Ryans. If Trump should find the Republican Party as it exists an unsuitable vehicle for his ambitions, he will attempt to bend it to his will and do as he pleases in the meantime.

The cold fact of the matter is that the party lacks any effective means of controlling Trump, while the electoral threat to anti-Trump Republicans is very real. Already, two of the president's most outspoken Republican critics in the Senate - Jeff Flake of Arizona and Dean Heller of Nevada - face primary challengers for 2018 who are explicitly pro-Trump, and have made the president their central campaign issue. Both sitting Senators trail in their respective primaries according to early public polling.

Such challengers to anti-Trump Republicans are likely to succeed in general. In a staggering finding, a recent NBC/WSJ poll found that 98% of Trump primary voters still back him, and this group is in itself a majority of the Republican primary electorate. These Republicans may see themselves as making a bold stand for a more inclusive, 21st century conservatism, but they will find to their sorrow that the base they have cultivated does not agree. Republican voters overwhelmingly blame the congress and not the president for the failure of his early initiatives, a notion which the president has endorsed explicitly and repeatedly.

It may take some time for the effect to be felt, but I believe that Republican resistance to Trump himself, or at bare minimum to Trump-style politics and policies, is doomed. In the absurdly gerrymandered world they created after the electoral bloodbath of 2010, a bare majority of the primary electorate rules the Republican Party and with it - at least for the moment - the country. The Republicans did not foresee that the weapons they used to secure their own power would enslave them to a base that sided with them less because of policy agreement than because of shared cultural fears. The same NBC poll cited earlier found that more than 60% of Trump primary voters said they were threatened by social changes in recent decades - among those who voted for other GOP primary candidates the number was half that.

The data make it very clear that the rank and file voters in the Republican Party side firmly with the president over the Congress and party establishment. The more that individual members of Congress defy him, the more at risk they themselves will be in primary elections. Should the challenges to Heller and/or Flake be successful, even the threat of a similar fate may encourage existing Senators to fall in line or step aside for someone more reliable from the point of view of the president. He has already made it abundantly clear that he has no qualms at all with targeting members of the party he ostensibly heads.

The reason for that is because Trump does not have any attachment or commitment to that party in itself. Donald Trump wants prestige and control. Should he perceive that the Republican leadership are failing to further that goal, he will work with the Democrats if he thinks, as he did in this case, that they will be more useful. But he will also do whatever is in his power to support people within the GOP who support him, and use his large base to do so. That base ultimately, in my view, guarantees his victory. What becomes of the Republican Party in that event I don't pretend to foresee.