Discussion Topic #7 - Thinking About the Trump Presidency and Biden's First Year

71 DOI: 10.1111/psq.12702

© 2021 Center for the Study of the Presidency and Congress Presidential Studies Quarterly Vol. 51, No. 1, March 2021, 71–95

ARTICLE

The Random Walk Presidency

KENNETH R. MAYER

Donald Trump’s erratic and unpredictable behavior as president was, metaphorically at least, a Random Walk. Combined with an inexperienced White House staff and a near total absence of any meaningful decision- making processes, the result was, routinely, unforced errors that both impeded the president’s ability to see his policy goals implemented effectively, led to poor congressional relations and, in several key cases, failures of leadership that played a role in his defeat in the 2020 election. The worst policy outcome was his catastrophic response to the COVID- 19 pandemic, which laid bare the pathologies of poor decision- making processes. As president, Trump’s record exposed institutional weaknesses that a more skilled populist or authoritarian successor may be able to exploit.

Keywords: Donald Trump, Executive Office of the President, norms, presidency

It is a cliché to note that Donald Trump’s presidency was unique: unprecedented in his disdain for the expectations of presidential behavior (Azari 2019), the many norms bro- ken (Siegel 2018), the refusal to recognize the authority of the other coequal branches of government (Crouch, Rozell, and Sollenberger 2017), his unconventional communica- tion style (Hart 2020), attacks on the press (Meeks 2020), obliteration of barriers between government functions and his personal and political interests (Bauer and Goldsmith 2020), and the number of misleading statements, lies, and outright whoppers he told throughout his tenure (Pfiffner 2020).1

My focus is on a more specific characteristic of his presidency: his erratic and unpre- dictable behavior, especially his inconsistent policy positions that often changed from one day to the next without any reason or explanation, and a lack of any meaningful process or coordination within the White House. The conventional wisdom about what presi- dents should do to succeed in office has become so conventional as to be obvious: establish priorities, create an effective White House staff structure, stay on message, cultivate

1. The Washington Post fact checker identified 22,510 “false or misleading” claims through September 3, 2020, an average of about 17 per day. https://www.washi ngton post.com/graph ics/polit ics/trump - claim s- datab ase/?utm_term=.27bab cd5e5 8c&itid=lk_inline_manual_2&itid=lk_inline_manual_2.

Kenneth R. Mayer is professor of Political Science at the University of Wisconsin- Madison. He is the author of With the Stroke of a Pen: Executive Orders and Presidential Power and coauthor of Presidential Leadership: Politics and Policymaking.

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credibility, and devote time to follow- through and implementation. Trump has adhered to none of them. Trump did show consistency in some policy realms, such as hostility to immigration2 and support for deregulation (Belton and Graham 2020; Brookings Institution 2020). But even here, poor staff work and a lack of coordination and process produced unforced errors that impeded his ability to institute his policy preferences.

The expectations of presidential behavior, the conventional wisdom about how presidents should operate, and the presidential institution exist for a reason: adhering to those expectations and processes gives the president the best chance of succeeding in of- fice. Being “presidential” is no guarantee of success, of course, and some presidents inten- tionally redefined the meaning of that term. But Trump’s radical departure from what presidents have typically done undermined his ability to accomplish many of his policy goals, and his reliance on unilateral action produced an unusually high loss rate in federal courts and a record of few legislative accomplishments. He could not stay “on message” and continually diverted attention from the policy successes he achieved. He repeatedly made public statements or gave interviews that blindsided his staff, and pushed out

2. Trump issued 9 executive orders and 18 proclamations on immigration or border security: 13767, “Border Security and Immigration Enforcement Improvements,” 82 Federal Register 8793 (January 30, 2017); 13768, “Enhancing Public Safety in the Interior of the United States”; 82 Federal Register 1799 (January 30, 2017); 13769, “Protecting the Nation from Foreign Terrorist Entry Into the United States,” 82 Federal Register 8977 (February 1, 2017); 13780, “Protecting the Nation from Foreign Terrorist Entry Into the United States”; 82 Federal Register 13209 (March 9, 2017); 13815, “Resuming the United States Refugee Admissions Program with Enhanced Vetting Capabilities,” 82 Federal Register 5055 (October 27, 2017); 13867, “Issuance of Permits with Respect to Facilities and Land Transportation Crossings at the International Boundaries of the United States,” 84 Federal Register 15491 (April 15, 2019); 13882, “Blocking Property and Suspending Entry of Certain Persons Contributing to the Situation in Mali,” 84 Federal Register 37055; 13888, “Enhancing State and Local Involvement in Refugee Resettlement,” 84 Federal Register 52355 (October 1, 2019); 13894, “Blocking Property and Suspending Entry of Certain Persons Contributing to the Situation in Syria,” 84 Federal Register 55851 (October 17, 2019); Proclamation 9645, “Enhancing Vetting Capabilities and Processes for Detecting Attempted Entry into the United States by Terrorists or Other Public- Safety Threats,” 82 Federal Register 45161; 9822, “Addressing the Mass Migration through the Southern Border of the United States,” 83 Federal Register 57661 (October 15, 2018); 9842, “Addressing Mass Migration through the Southern Border of the United States,” 84 Federal Register 3655 (February 12, 2019); 9844, “Declaring a National Emergency Concerning the Southern Border of the United States,” 84 Federal Register 44 (February 20, 2019); 9880, “Addressing Mass Migration through the Southern Border of the United States,” 84 Federal Register 21229 (May 8, 2019); 9931, “Suspension of Entry as Immigrants and Nonimmigrants of Persons Responsible for Policies or Actions That Threaten Venezuela’s Democratic Institutions,” 84 Federal Register 51931 (September 30, 2019); 9932, “Suspension of Entry as Immigrants and Nonimmigrants of Senior Officials of the Government of Iran,” 84 Federal Register 51395 (September 30, 2019); 9945, “Suspension of Entry of Immigrants Who Will Financially Burden the United States Healthcare System, in Order to Protect the Availability of Healthcare Benefits for Americans,” 84 Federal Register 53991 (October 9, 2019); 9983, “Improving Enhanced Vetting Capabilities and Processes for Detecting Attempted Entry Into the United States by Terrorists or Other Public- Safety Threats,” 85 Federal Register 6699 (February 5, 2020); 9984, “Suspension of Entry as Immigrants and Nonimmigrants of Persons Who Pose a Risk of Transmitting 2019 Novel Coronavirus and Other Appropriate Measures to Address This Risk,” 85 Federal Register 6709 (February 5, 2020); 9992, 9993, 9996, and 10041, “Suspension of Entry as Immigrants and Nonimmigrants of Certain Additional Persons Who Pose a Risk of Transmitting 2019 Novel Coronavirus,” 85 Federal Register 12855 (March 4, 2020), 85 Federal Register 15045 (October 16, 2020), 85 Federal Register 15341 (March 18, 2020), and 85 Federal Register 32291 (May 25, 2020); 10014 and 10052, “Suspension of Entry of Immigrants Who Present a Risk to the United States Labor Market during the Recovery Following the 2019 Novel Coronavirus Outbreak,” 85 Federal Register 23441 (April 27, 2020) and 85 Federal Register 38263 (June 25, 2020); and 10043, “Suspension of Entry as Nonimmigrants of Certain Students and Researchers from the People’s Republic of China,” 85 Federal Register 34353 (June 4, 2020).

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anyone who attempted to impose structure or discipline within the White House.3 More importantly, this style led to multiple failures, culminating in what can only be described as a catastrophically inept response to the COVID- 19 pandemic, a failure that resulted in hundreds of thousands of deaths and the worst economic performance since the Great Depression. It almost certainly was a major factor in his loss to Joe Biden in the 2020 presidential election (Parker et al. 2020).

Donald Trump presided over a random walk presidency. Formally, a random walk is a stochastic process consisting of a series of random

moves across some defined space, where a “step” in that space between time t and time t + 1 is a function of some transition (often a random distribution with a specified mean and variance).4 More simply, a random walk describes a process where the state of nature at time t time does not tell you much about what is going to happen at time t  +  1. Metaphorically, it describes how Donald Trump has behaved as president and captures the unpredictability and inconsistency of his policies, White House organization, and bar- gaining style. An important mathematical and metaphorical property of random walks is that they can progress to a specific point or region in space, though nobody can be quite sure where that will be or how long it will take to get there. Here, I use it to capture both Trump’s unpredictability as president as well as the general chaos and disorganization of his approach to the office.

Chaos as an Operating Principle

During the 2016 primaries, former Florida Governor Jeb Bush said Trump was a “chaos candidate. And he’d be a chaos president” (Smith 2015). One analysis of his cam- paign rhetoric identified nearly 150 contradictory positions Trump had taken on dozens of high- profile issues, including 23 different positions on immigration enforcement, 15 differ- ent positions on banning Muslim entry into the United States, eight different positions on raising the minimum wage, eight different positions on the deficit and national debt, and so on (Timm 2016). Mixed in with these contradictory statements were claims of campaign officials who insisted, blithely and falsely, that Trump’s positions had never wavered (even as they offered different explanations about what those positions actually were).

This behavior continued into the transition, when only days after the election he summarily tossed out months of work by Chris Christie and turned the transition over to son- in- law Jared Kushner and Vice President Mike Pence (Lewis, Bernhard, and You

3. A canonical example is the recorded interviews Trump did with Bob Woodward, which were re- leased in September 2020. Although the president had repeatedly declared that COVID- 19 was under con- trol, was not dangerous, and would soon go away “like a miracle” (Paz 2020), he told Woodward in April that he knew it was far deadlier than the flu and spread through the air and that he was deliberately “playing it down” (Woodward 2020, 285– 86). White House staff had discouraged the president from agreeing to inter- views with Woodward, and the book’s publication (along with recordings of the president’s interviews) “sent the White House scrambling, with aides blaming each other for the predictable fallout” (Cook and Thompson 2020).

4. A famous example is Malkel (2012, 142– 43), who generated fictitious graphs of stock prices by increasing or decreasing a hypothetical stock’s value by a set amount up or down, depending on a series of coin flips.

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2018, 485). The transition team did not engage with the outgoing administration, often not even sending anyone to meet with agency personnel who had prepared extensive briefing material (Lewis 2018).

Trump’s original West Wing arrangements— rival power centers, no clear organiza- tional structures or lines of authority, reliance on family as advisors, demanding absolute loyalty over even minimal competence, inexperienced high- level staff— proved ineffec- tive, an entirely predictable result (Warshaw 2017). Many of Trump’s most influential aides quite clearly had no idea what they were doing, and the new staff was immediately overwhelmed and “served the president poorly … illustrated by the president’s bizarre speeches to the Central Intelligence Agency and the Boy Scouts, rollout of the travel ban, and the unparalleled leaks and infighting” (Lewis, Bernhard, and You 2018, 486).

In failing to create “an internal structural capacity inside the White House to eval- uate and craft coherent policy,” which is “what all modern presidents have done" (Howell and Moe 2020, 86), Trump ensured that his presidency would not be governed by any process. “The result,” they continue,

is an organizational disaster. The Trump White House lacks the capacity for marshalling information, resources, and expertise to promote the president’s policy objectives in an ef- fective way. Worse, it is filled with people who cannot keep their jobs unless they act as sycophants, put a positive spin on Trump’s every failure, tell him how wonderful he is, and affirm and justify his blatant lying on important issues as they go about their work. (2020, 88)

A few years into his administration, Noonan (2018) observed, “[he] loves chaos— he brags about this— but it isn’t strategic chaos in pursuit of ends, it’s purposeless disorder for the fun of it. We are not talking about being colorfully, craftily unpredictable, as political masters like FDR and Ronald Reagan sometimes were, but something more unfortunate, an unhinged or not- fully hinged quality that feels like screwball tragedy.”

Both a cause and consequence of Trump’s chaotic management style was record White House staff turnover, with 91% of his “A- Team” (defined as the most influential positions within the Executive Office of the President) turning over at least once, and nearly 40% of key positions cycling through multiple replacements: Trump had four chiefs of staff, five deputy chiefs of staff, four press secretaries; six communications direc- tors, four national security advisors, six deputy national security advisors, five national security senior directors for Europe and Russia, and five directors of national intelligence (Tenpas 2020). Dickenson and Tenpas noted that “[r]apid staff turnover leads to a loss of institutional memory within the presidential branch, and makes it more difficult for presidential aides to communicate with their senior counterparts in federal departments and agencies” (2002, 445).

I take as a given that, other things being equal, policy consistency is an import- ant component of competent and effective government. In the ideal, consistency and predictability enhance the credibility of government action and commitments, provide the public with vital information about government performance, and make it possible to understand what the government is actually trying to do. Presidents have long made efforts to be consistent in their positions and statements. The reason is obvious enough:

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consistency leads to credibility, confidence among those bargaining with the president that commitments will be honored, and better opportunities to craft public narratives in support of the president’s positions. Abrupt reversals, or failure to follow through on expressed commitments, often lead to bad outcomes, particularly internationally, as for- eign adversaries may seek leverage or exploit opportunities resulting from uncertainty. The costs of the president’s inconsistent statements on foreign policy are apparent: “Even if American foreign policy during the Trump administration remains consistent and co- herent in action, if not in rhetoric, the United States has already paid a significant price for Trump’s behavior: the president is no longer considered the ultimate voice on foreign policy. Foreign leaders are turning elsewhere to gauge American intentions” (Yahri- Milo 2018, 77).

Staying “on message” explicitly denotes a continuity of communications revolving around a focused narrative. A president will not always act in a completely consistent way or have fixed policy preferences that never change. But there is an underlying assumption that changes, when they occur, will result from an intentional act based on new informa- tion, a strategic decision based on what is feasible, anticipated reactions among other key actors, an attempt to reach a compromise, or an attempt to reconcile contradictory goals (see Neustadt 1990; Peterson 1990).

Neustadt devotes much of his analysis of presidential reputation to a months long sequence of Eisenhower administration inconsistencies over the course of developing the 1958 budget— lurching from one emphasis to another, changing positions on key issues, conflicting public statements, uncoordinated explanations from different cabinet offi- cials— to the point that when a budget official testifying before Congress referred to “the program of the President,” everyone in the room laughed (Neustadt 1990, 68).

Lewis describes the effect of reversals and inconsistencies: “When the national gov- ernment reverses course, particularly when it does so in a punitive way (i.e., targeting specific partners using administrative power) as it has done with sanctuary cities and di- saster relief, it demonstrates a harmful inconstancy that makes essential stakeholders re- luctant to follow a national lead or cooperate on important shared goals” (2019, 783). Similarly, when official pronouncements and presidential statements are untethered to any ground truth, the only real possibilities are either (a) the public quickly learns that such statements are not to be trusted, leaving a leadership vacuum in which other officials must compete for credibility, or (b) the public accepts the lies as true, setting up a poten- tially dangerous situation when the lies collide with reality (if they actually do).5

For Trump, careening wildly has been the order of the day. One need not look far for examples. He publicly criticized intelligence legislation that his congressional liaison office was trying to push through Congress (only to walk back his criticism a few hours later), and expressed support for immigration legislation in meetings with congressional leaders, only to have House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R- CA) gently remind the president that what he just said contradicted his public position (Graham 2018). He expressed support for strong gun control regulations, only to reverse himself days later

5. It is not accidental that trust in government institutions began its slow but steady decline after Watergate and the realities of the Vietnam War. See Arendt (1971) and Lipset and Schneider (1983).

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(Dawsey 2019). He vacillated from threatening Kim Jong Un with “fire and fury and frankly power, the likes of which this world has never seen before” (Wagner and Johnson 2017) to declaring that the two of them “fell in love” (Rucker and Dawsey 2019). The president’s priorities often depended more on what he saw any given morning on Fox and Friends than on long- term goals (Gertz 2018), to the point that staff and even Cabinet officials arranged appearances on the network to try to influence the president’s thinking (Gearan and Ellison 2018).

Consider the following instances, which I present as illustrative of an overall pattern of unpredictability and incoherence.

First, in October 2020, at a crucial time in his reelection campaign, the president was trying to push a second economic stimulus package through Congress. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D- CA) and Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin, the latter acting as the president’s agent, were negotiating the terms of legislation. They faced the compli- cated task of threading a needle between Democrats, who wanted a large bill, conserva- tive House Republicans, who wanted a small package, and Senate Republicans, many of whom were open to something close to what the Democrats had passed in the House, but differed on key components, such as how much financial assistance the federal govern- ment would offer to state and local governments. The Pelosi– Mnuchin talks began after House and Senate negotiators could not reach agreement over the summer. The two sides were about $600 billion apart, after House Democrats passed a $2.2 trillion bill (scaled back from a $3.4 trillion bill passed in the House in May), and the White House had proposed $1.6 trillion (Werner and Stein 2020a).

This was a strategic situation that would have typically called for aggressive presi- dential legislative engagement. Instead, what happened was the following:

1. On October 3, the president tweeted, “OUR GREAT USA WANTS & NEEDS STIMULUS, WORK TOGETHER AND GET IT DONE. Thank You.”6 Pelosi expressed confidence that a deal was near, in part because administration officials were supportive (Werner and Stein 2020b).

2. Three days later (October 6), the president broke off the talks, tweeting that he had “instructed my representatives to stop negotiating until after the election” (Werner and Stein 2020c). Within minutes, the S&P 500 index dropped by 2%. The decision, baf- fling as it was, seemed to make his goal even less likely by preventing even a short- term economic boost.

3. A few hours later, the president reversed course again, tweeting that he supported a relief bill with $1,200 stimulus checks, airline relief aid, and additional funding for the Paycheck Protection Program. “I am ready to sign right now. Are you listening Nancy?”7

4. Two days later (October 9), the president’s position changed again. In the morning, he tweeted, “Covid Relief Negotiations are moving along. Go Big!”8 A few hours later, he told Rush Limbaugh on- air that “I would like to see a bigger stimulus package, frankly, than either the Democrats or the Republicans are offering” (Stein, Werner, and Dawsey

6. https://twitt er.com/realD onald Trump/ statu s/13124 49034 15450 4192. 7. https://twitt er.com/realD onald Trump/ statu s/13135 51794 62312 7552; https://twitt er.com/realD

onald Trump/ statu s/13136 58825 04037 1712; https://twitt er.com/realD onald Trump/ statu s/13136 64886 64858 2144.

8. https://twitt er.com/realD onald Trump/ statu s/13145 93632 73384 7552.

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2020). The White House communications director immediately contradicted the presi- dent’s statement to Limbaugh, telling reporters than any deal had to be below $2 trillion (Wasson and Jacobs 2020).

5. Later in the day on October 9, Mnuchin proposed a $1.8 trillion package, in between the initial $1.6 trillion Republican proposal and the $2.2 trillion plan the Democratic House had passed. Democrats panned the White House offer as too small, while many Senate Republicans opposed it as extravagant (Cochrane 2020).

6. A day later, the White House changed positions again, suggesting legislation allowing the president to use $130 billion in leftover Paycheck Protection Program money “while negotiations continue on a broader relief effort” (Stein and Werner 2020).

Within a week, the president’s public position on stimulus negotiations went from insist- ing on a bill, ending negotiations, support for a narrow bill, support for something bigger than either Democrats or Republicans had proposed, support for something in between what Democrats and Republicans had proposed, and then a narrow stand- alone bill with continued negotiations.

The inconsistencies continued throughout October. Even though the House ad- journed on October 2 until after the election, Mnuchin and Pelosi continued to negotiate in the face of Republican objections that the treasury secretary was caving to Democratic demands (Werner and Stein 2020d). On October 21, a Pelosi spokesperson said the two were “close to putting ‘pen to paper’ on legislation” (Werner and Kim 2020). Less than 90  minutes later, the president tweeted that Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer were focused on “BAILING OUT poorly run (and high crime) Democrat cities and states” rather than “doing what is right for our great American workers, or our won- derful USA itself, on Stimulus.”9

In late October the president pivoted again, promising “the best stimulus pack- age you’ve ever seen” after the election (Werner 2020). Two days after that, the Pelosi– Mnuchin talks ended altogether, but Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell had already warned against reaching any agreement with House Democrats, as consider- ation of stimulus legislation would interfere with confirmation hearings for Amy Coney Barrett, Trump’s nomination for the Supreme Court seat left when Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died (Stein and Werner 2020).

While the sequence could easily be chalked up to the president’s well- known pen- chant for inchoate operating strategies (if it could even be called that), the result was a substantive failure of presidential leadership. The rapidly changing and contradictory positions, and what appeared to be a complete lack of coordination with either Senate Republicans or the person negotiating on the president’s behalf, were not based on any strategy, and the result was simultaneously no deal, economic uncertainty, and open Republican exasperation with the president at a critical time in his campaign. Turning down the opportunity to enact a new stimulus package “may go down as the single great- est political blunder in the history of presidential elections” (Chait 2020).

Second, the ill- fated government shutdown from December 22, 2018, to January 25, 2019, played out in a similar fashion. The president was adamant that the fiscal year

9. https://twitt er.com/realD onald Trump/ statu s/13190 28569 15094 3232.

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2019 budget include funding for wall construction on the U.S.– Mexican border (Cochrane and Davis 2018). It was a tenuous situation, as Congress had already relied on two con- tinuing resolutions (CRs) to fund most federal government activities, first through December 7, 2018,10 and again through December 21, 2018.11 None of the enacted ap- propriations acts or CRs funded the border wall, and because Democratic senators could filibuster continuing resolutions, Republicans could not enact one over unanimous Democratic opposition.

A series of meetings between the president and legislators failed to produce a deal, with conservative House Republicans pressing Trump to not give in on his demand for at least $5 billion in border wall funding even as Senate Republicans were pressing for a compromise (Everett and Breshanan 2018). Negotiations were more difficult because the president would not specify what he would accept, despite the pleas of Republican senators for clarity. In meetings, the president was more interested in eliminating the filibuster than in finding a workable position (Davis and Cochrane 2018). Once the shut- down began on December 22, the president focused on placing blame on congressional Democrats.

On January 4, 2019, Trump told congressional Democrats that he would keep the government closed “for a very long period of time— months or even years,” though his support in Congress was weakening and more Republican legislators were looking for a way out (Stolberg and Tackett 2019). Polls showed that the public placed more blame on Republicans than on Democrats.12 A poorly received Oval Office address on January 8 did nothing to improve his public standing, and his approval ratings dropped to a net −16 points.13 Trump eventually agreed to sign spending bills with the same funding levels for border security that had been proposed prior to the shutdown; in the end, he achieved nothing, and even backed away from previous rhetoric that promised a physical wall along the entire border (Fandos, Stolberg, and Baker 2019).

Trump eventually declared a national emergency in February,14 claiming the au- thority to reprogram military construction funds toward wall construction. The step prompted passage of two separate congressional resolutions terminating the emergency, one in March 2019 and one in September 2019.15 Trump vetoed both, and Congress failed to override. When the Defense Department announced in September 2019 the details of military construction funding that would be diverted to wall construction

10. H.R. 6157, signed by the president on September 28, 2018, included appropriations for the Department of Defense and Department of Health and Human Services, along with a continuing resolution for other agencies not already funded through appropriations acts (P.L. 115- 245).

11. H.J. Res. 143, enacted on December 7, 2018, extended the earlier continuing resolution to December 21 (P.L. 115- 298).

12. In a January 14, 2019, Quinnipiac poll, respondents placed more responsibility for the shutdown on Republicans than on Democrats (56% vs. 36%), and a solid majority opposed building a wall on the U.S.– Mexican border (55% vs. 43%). https://poll.qu.edu/natio nal/relea se- detai l?Relea seID=2592.

13. FiveThirtyEight’s composite measure estimated his popularity shifted from roughly 42% ap- prove/52% disapprove the week before the shutdown (net −10) to 40%/56% (net −16) immediately after the shutdown ended. https://proje cts.fivet hirty eight.com/trump - appro val- ratin gs/.

14. Proclamation 9844, “Declaring a National Emergency Concerning the Southern Border of the United States,” 84 Federal Register 44 (February 20, 2019).

15. H.J. Res. 46 and S.J. Res. 54.

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(involving 128 military construction projects), the Sierra Club and a group of states ob- tained a district court decision prohibiting the transfers because they violated the Administrative Procedure Act and were not consistent with the laws authorizing use of emergency funding, although the judge immediately issued a stay of his own order pend- ing appeals. The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the district court decision in October 2020, once again placing a hold on wall construction,16 and the Supreme Court granted certiorari.17

In one sense, it was a victory for the president: a case of unilateral action taken over the repeated and explicit objections of Congress, which has so far not been permanently overturned by the courts (although the tangle of litigation and multiple lawsuits is not yet resolved). But the effect of relying on an emergency declaration and funding shifted from other accounts has hurt military readiness (by delaying projects already funded), raised costs, slowed the pace of construction, mobilized opposition, and may result in a definitive Supreme Court decision against his action. It was also an “extraordinary viola- tion of constitutional norms— setting a precedent that future presidents of both parties may emulate to unilaterally achieve their own goals” (Savage 2019). With the entire ef- fort contingent on the president’s emergency declaration, moreover, President Biden can revoke the authorities and bring the project to an end.

Such notoriously and often wildly inconsistent positions on legislation moving through Congress led Bond (2019) to question the reliability of CQ Presidential Success Scores (in which Trump’s first- year success rate was 100% for the House and 98% for the Senate). After analyzing the difficulties of figuring out what constituted a clear pres- idential statement of support or opposition with Trump— which often took the form of tweets— Bond concludes:

The greater and immediate threat to the study of presidential support and success on roll- call votes, however, is a president whose erratic behavior is neither valid nor reliable. With such a large number of false statements and statements that contradict earlier positions, how can members of Congress or presidency scholars know with confidence what the president actually wants in the way of legislative action? (2019, 166)

Third, another problem is that it was often unclear what, precisely, constituted a presi- dential statement or order.18 Is a tweet— Trump’s preferred mode of communication— an official statement that has the authority of the presidency behind it? Or is it a one- off, a type of “oh, by the way” presidential comment that chiefs of staff have historically worked so hard to discourage?19 In October 2020, Trump tweeted that he had “fully authorized

16. Sierra Club et al. v. Donald J. Trump et al., No. 4:19- cv- 00892- HSG (9th Cir.), October 9, 2020. 17. Other federal courts had declined to block the administration’s actions. The 5th Circuit rejected

a legal challenge to the use of military funds for the border wall, overturning a lower court decision prohib- iting the transfers. El Paso County et al. v. Donald J. Trump et al., No. 19- 51144 (5th Cir.), January 8, 2020.

18. Even the federal courts have struggled with this. Mannheim and Watts note an unprecedented amount of litigation aimed at the president himself (rather than at agencies after regulatory action), and find “some of the fiercest legal battles have concerned, in essence, whether the order in question is legally binding or instead has no legal effect” (2019, 1785).

19. James Baker, Reagan’s first chief of staff, called these “‘oh, by the way’ decisions, where commit- ments are made without sufficient staffing or thoughtful consideration” (Cohen et al. 2009, 21).

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the total Declassification [sic] of any & all documents” related to the Mueller investiga- tion and Clinton emails.20 Justice Department attorneys explained in court filings that the tweet did not actually declassify anything, and that even if it did, there was nothing actually classified in the materials the president referred to.21

On July 26, 2017, the president issued three consecutive tweets consisting of the following text:

After consultation with my Generals and military experts, please be advised that the United States Government will not accept or allow… Transgender individuals to serve in any capac- ity in the U.S. military. Our military must be focused on decisive and overwhelming… victory and cannot be burdened with the tremendous medical costs and disruption that transgender in the military would entail. Thank you.22

Trump’s tweets seemed to reverse an Obama- era policy from June 2016 allowing transgen- der troops to serve (Office of the Secretary of Defense 2016). Why the president chose that moment to tweet is unclear, although press reports suggested that Trump made the announcement to assuage some congressional Republicans who were threatening to hold up a defense spending bill unless it included language banning the Pentagon from paying for sex- reassignment surgery for transgender troops (Bade and Dawsey 2017).

But was this an official statement of policy? An instruction? An order? Did it have any legal effect or impose any obligations on Department of Defense or military officials? Pentagon officials and military leaders thought not— the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff said that the military would not alter policy based on the tweets and would wait for a formal memorandum before taking any steps (Bender and Klimas 2017). Defense Secretary James Mattis was reported to be “appalled” that the president announced his decision in a tweet (Davis and Cooper 2017). According to Harvard Law School professor Jeannie Suk Gersen, “A tweet by a President is neither a law nor an executive order.… Trump’s tweet seemingly banning transgender people from military service has the same legal efficacy as his myriad other tweets expressing desires, promises, intentions, many of which are unlikely to come to fruition, from building a wall on the Mexican border to changing the libel laws" (2017).

It was obvious that the tweets were spur- of- the- moment: there was no evidence of any process,23 and the “decision was announced with such haste that the White House could not answer basic inquiries about how it would be carried out, including what

20. https://twitt er.com/realD onald Trump/ statu s/13136 40512 02551 3984. 21. “Simply put, the Twitter statements were not self- executing declassification orders and do not

require the declassification of any particular documents.” Defendant’s Opposition to Plaintiffs Jason Leopold and Buzzfeed Inc.’s Emergency Motion for a Court Order to Reprocess the Mueller Report,” Electronic Privacy Information Center v. United States Department of Justice, No. 19- cv- 810 (RBW), October 13, 2020, 5.

22. This text is capitalized and punctuated as in the original tweets. https://twitt er.com/realD onald Trump/ statu s/89019 39815 85444864; https://twitt er.com/realD onald Trump/ statu s/89019 61643 13833472; https://twitt er.com/realD onald Trump/ statu s/89019 70951 51546369.

23. A federal judge concluded that “President Trump’s tweets did not merge from a policy review, nor did the Presidential Memorandum identify any policymaking process or evidence that the revocation of transgender rights was necessary for any legitimate national interest.” Memorandum and Order, Brock Stone et al. v. Donald J. Trump et al., No. cv:MJG- 17- 2459 (E.D. Maryland), November 21, 2017, 43. 20427

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would happen to openly transgender people on active duty” (Davis and Cooper 2017). Nobody in the military or Department of Defense knew, either. Lawsuits followed imme- diately, in a manner that “truly was unprecedented. Not only did plaintiffs decline to wait for subsequent agency action; they refused to wait for even for a formally issued presiden- tial order, such as an executive order or memorandum. Rather, their lawsuit challenged a presidential decision that had been memorialized exclusively on Twitter” (Mannheim and Watts 2019, 1790).

The actual policy, which went into effect in April 2019, was much more compli- cated, allowing current transgender personnel to continue to serve, although transgender individuals were no longer able to enlist. Although the president got a version of his policy enacted, the casual way it was originally announced complicated the administra- tion’s legal defense as well as implementation. Goodwin and Chemerinsky argue that the sequence— tweets first, then policy— shows that the policy itself was based on animus rather than any legitimate rationale, and that the subsequent justification resembled a post hoc process rather than a deliberative process (2019).

McDonald, Croco, and Turitto (2019) argue that Trump’s flip- flops did not hurt him, as public evaluations were more contingent on prior attitudes toward the president and whether voters agreed with the position the president flopped to than any concerns about the stability of those positions. Despite the president’s policy inconsistencies “[on] a host of foreign policy matters, from armed conflict to trade and immigration,” they write, “we find Americans react to those reversals with a collective shrug” (2019, 765). The authors find the implications of their finding troubling, however, as polarization and motivated reasoning overwhelm any meaningful public deliberation, perhaps removing the constraints that public opinion might play in constraining presidential action.

At times, the inconsistencies were so blatant as to be almost comical. On September 6, 2020, the president tweeted a threat to withhold funding for California schools that used the New York Times 1619 Project (which argues that slavery played a key role in the American Founding, with legacies that continue to the present day) in its curriculum. Apart from raising obvious First Amendment problems, it was also a patent contradiction of Executive Order 13791, Enforcing Statutory Prohibitions on Federal Control of Education, which specified that “it shall be the policy of the executive branch to protect and preserve State and local control over the curriculum, program of instruction, administration, and personnel of educational institutions, schools, and school systems.”24

Hennessey and Wittes argue that the unpredictability of and inconsistency in presi- dential statements and policy positions have made effective management of the executive branch impossible. “It has,” they write, “created habits of executive defiance, of presi- dential detachment from the management of policy- making and execution of the law. It risks cultivating habits in the bureaucracy of not doing as it’s told, habits far beyond those that have long made the executive branch a slow ship to turn” (2020, 73). It also encourages open defiance even among the president’s White House staff, since requests (or demands) for action are forgotten as soon as the president’s attention turned in another direction. Drezner identified many examples of staffers ignoring presidential instructions

24. 82 Federal Register.

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in the hopes that the president would forget what he had asked them to do. “Without any sustained focus,” he writes, “it is easy for bureaucratic actors to slow- walk or delay imple- mentation of an idea to see if the President’s attention shifts elsewhere.… Trump’s White House staff has repeatedly used delaying tactics in response to direct orders” (2020, 60).

Under some circumstances, presidents benefit from inducing some uncertainty about how they will react to a particular situation: if other actors do not know precisely how a president will respond to a refusal to do what the president asks, that uncertainty can increase the probability of compliance (Neustadt 1990, 55). Slotta (2020) argues that Trump’s unusual rhetorical style may appear incoherent when compared to traditional presidential communication styles, but makes sense to and is appreciated by key parts of his intended audience. Hart observes that “despite his legion idiosyncrasies, Donald Trump is a brilliant emotional manager, a political revolutionary of the first order” (2020, 231) who connects to the public by leveraging political identity to his advantage.

Strategic inducement of uncertainty or curated ambiguity, though, hardly describes Trump’s bargaining style, which is better characterized as unpredictable statements and demands that result in nobody being quite sure of what the president actually wants, or what he actually supports. Yahri- Milo, in an analysis of Trump’s foreign policy positions, notes,

It’s certainly true that when carefully crafted and consistently implemented, ambiguous statements can offer strategic benefits, such as allowing leaders to speak to multiple audi- ences, who may have opposing interests, without alienating any of them. But Trump’s state- ments are not strategically ambiguous; in fact, they are generally quite clear. The problem is that they are inconsistent. The impulsive tone and the fact that some of his statements are communicated via Twitter in the middle of the night further reduce their credibility. (2018, 74)

There is an enormous difference between the strategic and purposeful curating of un- certainty and Trump’s behavior. “He’s unpredictable,” Jared Kushner told Woodward, “which is a great strength. Nobody knows where that line is,” and according to Kushner, neither does Trump (Woodward 2020, 261).

Trump’s congressional strategies in the 2020 economic stimulus and 2018– 2019 government shutdown were part of a general pattern. Such erratic behavior undermined the president’s ability to work with Congress. “His shifting positions, inconsistent behav- ior, willingness to exclude the opposition in developing policies, and use of threats and ridicule squandered whatever potential for compromise might have existed” (Edwards 2020, 42).

Importance of the Institutional Presidency

The most fundamental purpose of the institutional White House is to regularize activity through internal processes that inform, coordinate, vet, secure support for, and follow up on presidential decisions, and to help the president monitor agency activities. Many of those processes had become so established that they are invisible to those outside

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of government, yet they are essential for efficient administration. In fact, the entire pres- idential structure— the institutions, the processes, the people— is designed to bring regu- larity to the governing process and the president’s ability to govern.

In describing the typical process that presidents use in making and promulgating decisions, Harold Bruff wrote in 1982:

When the time arrives for a formal presidential decision, the mechanics are fairly simple, and essentially similar from administration to administration. The White House staff or an agency official prepares a decision memorandum for the President, in order to present concisely the major policy options or recommendations that have survived debate within the administration. It usually reflects, although it may not discuss, legal analysis of the extent of permissible discretion under the statute or statutes involved. Each option is likely to be accompanied by outlines of the arguments favoring and disfavoring its adoption. These arguments may be confined to a rather legalistic presentation of relevant policy concerns, or they may branch off into frank discussion of political considerations having little or no legal relevance to the decision. The President reads the memorandum, perhaps discusses it with his advisers, and then decides, usually initialing or marking the options memorandum to indicate his choice. His reasons for selecting a particular option may or may not be those presented by the memorandum, and they may or may not be revealed to his advisers. (1982, 15– 16)

This is a stylized description, to be sure, but I suspect anyone who tried to make the case that this characterized the Trump White House would be laughed out of the room.25

Abandonment of norms is a key part of this, as informal rules and “soft guardrails” of what constitutes accepted norms are at their core a matter of predictability and regu- larity (Feldman 1984). Norms generate regularized behavior, so that even when the rules are not written down or formalized, political actors anticipate that everyone will abide by them. As such, they represent an equilibrium that incentivizes compliance. Norms also serve the vital function of constraining political conflict, by binding— if loosely— behavior in a way that increases the likelihood of long- term stability in political arrangements.26

My concern is not with the rhetorical norms that Trump has abandoned, particularly his penchant for attacking any critics and use of explosive racial language (Siegel 2018), or his flouting conflict of interest laws or the independence of law enforcement (Renan 2018), or his reluctance (or outright refusal) to engage in some of the symbolic or cere- monial roles presidents have historically filled, such as “Mourner- in- Chief” (Azari 2019). Rather, I focus on behavioral and strategic norms that affect the president’s ability to move policy and attain enduring political success.

At its best, the White House staff will “serve [the president’s] policy and political interests as well as fill in for his weaknesses” (Joynt Kumar 2017, 7). At worst, the staff will reinforce and concentrate those weaknesses. Trump’s White House immediately fell

25. Numerous press accounts have noted that several White House staffers are tasked with the job of taping back together documents that Trump had torn up, given his “odd and enduring habit of ripping up papers when he’s done with them— what some people describe as his unofficial ‘filing system’” (Karni 2018).

26. In this regard, observers sometimes criticize norms as entrenching established political structures and relationships in ways that obstruct change.

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into the second category. Less than a week into the transition, his appointment of Reince Priebus as chief of staff came with an announcement that broke the cardinal rule of the position— that the chief of staff must be first a mong equals with the authority to oversee the entire White House organization. Instead, Trump announced that Priebus would be “equal partners” with Chief Strategist Steve Bannon. Priebus had neither sufficient authority nor the president’s backing, and the staff immediately devolved into “leak- ing, backbiting, and general pandemonium” (Cohen and Hult 2020, 396). This result was entirely predictable, as any former chief of staff, or any presidential scholar, knew. “Presidents who, over the past fifty years, have tried to use a modern variant of FDR’s hub and spoke system— a weak chief of staff, no clear lines of authority or clear policy portfo- lios, advisors competing for the president’s time, no formal decision making or conflict resolution processes— have found … that it does not work” (Mayer 2017, 27).

The pathologies of such loose organization were compounded by the fact that Trump himself had no interest in formal structures, and he actively undermined efforts to control access to the Oval Office or organize the information he saw. Priebus, recognizing that his situation was untenable and knowing that the president wanted to replace him, offered his resignation in July. The following day the president announced by tweet that he had accepted it (Baker and Haberman 2017).

Trump was famously uninterested in details and process, and White House officials who tried to impose discipline— Chief of Staff John Kelly and National Security Advisor H. R. McMaster— were eventually squeezed out as the president grew frustrated with their attempts to create order (Rucker and Leonnig 2020).

One sees as much in Drezner’s (2020) descriptions of presidential staffers reacting to or often complaining to reporters about what Trump has done, usually anonymously. Drezner’s thesis— that the president’s own staff talk about him as though he were a tod- dler— is a rhetorical exaggeration, but it captures the dynamics of White House op- erations, where the most important job is often managing the president’s moods and controlling his impulses rather than regularized staffing work.

A president uninterested in administration does not stop governmental processes. The processes continue with the decisions delegated to someone else— Cabinet secretaries who act on their own agendas, subcabinet officials who are free to improvise, and lower- level officials who try to carry on with the day- to- day tasks of governing without mean- ingful guidance about what they are supposed to do.

The “new institutionalism” approach to the presidency begins (Moe 1993) with the axiom that the individual does not matter to the general pattern of presidential be- havior, which is driven more by institutional imperatives than a president’s personality. Skowronek’s theory of “political time” posits a different mechanism in explaining presi- dential success or failure, using the resilience of existing institutional and political rela- tionships to set the boundaries of what is and is not possible. Both frameworks, though they start from very different premises, rely on the same argument that presidential be- havior is channeled and structured via institutions or existing political structures. Within this common argument is an implicit assumption that these constraints and incentives regularize presidential behavior.

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The Consequences of Poor Staff Work

From the beginning of his administration, Trump’s policies suffered from poor staff work, including failures to incorporate even the most basic principles of structure and process. Documents were sloppily drafted, went through inadequate review, and frequently skipped normal legal clearances (e.g., sending executive orders through the Office of Legal Counsel in the Department of Justice). Decisions and policies were rolled out haphazardly, with little coordination with executive branch agencies. These patholo- gies were magnified by the lack of qualified staff. White House personnel learned quickly that the way to stay in the president’s good graces was to show public fealty to him rather than demonstrate ability. Few people in the White House, close to the president, were administratively competent or substantively expert, and the few who were usually found themselves sidelined. Those who remained were family members, loyalists, and courtiers who would have been unwelcome in any other administration.

Eight days after Trump’s inauguration, the president issued Executive Order 13769,27 which suspended all refugee entry into the United States for 120  days and “blocked entry into the United States for 90 days of citizens from seven predominantly Muslim countries: Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen” (Shear, Kulish, and Feuer 2017). It was the manifestation of his call during the campaign for a “total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States” (Johnson 2015). The rollout and announcement were remarkably shoddy, applying to aircraft mid- flight and issued with no advance warning to immigration or customs officials at U.S. airports. Despite the complexity of immigration laws, the order was not reviewed by any of the agencies that would normally be consulted— Homeland Security, State, Defense, Justice— and suffered from a number of ambiguities, such as whether it applied to citizens of the named coun- tries who were lawful permanent residents of the United States, and the lack of guidance in how immigration officials were to grant exceptions (Office of the Inspector General and Department of Homeland Security 2018). The sheer sloppiness of the order’s lan- guage prompted Wittes (2017) to note “[the] malevolence … is mitigated chiefly— and perhaps only— by the astonishing incompetence of its drafting and construction.”

Within 24 hours, a federal judge issued a temporary restraining order blocking the executive order, and the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals declined to stay the decision.28 The president responded with a revised order in March.29 That order was blocked by two sepa- rate federal courts in Hawaii and Maryland, although the Supreme Court stayed the sepa- rate injunctions.30 In September, the president tried yet again, issuing Proclamation 9645, which specified the verification processes to be used in implementing the earlier executive orders and added North Korea and Venezuela to the list of countries banned. That action, too, was enjoined by a federal court in Hawaii as a violation of a section of the Immigration

27. Executive Order 13769, “Protecting the United States from Foreign Terrorist Entry into the United States,” 82 Federal Register 8977 (January 27, 2017).

28. State of Washington v. Trump, 847 F. 3d 1151 (2017). 29. Executive Order 13780, “Protecting the Nation from Foreign Terrorist Entry into the United

States,” 82 Federal Register 13209, March 9, 2017. 30. 582 U.S. ___ (2017).

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and Naturalization Act that prohibits discrimination in issuing visas based on “race, sex, nationality, place of birth, or place of residence.”31 In June 2018, the Supreme Court up- held the proclamation, holding that the relevant immigration statute “exudes deference to the President in every clause.”32 The Court took no notice of the president’s statements in reaching its decision, although Justice Anthony Kennedy, in a brief concurring opinion, offered a backhanded criticism of the president’s language: “There are numerous instances in which the statements and actions of government officials are not subject to judicial scrutiny or intervention. That does not mean those officials are free to disregard the Constitution and the right it proclaims and protects.… [It] is an urgent necessity that officials adhere to these constitutional guarantees and mandates in all their actions, even in the sphere of foreign affairs.”33 This certainly suggests that Trump’s language complicated what would have otherwise been a more straightforward decision.

Similarly, Executive Order 13768,34 which purported to deny federal grants to “sanctuary jurisdictions,” was plagued by sloppy drafting and careless construction. The order was clearly aimed at cities and counties that refused to honor federal requests to detain people already in custody because immigration authorities said they were ille- gally present in the United States.35 Yet, it failed to define with any precision what constituted a “sanctuary jurisdiction”; which grants or programs the order applied to; used “federal grants” and “federal funds” interchangeably in the order; and failed to specify whether it applied to existing grants that had already been awarded, or only to future grants; and referred to a section of the U.S. code that had nothing to do with cooperating with immigration detention requests.36 Moreover, other language was en- tirely open- ended, leaving the Attorney General with the discretion to penalize any jurisdiction that “has in effect a statute, policy, or practice that prevents or hinders the enforcement of Federal law.”37 The language was at once “barely comprehensible” and so broad that it “could mean anything from firing on Ft. Sumter to not returning ICE phone calls after lunch” (Epps 2017).

In response to a legal challenge from San Francisco and Santa Clara County (California), Department of Justice attorneys argued in federal court that “the Order was merely an exercise of the President’s ‘bully pulpit’ to highlight a changed approach to immigration enforcement,” and that it simply restated existing conditions applying the three specific categories of Department of Justice and Department of Homeland Security

31. 8 U.S. Code §1152(a)(1)(A). 32. Trump v. Hawaii, 585 U.S. __, 10 (2018). 33. 585 U.S. __, 1- 2 (J. Kennedy, concurring) (2018). 34. 13768, “Enhancing Public Safety in the Interior of the United States,” 82 Federal Register 1799

(January 30, 2017). 35. White House, Statement on Sanctuary Cities Ruling, April 25, 2017. https://www.white house.

gov/brief ings- state ments/ state ment- sanct uary- citie s- rulin g/. 36. The order specifies only jurisdictions that “willfully refuse to comply with 8 U.S.C. §1373,”

referring to a statute that involves sharing of information with federal immigration authorities. But the order does not specify what “willfully refuse to comply” means, and the cited section refers only to sharing of infor- mation, not refusal to honor Immigration and Customs Enforcement civil detention requests to hold individ- uals suspected of illegal presence in the United States.

37. Section 9(a).

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grants already conditioned on information- sharing requirements.38 But the judge was having none of it:

It is heartening that the Government’s lawyers recognize that the Order cannot do more constitutionally than enforce existing law. But Section 9(a), by its plain language, attempts to reach all federal grants, not merely the three mentioned at the hearing. The rest of the Order is broader still, addressing all federal funding. And if there was doubt about the scope of the Order, the President and Attorney General have erased it with their public comments. The President has called it “a weapon” to use against jurisdictions that disagree with his preferred policies of immigration enforcement, and his press secretary has reiterated that the President intends to ensure that “counties and other institutions that remain sanctuary cities don’t get federal government funding in compliance with the executive order.”39

A month after this injunction, the Attorney General released a memorandum narrowing the scope of the order to apply “solely to federal grants administered by the Department of Justice or the Department of Homeland Security, and not to other sources of federal funding” (United States Department of Justice 2017, 1). The federal judge who issued the preliminary injunction was unpersuaded that this memo changed anything, and is- sued a permanent injunction in November 2017 that concluded the order was unconsti- tutionally vague as well as a violation of separation of powers and principles of federalism.40 The 9th Circuit upheld the decision within California although it with- drew the nationwide injunction,41 and the Department of Justice agreed to drop further action.42

The administration never secured a win in any major litigation challenging its abil- ity to restrict funding broadly to “sanctuary cities.” Eventually, the scope of the order was scaled back to the point where the Justice Department could only structure the scoring process for applications to a single federal grant program (the Community Oriented Policing Services program) to give preference to cities that pledged to share information with immigration authorities or made immigration enforcement a priority.43 It is possi- ble that the administration’s repeated and unsuccessful efforts to litigate the sanctuary cities issue was, in fact, part of a calculated political strategy to energize the base and construct a narrative of a hostile judiciary (Thomson- DeVeaux 2019), rather than a sin- cere attempt to change policy.

Contrast this with the process for issuing Executive Order 12291 in February 1981, in which President Reagan fundamentally altered the regulatory process by requiring

38. County of Santa Clara and City and County of San Francisco v. Donald J. Trump, “Order Granting the County of Santa Clara’s and City and County of San Francisco’s Motion to Enjoin Section 9(a) of Executive Order 13768,” Case No. 17- cv- 00574- WHO (N.D. Calif.), April 25, 2017, 2.

39. Ibid., 2- 3. 40. County of Santa Clara and City and County of San Francisco v. Donald J. Trump, “Order Granting

Motion for Summary Judgement,” Case No. 17- cv- 00574- WHO (N.D. Calif.), November 20, 2017. 41. 897 F. 3d 1225 (9th Cir. 2018). 42. County of Santa Clara and City and County of San Francisco v. Donald J. Trump, “Stipulation and

Final Judgment and Order.” Case No. 17- cv- 00574- WHO (N.D. Calif.), August 23, 2019. 43. The City of Los Angles unsuccessfully sued over the scoring metric. City of Los Angeles v. Barr,

Case No. 2:17- cv- 07215- R- JC, July 12, 2019.

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major rules to submit a cost– benefit justification to the Office of Management and Budget. The administration had been working on the order “since the earliest days of the transition,” and went through the Office of Legal Counsel for review. It survived multiple legal challenges (Mayer 2001, 128) and has had a permanent impact on regulatory review.

This remarkable lack of discipline and sloppy process are reflected in the Trump ad- ministration’s unusually poor record in defending against legal challenges: as of October 2020, the president had lost 83% of the time in court when an agency rule was chal- lenged (Institute for Policy Integrity 2020). Such erratic decision making (which cannot meaningfully be termed a “process”) diminished the administration’s ability to see its policies carried out. Its regulatory rollback effort has been “a display of autocracy, impul- sivity, and jerry- rigged reasoning” (Heinzerling 2018, 15).

The Apotheosis of Failure: COVID- 19

Many observers of Trump’s behavior as president expressed astonishment at his ability to dodge consequences for what would likely have brought down any previous president. Despite all of the norm violations, investigations, refusal to comply with con- gressional subpoenas and document demands, indictments and convictions of campaign associates and advisors, his impeachment, and on and on, his base and nearly all con- gressional Republicans stuck with him and he paid little political cost. He also faced no grave military or diplomatic crisis, or a domestic policy debacle that affected his public standing or congressional support. There had been no war, no Bay of Pigs, no Iranian hostage crisis, no 9/11.

While the president’s supporters attributed this to strategic acumen, others were skeptical. “Trump,” declared Brian Klaas of University College (London), “is simply the luckiest president in modern U.S. history” (Klaas 2019).

In what is now an eerily prescient analysis, in 2018, Lewis, Bernhard, and You iden- tified the problems of chaotic administrative practices within the Trump administration, particularly the failure to have key staff in place:

Most large problems, such as preparation for a possible global pandemic or the develop- ment of reconstruction plans in war- torn areas, involve cooperation among large numbers of agencies and require sign off on actions at the highest levels. Preparing for a pandemic, for example, requires coordinated action by, among others, embassy officials in various countries, the U.S. Agency for International Development, the Office of Global Health Affairs, the Public Health Service, the Centers for Disease Control, the Department of Homeland Security, and the Federal Emergency Management Agenc y.… The U.S. gov- ernment must work with the governments of other countries, international organizations, nongovernmental partners, state health agencies, and local hospitals and first responders. (2018, 491)

COVID- 19 would expose the pathologies of Trump’s approach to the presidency— the inconsistency, randomness, incompetence, lack of process, dismissal of administrative ex- pertise— in catastrophic fashion.

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The planning, coordination, and implementation failures are, at this point, obvious: dismissing existing planning efforts; ignoring the warnings of intelligence agencies and global health authorities; deemphasizing coordinating offices within the White House; failure to recognize the scope of the problem; presidential statements that ranged from inconsistent, to dangerous, to wildly false, and various permutations of all three (e.g., insisting that COVID would disappear, undercutting health experts who were recom- mending basic public health measures such as masks and social distancing, promises about testing capacity that were never fulfilled, failure to mobilize production capacity for per- sonal protective equipment, pitchman- level hawking of cures that had no evidence behind them and which were eventually shown to be worse than useless); leaving states to fend for themselves in acquiring necessary resources; and failure to create an effective coordinating mechanism for the multitude of agencies involved in a nationwide public health crisis (Abutaleb et al. 2020; Bowling, Fisk, and Morris 2020; Cameron 2020; Dickerson 2020; Fallows 2020; Lipton et al. 2020; NEJM 2020; Rutledge 2020; Yong 2020).

It was the culmination of three years of abandoning the norms of effective gov- ernment, organizational maintenance, and presidential leadership. James Fallows (2020) summarized the effects:

The more complex the organization, the more its success or failure turns on the skill of peo- ple in its middle layers— the ones who translate a leader’s decision to the rest of the team in order to get results. Doctors depend on nurses; architects depend on contractors and crafts- men; generals depend on lieutenants and sergeants. A president depends on people who have developed the skills and muscle memory needed to shift a huge bureaucracy’s focus. Because Donald Trump himself had no grasp of this point, and because he and those around him preferred political loyalists and family retainers rather than holdovers from the “deep state,” the whole federal government became like a restaurant with no cooks, or a TV station with stars but no one to turn the cameras on.

By the end of 2020, COVID- 19 had infected nearly 20 million Americans and killed over 330,000.44 Whatever else happened during the Trump presidency, the COVID- 19 re- sponse was a canonical presidential failure.

Making Sense of What Appears to Make No Sense

[It’s] a very dangerous thing to have a White House that can’t with the remotest pretense of competence and governance put together a major policy document on a crucial set of national security issues without inducing an avalanche of liti- gation and wide diplomatic fallout. (Wittes 2017) Trump’s loss to Joe Biden in the 2020 election, despite his ham- handed and anti- democratic efforts to upend the results, confirms that Trump’s operating style— his

44. Data from the Johns Hopkins University Coronavirus Resource Center, https://coron avirus.jhu. edu. Globally, the pandemic has infected more than 57 million and caused nearly 1.4 million deaths.

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random walk through the presidency— was a failure. The judgment of history will likely be even harsher.

What are we to make of his presidency? Does his random walk approach hold any promise for future presidents? Or is his a cautionary tale about the risks of ignoring decades of conventional wisdom about the necessary (though surely not sufficient) condi- tions for successful presidential management and leadership of the executive branch? Was Trump’s dissonant foreign policy strategy an unlikely, but effective way of forcing other countries to increase their own international presence to make up for lost U.S. influence? Or was the United States fortunate that it did not lead to a widespread military conflict or an escalation of personal insults and miscalculation into a nuclear showdown with North Korea or Iran?

One interpretation of Trump’s erratic and incoherent behavior is that it is merely the predictable result of an unprepared and uninterested individual placed in the office.

Another interpretation, far less sanguine, is that Trump is a symptom of institu- tional and political dysfunction that poses considerable risks. His approach makes more sense if he considered himself a disruptor more than anything else, devoted to “decon- structing the administrative state” (Lewis 2019) and fomenting chaos rather than achiev- ing enduring change. Howell and Moe go further, arguing that Trump’s behavior— the fact that he “sabotaged administrative agencies, undermined the legitimacy of political institutions, sowed public distrust and fomented fear” (2020, 159) — was the intentional strategy of a populist: a leader who seeks to substitute personal loyalty for commitment to “rigged” political institutions (2020, 166). Levitsky and Ziblatt are even less posi- tive, classifying Trump as a straight- up authoritarian, embodying all of the classic char- acteristics of such leaders around the world and through history: rejecting democratic norms, denying the legitimacy of political opponents, encouraging violence, and a desire to punish rivals (2018, 61– 67). Erratic behavior and lack of process are not causes of poor decision making, but rather, the point itself. Writing shortly before Trump took office, Henry Farrell posited that

the key qualities of presidential politics over the next four years will be instability, frequent policy changes, palace intrigues, and Trump looking to reign triumphant above it all, not particularly caring … about attaining specific goals, but instead looking to preserve his position at the center of an ever shifting spider web of political relations, no matter what consequences this has for the integrity of the web. This might not be authoritarianism in terms of the sense of a well- honed bureaucratic regime dedicated to horrible ends, but au- thoritarianism in terms of the general break down of Weberian order and hierarchies in favor of a largely personalized politics in which one’s relationship with an erratic and unpredict- able president counts for far more than one’s formal position and authority. (2016)

From this perspective, the key lesson from Trump’s random walk presidency is that a would- be authoritarian with better skills may have been able to do lasting, even perma- nent damage to American governing institutions, the resilience of which we have taken for granted.

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