It may have escaped your attention, what with Rocket Man and the Dotard flexing for nuclear war, but historians are pretty sure that Donald Trump has already overtaken Warren Harding as the country’s worst president. This has no doubt brought Harding his first good night of eternal rest since dying in office in 1923.
In many ways, the 29th and 45th presidents are starkly dissimilar. Harding drank too much. Trump, in his singular gift to humanity, is a teetotaler. Harding was suave and debonair. Trump is puffy and orange. Harding was known to woo and enchant women with romance. Trump grabs them the wrong way. Harding was prone to honest self-reflection, having once said, “I am not fit for this office and should never have been here.” Trump stares down his massive failures and declares his reign to be “the best presidency ever.”
Yet, both men entered the White House through amazingly similar routes. Malcolm Gladwell, in his best-selling treatise on the ups and downs of intuitive decision making, “Blink”, devoted a section to Harding as an example of the down side. Harding, the author noted, never distinguished himself when he was in the Ohio legislature or the U.S. Senate. Instead, writes Gladwell, a political sponsor pushed Harding to run because he “looked like a president.” Those looks were enough to get him the Republican nomination at a brokered convention in 1920, and, from there, the presidency. The charisma and presidential confidence that voters saw, however, was a mere façade. Harding lacked the capability of functioning successfully as a president.
Although the Donald hardly brought a Mount Rushmore face to the ticket, he had something just as powerful as Harding’s presidential aura. As a blustery business mogul, Candidate Trump was rude, crude and mad as hell. Eschewing all forms of political correctness, he denigrated every minority group imaginable and ripped into establishment elites for coddling them. For a good chunk of voters, it was a different kind of love at first sight. To the disgruntled, disaffected and disenfranchised – mostly older, angry Caucasians longing for the good old days when white privilege actually counted for something – Donald Trump was their Warren Harding. It wasn’t his looks. It was how he acted, what he said, his anger, his persona. He was one of them, their only hope to take a rapidly changing country back. But there was a problem, the same one Harding’s supporters faced: a deep void behind the veneer. There was no substance, intellect or skill to convert an illusion of competence into effective governance.
And so we have, in the ninth month of this administration, a new paradigm of presidential paralysis, a bizarre, needy codependency between the president and his not-so-merry band of malcontents. It’s a vicious cycle of dysfunction, in which Trump responds to each failure with an outrageous act that disgusts most people, but is lovingly devoured, like a piece of red meat, by his faithful base. As a result, he loses support from moderates and independents, while holding on to a “strongly support” base of around 20%. He keeps on stumbling because, among other reasons, it’s hard to move political mountains with that kind of math. And, with each failure, he trots back to his base with another piece of red meat. Rinse and repeat.
For example, take the crazy NFL brouhaha. Trump had been having a bad week. Yet another shot at Obamacare repeal appeared dead on arrival. He took heat for softening on the dreamers and working with Democrats. The right was all over him for backing an establishment Republican Senate candidate in Alabama. So he rips into the NFL for not firing the “son-of-a-bitch” players who kneel during the National Anthem. By all objective accounts, the move was a disaster. Players, coaches and even team owners who had supported Trump, linked arms before Sunday’s games to protest the president’s comments. Predictably, his base loved it, which meant that Trump was ecstatic. “It’s really caught on, it’s really caught on,” Trump said at a conservative White House dinner Monday night. “I said what millions of Americans were thinking.” Meanwhile, days before his NFL rampage, 66% of Americans told pollsters that Trump has done more to divide the country than unite it.
Solidifying the love of those closest to you, even if others disapprove of your actions, can be a commendable personal trait. But it is not particularly useful in the pragmatics of electoral politics. Every recent president has attempted to broaden their appeal, despite loud outcries from their base. George W. Bush’s pro-immigration stance, and his successful push for a Medicare drug program, infuriated his base but drew in more moderates. Liberals are still complaining about Bill Clinton’s welfare reform move that got him more support from the right. Many on the left, including the Congressional Black Caucus, were privately outraged with what they felt was Barack Obama’s failure to do more for the people who helped him get him elected. Yet it was important to Obama to be more than a black president. He, like his predecessors, wanted to expand his support and broaden his base. That’s what makes presidents more effective.
Trump is forever stuck in campaign mode, a one-trick pony who excels at creating outrage just so he can bask in the glory of a shrinking fringe group. He’s had their adulation since the birther days. They still chant “Lock Her Up” at his rallies because nostalgia feels so much better than the dismal reality of failure. Like Warren Harding, Donald Trump fooled a lot of people into thinking he’d make the perfect president. Unlike Harding, however, Trump fooled himself into believing the same thing. That’s why he has to keep performing for his base. Their applause is what makes his act possible. Without it, the curtain will eventually fall.