Good sentences to ponder, from Julia Azari and Jonathan Bernstein
From their excellent Substack Good Politics / Bad Politics, here's Julia yesterday:
we have a president who articulates the ugly reality we can all see, rather than the aspirations that, paradoxically, anchor us...the preference for grievance over unity leave us with very little that resembles what we’ve come to expect from the presidency...Trump’s neglect of the presidency’s unifying duties makes it easier for Americans to think even more in terms of our divisions and conflicts than we already do.
And here's Jonathan today:
Trump believes that by winning the presidential election Trump believes he won some sort of prize, when in fact he was hired to do a job...Trump is acting as if the presidency has always been the leader of an autocracy, rather than one piece of a republican government.
A few orthogonal thoughts:
Trump's inability to practice unifying leadership, even when it's the obvious best model for successful policy/politics, has been a major weakness throughout his 5 years. It hurt both him and the country badly during COVID, when the obvious-to-every-other-pol unifying leadership model would have produced and legitimated better policy, and better politics for him.
Public opinion and public approval probably mean less to Trump than previous presidents. Which means he probably cares less about the presidential function of legitimating policy via public explanation and public persuasion. This seems notably true in regard to Venezuela, where the administration has seemingly never offered/defended a rationale for its actions in any serious way.
Trump doesn't really have an articulable big-picture political project. Jonathan makes the point that if Trump is trying to purposefully build some sort of autocratic regime, he's going about it in a truly weird way. And I doubt he could describe what exactly he's up to in any case. Kinda the way David Foster Wallace finds elite athletes unable to analyze their own skill. They never think about it. So instead, all you have are various functionalist accounts; Trump is nothing but the received sum of his disparate actions. As I've argued, this does create a discernible and coherent worldview, but only from the outside. Which, I think, leaves Trump somewhat external to the defining of his own politics.