Henry Bodkin
2024-10-01 17:01:54 UTC
Reply
PermalinkTrumps presidency is failing rapidly. Like others before him, modern
American presidents fail when they cannot master or comprehend the
government that they inherit. This is a hard concept to grasp in an age
when non-stop media coverage leads us to focus on the presidents
communication skills and when presidents themselves value spin more than
expertise. But in the end presidential failure is about reality, not
wordsno matter how lofty and inspiring or how crude and insulting.
Contemporary presidents are especially prone to mistaking spin for
reality for several reasons. First of all, they are nominated not by
other elected officials who have some sense of what it takes to govern,
but by activists and party electorates who value inspiration and
entertainment. Second, the importance of mass communication leads
presidents to believe that the words and activities that got them into
office can work once they are in office: more rallies, more speeches,
more tweets, and more television advertising.
Nothing can be further from the truth.
Presidential scholars have been aware of the disjuncture between
campaigning and governing for some time now. More than a decade ago, Sam
Kernell wrote a book called Going Public: New Strategies of Presidential
Leadership (CQ Press, 2007), in which he showed that beginning with
President Kennedy, modern presidents spent a great deal more time on
minor presidential addresses and on domestic and international travel
than their predecessors. All this communication, he argued, came at the
expense of actual governing. Later on another presidential scholar,
George C. Edwards III, writing in Overreach, Leadership in the Obama
Presidency (Princeton University Press, 2012) argued that Obama thought
he could go directly to the public to get support for his programs, an
approach that placed communication over negotiation and that resulted in
a stunning midterm loss for his party.
Reality still matters, and spin has its limitseven in an era of social
media.
As long as things are going okay for most people, Americans tolerate a
presidents verbal gymnastics. But when people are in trouble, even the
most ardent government haters ask that famous question: Wheres the
government? And for most Americans, the president is the government.
Following the botched federal response to Hurricane Katrina in 2005, the
collateral damage to the presidency of George W. Bush was extensive. His
popularity never recovered and his second-term agenda, including bold
changes to Social Security, was destroyed. Nearly a decade later when
President Obama rolled out his signature achievement, the Affordable Care
Act, the hugely embarrassing crashing of the computer systems meant to
implement the act increased Republican opposition to it and undermined
public confidence in the governments ability to implement important
executive actions.
Trumps failures during the coronavirus pandemic run the gamut from the
rhetorical to the organizational. Every time the president speaks he
seems to add to the fear and chaos surrounding the situation: telling
Americans it was not serious by asserting his hunches about data,
assuring people that everyone would be tested even when there were very
few tests available, telling people that we are very close to a vaccine
when it is anywhere from 12 to 18 months away, mistakenly asserting that
goods as well as people from Europe would be forbidden from entering the
United States, and announcing that Google had a website for testing while
the initiative was merely an unimplemented idea, were just a few of his
televised gaffes. After every presidential statement, clarifications
were needed. Trump has the unique distinction of giving a national
address meant to calm the country that had the effect of taking the stock
market down over 1,000 points.
We have come to expect verbal imprecision and outright lies from this
president, but that is more easily corrected on less momentous
developments. When there is fundamental incompetence on matters of
tremendous importance, voters punish poor results. And this is where
Trumps actions on the coronavirus have gone far off target. One of the
most glaring deficiencies of his administration has been the failure to
have enough tests available to identify those infected and to screen
others for possible exposure. South Korea, a country a fraction of the
size of the United States, is testing thousands more people a day than
the United States. The failure to produce tests quickly will go down as
one of the biggest failures in the overall handling of this disease
because it prevented authorities from understanding the scope of the
pandemic and therefore made it difficult for them to undertake
appropriate steps to mitigate its spread. Other countries had tests and
now state governments are rapidly rolling out their own tests after the
CDC belatedly removed regulatory barriers. Even the nations chief
infectious disease doctor, Anthony Fauci, has admitted that testing is a
major failurea statement that is most certainly not one of the
presidents talking points.
In this and other areas, Trump has failed to learn from the failures of
his predecessors. When President Ronald Reagan signed into law the
fundamental restructuring of the military known as the Goldwater-Nichols
reforms,[1] he did this knowing that he did not want a military fiasco on
his watch like the failed Iranian rescue mission that did in Jimmy
Carters presidency. And following the total breakdown in the Federal
Emergency Management Agencys handling of Hurricane Katrina, President
Barack Obama made sure his FEMA director was an experienced state
emergency management director. He knew that poor performance during
natural disasters would doom his presidency.
During the Obama Administration, the White House dealt with a precursor
of the coronavirus: the Ebola virus. While the scrambling eventually
worked out thanks to decisive executive office leadership, it illustrated
that pandemics were a fundamental national security threat. They created
the Global Health Security Team in the National Security Council to
prepare. In May of 2018, Trump disbanded the team allegedly because he
never thought pandemics would happen and because Im a business person.
I dont like having thousands of people around when you dont need them.
Trumps hurried justification for abandoning a unit (that was well short
of thousands) showed Trumps limited understanding of why government is
different from businessit is in the business of preparing for low-
probability events. For instance, the United States military spends
billions every year preparing for wars all over the globe and even in
outer space that may never take place. The art of presidential leadership
is anticipating major problems and coming up with plans to mitigate them.
In addition to learning from past administrations, presidents need the
ability to anticipate reactions to their actions. The Trump
administration has been especially inept on this dimension from the
beginning. The first big executive order he issued, largely banning
Muslims from coming to America, was so ill-conceived that chaos broke out
in airports around the world as people with green cards to work in
America and Muslims who had assisted U.S. military forces in Iraq were
initially turned away. Airport chaos seems to be a specialty of the Trump
administration. It reappeared this past weekend, as Americans came home
from Europe in huge numbers following Trumps announcement to close off
travelers from Europe and screen returning Americans. When travelers
arrived, they found vastly inadequate staffing at airports and were thus
forced into the very situation medical authorities were warning against:
large crowds being hoarded into small spaces with constant, close
contact.
Trump has also failed to fill top government positions and turnover is
far higher than in any other recent administration, as Katherine Tenpas
has tracked on these pages. The absence of expertise in top government
jobs is especially dangerous during emergencies. Also, when positions are
filled they have not necessarily gone to the strongest candidates. Take
for instance leadership at the Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention, the nations top agency for infectious diseases. Dr. Robert
Redfields appointment was opposed by the Center for Science in the
Public Interest which warned the administration that Redfield lacked a
public health background and that he was under investigation for
scientific misconduct.
Modern presidents inherit an enormous enterprise called the federal
government that employs about the same number of people as the 6 largest
U.S. companies and has a combined annual revenue that is larger than the
combined revenues of the top 16 companies in the Fortune 500.[2] No
wonder modern presidents have had trouble managing this enterprisein an
organization this big, something is always going right and something is
always going wrong. A president who understands whats going right can
call on deep wells of expertise to protect himself from the failures that
will inevitably be attributed to him. And on the flip side, a president
who is aware of whats going wrong can take corrective actions and try to
stave off the kinds of bureaucratic meltdowns that will also be
attributed to him.
As Oval Office leadership fails while the pandemic spreads, governors,
mayors, university presidents, religious leaders, business executives,
and health providers are stepping into the leadership vacuum that has
been the Trump presidency. They have sent workers home to telework,
announced their own social distancing rules, and developed their steps to
limit the spread of the pandemic. This tragedy teaches us many things
about preparedness and public health, but it also warns us about the
dangers of presidents who are manifestly unprepared to govern.
https://www.brookings.edu/articles/trumps-failed-presidency/
