Who’s Weaker: Trump Or The Congressional GOP?
By all rights, Donald Trump should have been expected to be an incredibly weak president. He managed to eke out an Electoral College victory by under 100,000 votes and the lost the popular vote by nearly 3 million in an election clearly tainted by foreign interference. Of course, the key to Trump’s victory, besides James Comey, was to never show any weakness at all and, due to the majorities that Republicans had in the House and the Senate, he was largely able to get away with that as President until 2018.
It is remarkable to look at just how ineffective Trump has been as President. That’s not to say he hasn’t caused enormous damage to the country and our democracy that will take years if not decades to repair. But the only things he has really accomplished are actually the goals of his congressional colleagues, stacking the courts with unqualified Federalist Society hacks and passing an enormous tax cut for the GOP’s corporate and plutocratic donors. Those accomplishments would have been probably been achieved with any of the other 17 Republican wannabes that Trump defeated in the primaries.
Trump’s stated goals – repealing the ACA, renegotiating trade deals, and building the wall – have all basically gone nowhere and even backfired in the two years that Republicans have had total control and it’s not for lack of trying on at least the first two issues. Regarding the wall, it could be argued that Trump doesn’t really want to do anything other than keep the issue out there as something that will motivate his base for the 2020 elections. And, remarkably, the biggest policy accomplishment of Trump’s first two years, an over $2 trillion tax cut, is wildly unpopular with a majority of the voters. It’s hard to image you can give that much money away and still piss off a majority of the electorate.
Trump’s inherent weakness, long hidden by a largely unearned reputation of invincibility from 2016 and his congressional majorities despite never breaking the mid-forties in approval rating, finally was exposed when Democrats took the House in November. Pelosi has owned Trump since the election and Friday’s hour-long rant announcing a made-up national emergency was merely the tantrum of a child who knows he has been defeated before picking up his golf clubs and going home.
Trump’s tantrum was a remarkable display of ignorance and rage that was really a broad attack on the core of our democracy. It is an attack on Article 1 of the Constitution, once again politicizes the military, and is a clear abuse of power. Combined with his ramble about his own stats and summarily executing drug abusers, it was a speech of a dictator. But, unlike true dictators who resort to emergency powers as a show of strength to obscure their weakness, Trump’s heart wasn’t even in it. He sabotaged the rationale for his emergency action and his sing-song recitation of the expected legal battle sounded like a lamentation of a defeat, although his faith in the Supreme Court, which is far more radical and dangerous to our democracy than Trump, may not be misplaced.
Congressional Republicans, having really had the upper hand over the last two years, are apparently scared of their own shadow, or at least one that might challenge them in a primary. They are basically a minority party with majority power, primarily due to the critical flaws in our Constitution, consisting of two blocs that are actually in conflict with one another, less educated white men and the plutocratic donor class. The party keeps the former placated with culture war signaling, which Trump truly excels at, and the promise that courts will finally ban abortion. The latter actually drive GOP policy that often is detrimental to the former as the tariffs and tax bill illustrate. Remarkably, at this point in time, actually satisfying the wishes of either bloc makes the party less popular as a whole.
It would be humorous if it wasn’t so damaging to see congressional Republicans, especially those in the Senate, repeatedly promise to stop Trump from taking some action and then prostrating themselves before him when he goes ahead and does it, epitomized by the two greatest profiles in cowardice, Jeff Flake and Bob Corker. It has been a constant over the first two years of Trump’s term exemplified by the complete cave on one of Trump’s earlier abuses of his national security powers in instituting steel an aluminum tariffs and the recent refusal of Paul Ryan, perhaps the weakest Speaker of the House in history, to hold a vote on the bill which would keep the government open that overwhelmingly passed the Senate but which Trump threatened to veto. Rather than pass the bill that had overwhelming support in both houses and override the veto, they decided to take the blame for a 35 day government shutdown that eventually provided less money for Trump’s wall than the bill they refused to vote on. How do you say “Winning!”? And we see their weakness again now as those who just days ago decried the idea of a national emergency as a terrible idea and an abuse of power are supporting Trump’s actions today.
In addition, the Republican party is clearly bereft of ideas. While Kevin McCarthy may be rightly blaming the lunatic fringe in the Freedom Caucus for tanking ACA repeal by demanding the elimination of the protection for pre-existing conditions, the larger reality is that, after eight years, Republicans came up with nothing to replace Obamacare. In fact, that was basically their proposal, to replace it with nothing or, if you consider the cuts to Medicaid, less than nothing. Even the tax cut, their signature achievement by their own admission, was just a retread, sold with the same old tired lies about paying for itself which the stenographic press largely parroted and the majority of Americans, this time, no longer believed. The party couldn’t even come up with a proposal for infrastructure investment, which would have been something tangible representatives could have brought back home and a bipartisan layup with a reasonable plan.
On the two major issues confronting our country and our world, climate change and inequality, Republicans have absolutely nothing to offer and are intellectually unable to even discuss them. Climate change is a Chinese hoax and anything that might address the issue will result in the banning of airplanes, the US military, ice cream and hamburgers. Any attempts to reduce income inequality by returning to tax rates used in the 1950s or imposing a wealth tax will lead to Venezuelan socialism and complete economic collapse. Attempts to give workers a say in how the largest companies are run is the “wholesale expropriation of private enterprise”. These are just puerile statements representing the party’s unwillingness to actually engage with either of these issues and inability to come up with any plans to address them.
On a more macro level, congressional Republicans have lost the interest and ability to actually engage in the act of governing. With control of Congress and the White House, they are unwilling or unable to keep the government functioning, having shut it down three times in one year. Despite all the GOP whinging about how the ACA was simply rammed through, Democrats actually had dozens of hours of hearings on the issue and the Senate debated the bill for 25 straight days. One of the Senate’s attempts to repeal Obamacare was written in secret, with no Democratic input, with no hearings, and then voted on before the CBO could actually score it and most members had actually even read it. McConnell’s latest gambit is to hold a vote on the Green New Deal, which is merely a proposal that has not even been turned into actual legislation, merely as an attempt to create a TV spot against the Democratic presidential hopefuls in the Senate for 2020. You can be sure there will be no hearings before the vote.
In the end, it appears that congressional Republicans are even weaker than Trump. Trump’s weakness is dangerous as he lashes out in unpredictable, often unconstitutional, outrageous, and absurd ways against it. Despite primarily representing solidly red districts or states, Republicans in Congress are so afraid of a challenge from the right that they time and again willingly follow Trump off the cliff when they know it is wrong and openly admit so. What is truly pathetic is that both of them are so weak, they are both petrified of alienating the other. Trump’s insecurity requires congressional Republicans to constantly show subservience at the same time their weakness and fear requires them to give it to him. The result is a toxic co-dependence of weakness. We keep on waiting for this generation’s Joseph Welch moment that will end this charade. The problem is that Trump and the GOP have no sense of decency and shame.