It has been just 30 days since Donald Trump was inaugurated as the 45th President of the United States, and already articles are being written suggesting that he needs a reset.[1] It may be normal for a presidency to stumble a little out of the gate; most of the time, the people in the new administration are dealing with an entirely new level of responsibility and control. However, the Trump administration has appeared to be a special level of dumpster fire. The only substantive actions they have taken were a botched military operation in Yemen, the infamous “Muslim ban” executive order that has already been at least temporarily blocked by federal courts, and appointing a potential Supreme Court justice who has already had to distance himself from some tweets.
Donald Trump’s job approval rating is underwater,[1:1] which is unusual for a president who has only been in office for a month. In this context, the strategy that the Trump administration appears to be pursuing to try to turn this around, based on Thursday’s press conference and a campaign-style rally on Saturday, is to try to keep campaigning. I find him and almost all of his desired policies repulsive, but the folly of this strategy has nothing to do with how distasteful it is.
I obviously cannot (nor do I really want to) step inside the minds of the Trump brain-trust, but one imagines they are pursuing this approach because it worked to win them the election. The first problem with that is the actual circumstances under which they did so: losing the popular vote by a substantial margin, and winning the Electoral College through very narrow margins in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan. I don’t want to call them lucky,[1:2] but it seems unlikely that the next Democratic campaigns will repeat the mistakes of the Clinton campaign with regards to resource allocation, and thus counting on those margins to hold up seems questionable. Based on historical voting patterns, if the next Democratic presidential campaign can bring back a small number of those voters who abandoned them for Trump, his winning margin will vanish.[1:3]
Meanwhile, the voters who disliked him enough to vote against him despite the also-strongly-disliked alternative Hillary Clinton likely still will,[1:4] and more teenagers will turn 18 and look forward to casting their first vote against him. The second, and more salient point, is that if the polls were to be believed,[1:5] Trump actually did worse when he was the center of attention. Trump will most likely not get to run against Clinton again, no matter how much he wants to re-litigate the 2016 election, and he now faces the reality of his actual presidency, as opposed to the now-theoretical Clinton one. It is abundantly clear that Trump feels like he can disregard low approval ratings now, but his most strident opponents will take heart from them, and potential allies will think twice about being associated with them, all of which will make his job harder.
As I discussed above, Trump has basically accomplished very little, especially compared to Barack Obama’s first month,[1:6] and the things he has tried have gone poorly. Being able to carry out a policy competently tends to make people think more highly of it; the Affordable Care Act arguably has never recovered from the botched launch of Healthcare.gov, and approval of the immigration ban did appear to decrease as its actual implementation turned out to be a disaster. Further, it doesn’t appear that he has made substantial progress towards his major promises: Congress has yet to figure out how to pay for his wall, there has been little effort towards the one area where he might find common ground with Democrats (infrastructure), and there is still no agreed-upon plan for the promised alternative to the ACA.[1:7]
It also seems that his administration is woefully unprepared for any major crisis; as of this writing he fired National Security Advisor Michael Flynn after 24 days and has no replacement, and reports suggest that key cabinet departments remain understaffed.[1:8] The conventional wisdom that suggests the final blow to the second Bush presidency was his botched handling of the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina might be mistaken, but it should be noted that poor handling of a crisis would hit at Donald Trump’s supposed strongest qualities: effective management and strong leadership.[1:9]
Instead, he continues to do the things that even some Trump voters dislike (early-morning tweets at people, TV shows, and department stores that displease him, for example), further reinforcing his poor temperament to those strenuously opposed to him and those who held their noses and voted for him for whatever reason.[1:10] Reports also suggests that he refuses to hire people who have publicly criticized him and even fires people who are later discovered to have done so,[1:11] which not only precludes one from hiring those people prominent enough that someone might care about their opinion, but also likely discourages others with more private reservations from applying.
It very much seems like Trump is falling back on what he knows: the perpetual reality show of the 2016 campaign. He is happy to serve as the villain who’s not here to make friends; but for the bulk of his persuadable supporters, they have specific expectations for what he will deliver. He has made promises that a king would have trouble fulfilling; alas, he is merely a president, and he needs help from more than his die-hard supporters to get anywhere close. If Donald Trump succeeds in delivering broad prosperity to America, enough people will ignore his defective character that he will probably win re-election. If he fails, however, there will not be enough people willing to give him the benefit of the doubt. Even the most successful reality shows lose their novelty after a while, and trying to run the show nonstop for the next four years might have America begging to cancel it.