The Atlantic: Trump the Bulldozer

But over the past year and change, there’s been a shift: Trump, having shed himself of the aides most likely to try to divert him or change his mind, has followed through on several of the biggest unfulfilled threats I highlighted back then. The catch is that while Trump is getting his way, many of these policies are not turning out as well as the president hoped—as illustrated by severe market jitters on Monday over the escalating trade war between the U.S. and China. [...]

This is the template for what has happened in several of the cases where Trump had appeared to fold but has since followed through. Aides who felt he was acting either against the national interest or against his own interest have been shipped out: Cohn, Defense Secretary James Mattis, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster, Chief of Staff John Kelly. They’ve been replaced by advisers who either encourage Trump, like Navarro, or are determined to enable rather than encumber him, such as acting Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney and the television pundit Larry Kudlow, who succeeded Cohn.

In retrospect, the May 2018 announcement that Trump would withdraw from the nuclear-nonproliferation deal with Iran looks like a turning point. Trump had lambasted the deal as a candidate, but once entering office, he repeatedly recertified Iranian compliance with the agreement, bowing to the will of his aides. He seemed more ready to fire aides than to keep but overrule them. But starting with his withdrawal from the deal, Trump has begun following his instincts more fully.[...]

Negotiations with North Korea have gotten nowhere after two summits—though to his credit Trump did walk away from the second meeting, in Vietnam, when he felt no progress was being made. And Trump is now pursuing diplomatic negotiations with Iran on what appears to be, as with NAFTA and USMCA, just a rewrite of the deal that was previously in place, though whether anything will come of the push is unclear.

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The New York Times: The Failures of Anti-Trumpism

We have persuaded no one. Trump’s approval rating is around 40 percent, which is basically unchanged from where it’s been all along.

We have not hindered him. Trump has more power than he did a year ago, not less. With more mainstream figures like H. R. McMaster, Rex Tillerson and Gary Cohn gone, the administration is growing more nationalist, not less.

We have not dislodged him. For all the hype, the Mueller investigation looks less and less likely to fundamentally alter the course of the administration.

We have not contained him. Trump’s takeover of the Republican Party is complete. Eighty-nine percent of Republicans now have a positive impression of the man. According to an NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll, 59 percent of Republicans consider themselves more a supporter of Trump than of the Republican Party. [...]

Why has Trump dominated? Part of it is tribalism. In any tribal war people tend to bury individual concerns and rally to their leader and the party line. As late as 2015, Republican voters overwhelmingly supported free trade. Now they overwhelmingly oppose it. The shift didn’t happen because of some mass reappraisal of the evidence; it’s just that tribal orthodoxy shifted and everyone followed.

Part of the problem is that anti-Trumpism has a tendency to be insufferably condescending. For example, my colleague Thomas B. Edsall beautifully summarized the recent academic analyses of what personality traits supposedly determine Trump support.  

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FiveThirtyEight: Which Power Centers In The Trump Administration Still Have Power?

But recent developments suggest the power couple is running low on wattage. Two White House aides who were close to the pair resigned. (Hicks and Kushner press aide Josh Raffel). Kushner’s access to classified information has been curtailed. And Ivanka Trump’s proposal to create a national paid leave program for new parents has stalled. Whether they keep working at the White House or opt at some point to return to New York, “Javanka” is having fairly limited influence in Trump’s Washington. [...]

Still, much of Trump’s national security agenda is little different from the perspective of Arizona Sen. John McCain, long a leader in the Republican Party on defense issues. Trump, who suggested during the campaign that the U.S. military was too involved in conflicts abroad, has increased the number of troops in Afghanistan and kept up the U.S. policy of using drones to target terrorists abroad. Aside from his bombastic rhetoric and his policy on Russia, much of Trump’s approach is fairly normal for a Republican on national security issues. [...]

And second, the number of departures from the administration should not obscure a broader story of policy stability. Cohn is leaving, and he was perhaps the administration’s most important figure on economic policy. But the dominant figures on other issues remain, including Mattis (national security), Miller (immigration), Pence (abortion and priorities of social conservatives), Pruitt (the environment) and Sessions (criminal justice). Trump may seem erratic. But generally, his policy preferences — perhaps shaped by these powerful advisers — are somewhat predictable.

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FiveThirtyEight: Four Reasons That Gary Cohn’s White House Resignation Is Different

That Cohn resigned suggests that Trump is serious about implementing these tariffs, despite resistance from fellow Republicans and the business community. This is not like Trump talking about supporting gun control, only to backtrack soon after. Trump has long favored new tariffs, appears to be acting on that policy preference and didn’t stop pushing in that direction when his top economic adviser objected so strongly that he quit. Of course, this is Trump, so he could always reverse course, but so far he appears more serious about following through on tariffs than on his other more unconventional views.

Trump is breaking with GOP orthodoxy in a big way — Cohn isn’t the only person who objects to these tariffs. House Speaker Paul Ryan, who usually avoids direct criticism of the president, went public with his opposition to the tariffs. So has Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, who has largely aligned himself on policy with the president since Trump entered office. [...]

As I said before, this is Donald Trump, so he could decide next week to drop the tariffs idea and hire another person from Goldman Sachs to replace Cohn — or even ask Cohn himself to come back. But I doubt it. Instead, I will be curious — with Cohn ostensibly leaving over tariffs — whether Trump will take additional steps to implement his vision in his second year as president, even if he has to dump some well-respected aides along the way.

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FiveThirtyEight: Bannon May Be Out, But Nationalism Probably Isn’t

More than a decade before he was the president, Trump complained that the U.S. was being ripped off in trade deals, and now, he is pushing his administration to reconsider such agreements. He was touting his proposal for a border wall well before Bannon formally joined the Trump presidential campaign. In office, Trump praised John Kelly’s work as homeland security secretary in deporting undocumented immigrants and then promoted Kelly to chief of staff. In a 2011 interview with the Christian Broadcasting Network, Trump said that there was a “Muslim problem” and that the Quran “teaches some very negative vibe.” It’s not clear if Bannon urged Trump to make remarks this week suggesting that white supremacists were on an equal moral footing with people protesting racial injustice. But Trump made racially charged comments before Bannon started working for him, most notably his repeated (and false) claims that Barack Obama was not born in the U.S. [...]

So will Bannon’s exit change anything? Well, the administration’s internal feuds could be less tense and less public. Bannon and his allies viewed themselves as advancing the true views of the president while arguing that other members of the administration were trying to impose establishment views on Trump. That fight often played out in public. Bannon-aligned staffers on the National Security Council, for example, were allegedly the unnamed sources behind stories that attacked national security adviser H.R. McMaster. Several of those aides were pushed out a few weeks ago. Bannon aide Sebastian Gorka has issued statements on foreign policy that contradicted Secretary of State Rex Tillerson’s views. Gorka is rumored to be on the way out as well. Bannon himself gave a long interview to The American Prospect in which he publicly disagreed with the administration’s North Korea policy. He is now gone. [...]

That said, even with Bannon out, Trump’s administration still includes at least seven power centers. (Virtually all the staffers who were aligned with Trump’s first chief of staff, Reince Priebus, have departed, effectively eliminating the “Party Wing” of the White House. I think the Bannon Wing remains, even if its namesake is gone.) Trump’s administration contains a weird mix of strong conservatives (the wing led by Vice President Mike Pence), Wall Street types (White House National Economic Council Director Gary Cohn), foreign policy hawks (Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley) and his family members (Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump). These groups disagree with one another (Kushner and Ivanka Trump are less conservative on issues like abortion and LGBT rights than is Pence, for instance) and with Trump (his foreign policy team is much more skeptical of Russia than the president is). The federal bureaucracy is likely to remain in some tension with Trump, and figures like Kelly and Tillerson still have powerful jobs, even if they don’t fit into an obvious wing.

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