Still Winning : Our Last Hope to Be Great Again (9781546085287)
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Certainly, Donald Trump’s insistence on approaching every problem anew can be mightily frustrating for supporters—a little like he is trying to reinvent the wheel every day. Some cringe when President Trump asks in his little-boy wonderment, why in the world do we have all of these nuclear weapons if we don’t intend to use them? Actually, that is a profoundly intelligent question and the answer is terrifyingly simple. We should not have all those weapons unless the world reasonably believes we really will use them.
Others freak out when President Trump wonders aloud why we don’t have huge military parades down Pennsylvania Avenue. For many of us, however, it is an interesting question.
Even some of Trump’s rare early supporters in Washington sometimes chafe under Trump’s refusal to play any of the routine campaign games or abide by any of the Washington political niceties. They need to keep in mind that he has never played by anybody else’s notions of protocol, and it is not surprising that he doesn’t respect the process and norms of regular political campaigns.
Truth is, he probably could not have done so if he tried. As all of Washington became obsessed with the silly canard about “collusion” between the Trump campaign and Russia, some of us would joke that the Trump campaign could not even manage to collude with itself. So, it was hilarious to imagine the campaign trying to collude with a giant foreign power that also happened to be an arch global enemy.
One experienced political operative, an observer who realized Donald Trump’s potential from the very beginning, became frustrated over how poorly the campaign communicated with people like herself who wanted to help. In Washington, these people are called “surrogates” and they go on television—often armed with information provided by campaigns—to make the best arguments on behalf of the candidate. Everybody does it and it all kind of equals out so that you have a type of proxy war going on over the airwaves among various spokespeople.
With a mixture of despair and amusement, my friend who wanted to help Trump was delighted when the campaign finally began sending people like her “talking points.” But when she read them, she was astonished. Never had she worked for any campaign that seemed to insist on doing everything—from the tiniest of little things to the biggest of big things—completely differently.
No matter what the issue at hand—Donald Trump’s position on taxes or immigration to the latest scandalous accusation—the Trump campaign’s “talking points” always began the same way.
First: “Donald Trump is a builder. He builds buildings.”
And then the “talking points” would go on to talk about the need to lower taxes or clamp down on illegal immigration.
To people in Washington and in politics generally, this was gibberish in a foreign language. But I maintain that it is exactly that kind of mentality directly from the candidate himself that got Trump elected. He was not just some glib and gifted speaker who had been a community organizer or a personal injury lawyer or a lifelong political hack. He was a business guy who builds buildings. And if you didn’t believe him, you could go to New York City or Las Vegas or Chicago and see it for yourself.
And no matter what President Obama might say, Trump did build those buildings.
It wasn’t just the little things that set Donald Trump and his presidential campaign apart from everybody else. It was the big things, too. Early on, friends of mine around Washington with whom I had always agreed on politics were aghast at Donald Trump. I can hear my friends railing now: “The man cannot be trusted! He says whatever he needs to say! He will destroy the Constitution!”
In all honesty, I did sometimes worry about where Trump would be on the Constitution. That is a pretty big deal to me. Watching Barack Obama nonchalantly shred the Constitution on a routine basis is a big reason why in 2015 I was willing to take a flier with the most outrageous, disruptive, and unpredictable candidate in my lifetime.
But I never bought that whole trope about how Donald Trump would trash the Constitution. After all, any guy who has been in as many lawsuits as Trump must surely cherish having a set of rules by which everyone must play. Otherwise, you never win in court and you never get what you want.
With President Trump, that has proven true.
From the very start of the Trump campaign, when veteran political reporters I had known for years seemed to be having nervous breakdowns in public nearly every day about something Donald Trump had done, I kept thinking about all the things President Obama had done. And all of his predecessors.
Combined, they had piled up more than $20 trillion in real debt upon our children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren. They could never reasonably be expected to pay it off in their lifetimes. That debt is even more unimaginably massive when you tally up all the unfunded obligations that the government owes people over the coming decades.
Meanwhile, the U.S. government has never been more gargantuan. It has become so powerful that it reaches into nearly every crevice of American life today. A farmer is prohibited from drawing water from a pond on his own land so that his own hogs might drink—without the probing approval of the federal government. A baker in Lakewood, Colorado, cannot operate a bakery without the federal government intruding. A peaceful farmer cannot sell fresh milk produced by his own cows without risking a federal SWAT team from the United States Department of Agriculture launching a predawn raid with armed commandos rounding up his sleeping family in their pajamas.
Yet, never has this same all-powerful federal government been less answerable to the American people. Legislators from both parties have gradually and gladly handed over more and more authority to the president in the White House—so long as that president is of the same party. But no matter which party the president might be in, he never surrenders back that authority when he leaves office.
The result is that the branch of government closest to the people—Congress generally and the House of Representatives specifically—has ceded more and more authority to the executive branch. Gone are the days when committee chairmen in Congress were celebrated for grinding the entire federal government to a halt in order to protect some constituent back home from the tyrannical hand of the federal government.
No matter Donald Trump’s imperfections, he was at least willing to question all the “wisdom” that has dominated the media complex for decades in Washington and led to this terrible state of affairs. He was at least willing to ask the uncomfortable questions. And, best of all, he was willing to listen carefully to the only people who matter: the voters.
Throughout the campaign, the Great White Media churned out silly story after silly story about an endless string of nonscandals. All of it was designed to make Donald Trump look unfit for the White House. “Unpresidential,” as they all liked to say.
Wisely, Trump embraced the moniker and pretty much vowed to serve as “unpresidentially” as possible. If “presidential” is what has gotten us into this mess over so many years, then let’s try “unpresidential” for a change. Obviously, detractors want to equate “unpresidential” with “unqualified” or “dangerous.” For them, I always thought a great Trump campaign bumper sticker would have been simply, “Vote Trump. You Can’t Screw It Up.”
It’s similar, in fact, to his message to black voters who have been taken advantage of, disrespected, and disregarded by the Democrat Party for more than a half century now: “What have you got to lose?”
One of the most obvious ways President Trump stands out from the rest of Washington politicians is his exhaustive use of Twitter. For enthusiastic supporters, our only concern is that he does not send enough messages over Twitter. For others, even many who work for him faithfully, they wish he would knock it off. It allows him to get drawn into unnecessary controversies that his campaign staff—and now his White House staff—has to handle.
This, of course, begs the larger question of what on earth campaign and administration staffers are supposed to spend their time doing other than helping explain and carry out the vision of the cand
idate or president they are working for. Perhaps the best example of President Trump’s adventurism over Twitter were his claims about the size of the crowd that attended his inauguration in January 2017.
He was pilloried by partisan detractors as well as almost everybody in the so-called mainstream media. They portrayed him as some kind of insecure, childish liar obsessed with unimportant things.
Well, let’s consider that a little more closely. For example, is crowd size unimportant? Obviously, looking back, the size of the crowds showing up for Donald Trump’s campaign rallies clearly predicted that he had tapped into something hugely popular and might win not only the Republican nomination, but the general election as well. Perhaps if all the experts in the media had spent a little more time paying attention to the enormous enthusiasm of those massive crowds showing up at Trump campaign rallies, they might not have been quite so shellacked with surprise on the night of the election.
Anyway, if crowd size is so unimportant, then why have CNN and the Washington Post and the New York Times spilled so many barrels of ink and electrified so many terabytes of words on the Internet desperately trying to knock down President Trump’s claims about the size of the crowd at his inauguration? Why would any organization supposedly dedicated to gathering the news spend so much time focusing on something that they themselves claim is so entirely irrelevant?
I actually do not believe President Trump’s focus on crowd size is unimportant. Nor do I believe it reveals some dangerous streak of childish narcissism. What everybody in the media and in our broken political system fails to understand is that President Trump’s focus on things like crowd size actually reveals something very positive and productive: He is a businessman who just might have, at some point, sported a sign in his office like this: “If You Can’t Measure It, You Can’t Manage It.”
The reason President Trump “obsesses” over things like crowd size is that it is a simple, measurable metric. It is a way for him to evaluate how well he is doing something, as compared to other people who are trying to do the same thing. It is why he wants the biggest plane and the best helicopter and the tallest building that offers the best taco bowls. It is why he cares about how many people follow him on Twitter.
You see, in Washington, everybody survives without anybody ever missing a lunch because there is no measurable metric by which people are objectively judged. It is all BS and “messaging” and posturing. Becoming a chief of staff for a member of Congress, for example, is like becoming a “made man” in the mafia. As a friend of mine says, you will never miss a lunch in this town again if you become a “made man” in either political party.
And so the beat goes on and everybody wrings their hands and complains about Donald Trump and his insistence on using Twitter to get out the messages that the media refuses to report. How humiliating it must be for the grand poohbahs of the media to be bypassed each and every day by a president unwilling to have his words and actions distorted by the irresponsible media.
One of President Trump’s most successful cabinet secretaries told me about how often people ask him what President Trump is really like in person, behind closed doors. The secretary laughed and said he always answers the same way.
“Are you on the Internet?” the cabinet secretary asks. “Ever heard of Twitter? Well, if you go on the Internet and find Twitter and look for President Trump’s tweets, read those and you’ll know exactly what President Trump is like in person, behind closed doors.”
This is, of course, completely true.
A solid two years into Trump’s presidency, Americans were treated to one of the most ridiculous stories ever produced about a sitting president. President Trump, some cutting-edge Internet sleuths reported, was spending an inordinate amount of his day in “executive time.” Too much time, anyway, as determined by these Internet sleuths.
This story broke like it was Watergate.
“President Donald Trump had about three times as much free time planned for last Tuesday as work time, according to his private schedule,” reported one team of reporters, breathlessly heralding that they had somehow gotten ahold of the president’s personal schedule.
“The president was slated for more than nine hours of ‘Executive Time,’ a euphemism for the unstructured time Trump spends tweeting, phoning friends, and watching television,” this team of reporters wrote on the Internet. “Official meetings, policy briefings, and public appearances—typically the daily work of being president—consumed barely more than three hours of his day.”
The most amazing part of this “story” to me was that two years into Trump’s presidency and more than three years after he had launched his presidential campaign, there were still reporters in Washington who were somehow surprised that this is a president who operates differently from other presidents. He has different work habits. He approaches things differently.
Duh.
One of the most ignorant, ill-informed, and misguided attacks on President Trump is that he is some kind of bullheaded autocrat who surrounds himself with yes-men and yes-women to whom he does not listen.
Anyone who has ever spent time around Trump can tell you what an absurd mischaracterization this is. It is certainly true that President Trump is capable of calling up people and launching into Heart of Darkness tirades about his political enemies or how dishonest the media is in covering him. Anybody who has ever watched President Trump at a campaign rally should already know that.
But more often than not, those personal phone calls to people involve him calling up to ask an endless array of questions about everything under the sun.
Riding home late one night with my brother after spending a week in Washington, I got an email from the White House. President Trump wanted to talk. I called and got patched through.
For thirty minutes as my brother drove us through the moonless dark of the foothills of rural Virginia from Nelson County to Pittsylvania County, President Trump peppered me with questions about the policy fights of the day, whether he was winning the political arguments and what voters were paying attention to.
Now, I would be the first to offer that President Trump has plenty smarter people than me to be talking to. Heck, his own gut political instincts are the best I have ever seen. But those political instincts are not by accident. He feeds and informs those instincts by being a voracious consumer of information from people he talks to.
“He doesn’t listen” is by far the most dishonest critique leveled against Donald Trump. How else do you think he enters politics with a campaign and a message more perfectly tailored to the Republican electorate than anything offered by the two dozen seasoned Republican politicians in the race?
He succeeded by being the most careful and calculating listener of anyone else in the field. At the same time, he nurtured the true confidence to make his own decisions and then remain faithful to that remarkable internal gyroscope that feeds and balances his political instincts.
I was covering Congress back before the whole Tea Party revolt pulverized the Republican Party. Establishment legislators in Washington still had a pretty firm grip on the Grand Old Party. But it was obvious that trouble was brewing. Republicans had enjoyed an historic “revolution” in the previous decade, winning control of the House and the Senate. George W. Bush had won the 2000 election and would go on to win reelection. Yet the federal government and the tentacles reaching deep into every facet of American life did not appear to be receding.
Whenever I interviewed a self-professed conservative Republican, I asked them all the same stock question. If the Republican Party gained enough control of Washington and you could eliminate three departments of the federal government in an instant, what would those be?
The response was as astonishing as it was dispiriting. Nearly every Republican I ever asked this just stared back, blinking. It was a question that had never occurred to them. It had never dawned on them that voters just might be serious about wanting to slash the federal bureaucracy.
Department of Labor? Gone. Education Department? Eliminated, with malice. U.S. Junk Mail Service? Gone.
U.S. Department of Transportation? Let the states deal with it. Defense Department? Keep that one but return to its original name: War Department.
Office of Management and Budget? I actually would not eliminate that one. I would suspend the department, fire every employee, and suspend the current OMB director until such time as they figured out how to balance the federal budget. I am sorry, but there are not even criminal enterprises that manage to continue operations after having racked up $22 trillion in debt.
Needless to say, when I interviewed self-described “conservative” Republicans in Congress and they could not even list three major parts of the federal government they would like to see eliminated, I was shocked. Clearly, this meant that the dreams of so many regular conservative voters that one day the federal Leviathan might get tamed were entirely unrealistic. Perhaps even more alarming, voters were electing Republicans under the clearly false impression that they were actually serious about the concept of limited government.
By the time Donald Trump got rolling in his campaign during the summer of 2015, I had these wonderful recurring fantasies. Everybody was so aghast that a reality TV star was making such a big splash. This was a guy who called employees into his conference room before the TV cameras and asked them rapid-fire questions, grilling them in the harshest fashion possible. And then, more often than not, he would jab a finger at them and declare: “You’re fired!”