In the past two weeks, Donald Trump attacked the U.S. intelligence community, CNN, Meryl Streep, the nonpartisan Office of Government Ethics, and, just in time for Martin Luther King Day, Civil Rights icon John Lewis.
If you were hoping the end of the campaign would prompt him to be more presidential, you got your answer.
But, despite considerable hand-wringing from the usual suspects, none of this will hurt him.
The reason why is simple: his coalition is intact.
Trump embraces a truth every previous president rejected as insufficient: once you’re in the White House, it’s fine if large swaths of Americans don’t like you as long as they can’t stop you.
Whose Support Does Trump Need?
Trump won the election thanks to two main constituencies:
- Trumpian populists, who like the reality show combativeness of his Twitter account and press conference performances
- Regular Republicans, who don’t, but put aside concerns about his behavior because he’ll advance their domestic policy agenda
As a January 10 Quinnipiac poll shows, both groups remain firmly behind him.
Only Republicans (76% – 12%) and whites without a college degree (49% – 34%) are net positive. Everyone else disapproves.
But for practical purposes, these are the only groups that matter.
That’s because most constraints on the presidency are norms, not laws. If Trump doesn’t care what his critics think, and if Congress doesn’t check him, there’s not much anyone can do.
Consider this example: a broad bipartisan group of government ethicists believe Trump’s business ties place him in violation of the Constitution’s Emoluments Clause, which prevents any officeholder from getting something of value from a foreign state.
But the enforcement mechanism for this anti-bribery rule is impeachment.
Congress could use less drastic means to push Trump to divest from his business interests, such as refusing to hold hearings on his nominees.
However, the Republican majorities in the House and Senate won’t buck Trump — at least for now — because they want him to sign their bills on healthcare and taxes, and because they’re afraid of losing a primary if they anger the Trumpian populists.
Understanding Trumpian Populism
Populists claim their authority comes from “the people,” and the will of the people supersedes established norms, or even laws.
But “the people” are really just some of the people. As a political force, populism relies on excluding and fighting against other elements of society. These can be powerless undesirables, such as recent immigrants, or an entrenched establishment.
In American history, the powerful other is often economic elites (e.g. William Jennings Bryan’s “Cross of Gold” speech), and a common post-election narrative characterizes Trump’s appeal along those lines.
In particular, progressives, such as Robert Reich, insist that left-wing economic goals they’ve long championed are what white working class voters wanted, but didn’t get, from Hillary Clinton.
For example, Lawrence Lessig argues that Hillary would have captured some of the populist energy Trump channeled if she campaigned more on public funding for Congressional elections.
However, Trump’s populism is primarily cultural, rather than economic.
His supporters care more about political correctness and immigration than campaign finance reform.
Anger at cultural, rather than economic elites is how they could rally behind a billionaire, and why they don’t object as he stocks his cabinet with Goldman Sachs vets and CEOs.
And it explains why every fight Trump picked over the last week won’t hurt him with his populist supporters.
It’s what they voted for.
Rep. John Lewis
Done to excess, political correctness is about policing speech and stifling disagreement. But the core idea is about respecting others.
Among the establishment — Republican and Democratic politicians, the mainstream media, etc. — there’s a widespread consensus that Lewis deserves respect for his role in the Civil Rights movement.
But Lewis is a Democratic Congressman who called Trump’s presidency illegitimate. That means he’s the establishment. The elite. Them.
Respecting Lewis is politically correct. Trump responded by calling him all talk and no action.
Meryl Streep
This is an easy one, since Streep is Hollywood royalty and criticized Trump (though not by name) in her speech accepting the Golden Globe for lifetime achievement.
But it’s noteworthy that Streep focused her criticism on the time Trump mocked a disabled reporter:
And this instinct to humiliate, when it’s modeled by someone in the public platform, by someone powerful, it filters down into everybody’s life, because it kind of gives permission for other people to do the same thing. Disrespect invites disrespect. Violence incites violence. When the powerful use their position to bully others, we all lose.
In other words, Streep criticized Trump for being politically incorrect. Trump responded by calling her overrated.
The Intelligence Community
Director of National Intelligence James Clapper told the Senate Armed Services Committee that Russia hacked the DNC and senior Democratic operatives and passed on the information to Wikileaks.
Trump responded by disputing the claim, denigrating the intelligence community’s credibility, and holding up Julian Assange as more trustworthy.
This wasn’t politically incorrect in the same way as Trump’s attacks on Congressman Lewis and New York Times reporter Serge Kovaleski. But the CIA and NSA are elite institutions, and denigrating them is another example of Trump attacking the establishment in a way you just do not do.
You do not say an activist who endured beatings to advance Civil Rights is all talk. You do not call one of the greatest actresses of all time overrated. And you most certainly do not trust Julian Assange over American intelligence agencies.
The Lewis and Streep fights don’t really matter, but a feud between the White House and the CIA hinders national security.
But for a Trumpian populist, national security comes from the leader projecting strength, not from things like a smoothly functioning intelligence process.
The Press
On January 11, Trump held a press conference in which he insulted CNN, and refused to answer questions from CNN’s reporter, because it ran a story about a dossier alleging that Russia has compromising information on the president-elect.
Numerous media figures fear attacks like this undermine the important role the press plays in American democracy. For example, FOX’s Shepard Smith:
Though we at Fox News cannot confirm CNN’s report, it is our observation that its correspondents followed journalistic standards and that neither they nor any other journalists should be subjected to belittling and delegitimizing by the president-elect of the United States.
But the most remarkable part of the press conference? Trump’s staffers standing in the back, cheering him on and jeering unfriendly reporters.
It was reminiscent of Republican primary debates. Trump would insult another Republican candidate, or a past Republican president. Most of the crowd reacted unfavorably. But a loud minority whooped in support.
Party unity, the debate process, the fourth estate as a check on government; all less important than seeing political and media elites taken down a peg.
Besides, they’d argue, CNN doesn’t deserve respect, because it supported Hillary during the campaign and lied about Trump’s ties to Russia.
Office of Government Ethics
Of all these examples, the fight over Trump’s conflicts of interest best illuminates the political dynamics at work. It’s also the one Trump participated in the least, perhaps to avoid drawing attention to the issue.
At the news conference, Trump had his lawyer, Sheri Dillon, tell reporters that continuing to own Trump International is not an unconstitutional conflict of interest:
These people are wrong. This is not what the Constitution says, paying for a hotel is not a gift or present and has nothing to do with an office. It is not an Emolument.
Anyone who argued that the Clinton Foundation could create conflicts of interest (as I did) should see Trump International as a problem. If foreigners being able to donate to the president’s charity is ethically suspect, then foreigners being able to patronize the president’s business is also problematic.
But when Walter Shaub, director of the Office of Government Ethics, dismissed Dillon’s argument and repeated his call for Trump to divest, House Oversight Committee chair Jason Chaffetz summoned Shaub to Capital Hill for an unusual closed-door meeting and threatened OGE’s funding.
As George W. Bush’s chief ethics lawyer Richard Painter told the New York Times:
They are strong-arming them. They are obviously very upset the Office of Government Ethics is leaning on Trump and not willing to jam through his nominees. It is political retaliation.
No Congressional Republicans have publicly disagreed with Dillon or Chaffetz. Either they don’t have a problem with Trump’s sons running his business, or they believe it would be politically disadvantageous to say otherwise.
If Trumpian populism was about economics, such blatant potential for corruption would destroy the president-elect’s popularity. But his supporters remain as committed as ever.
What It Means for American Politics
Trumpian populists feel disrespected by cultural elites. They like Trump precisely because he sticks it to people like Lewis and Streep, and institutions like CNN, the CIA, and the Office of Government Ethics, and gets away with it.
These attacks aren’t incidental to Trump’s populist appeal. They’re not something his core supporters have to endure to get the economic policies they want. They’re the whole point.
And, since Trump is the avatar of their populist anger, anyone who disrespects him or gets in his way is part of the establishment and warrants attack.
As Trump astutely noted a year ago, “I could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose voters.” The Trumpian populists are all in.
That leaves Congressional Republicans. As long as they back the president-elect, he’s untouchable.
Some are Trump supporters themselves. And any up for reelection in 2018 will remain afraid of a presidential tweet turning them into enemies of the people.
Trump outperformed many of them in their own districts, and challenging him risks damaging their reelection prospects. As one senior House Republican, on the condition of anonymity, recently told Politico:
Now that Trump has won, [the House Freedom Caucus is] irrelevant. They’re not going to go against Trump; he’s stronger in their own districts than all of them.
But some are surely biting their tongues because they know party unity is necessary to repeal Obamacare, eliminate regulations, and cut taxes. Once the early legislative flurry is complete, they may stand up to Trump.
But not before.
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