Trumpled

Is Donald Trump Losing His Juice?

The president will address Congress for the first time from an unusual position: humbled.
donald trump
Donald Trump at the Boeing South Carolina facilities on February 17, 2017 in North Charleston.By Sean Rayford/Getty Images.

This weekend, amazingly, the selection of Tom Perez as head of the Democratic National Committee and the chaos at the Academy Awards managed to push Donald Trump out of the headlines for 30 seconds. Perhaps this is part of a trend toward regular breathing. Back in December, Republicans were scared of Trump. Democrats were scared of Trump. Everyone was scared of Trump. Today, conservative critics are getting louder. Democrats are vowing to wage war against him. Much of the federal bureaucracy wishes to undermine him. The intelligence community has been making veiled allegations against him. The major news outlets seem determined to fell him. Trump’s approval ratings are also poor. Many polls put his approval ratings at under 40 percent and his disapproval ratings north of 50 percent. It’s a wonder he can achieve anything at all.

Indeed, Trump’s concrete impact has been modest. As Zachary Karabell recently wrote in Politico, “There is a wide gap, a chasm even, between what the administration has said and what it has done.” Congress has passed no major legislation. Immigration enforcement has been stepped up, but deportations have been mainly of people with criminal records and long-standing removal orders. The White House caused a furor with a three-month ban on arrivals from seven Middle Eastern and African nations, but the order got struck down by the courts, and refugees have continued to settle here largely as before. Trump has made noises about tariffs and infrastructure bills and tax cuts and border walls and Obamacare repeals, but Congress has yet to act seriously on any of them. All of which leads us to a question: Is Trump getting less and less powerful?

VIDEO: What Happens at a Donald Trump Protest?

When you’re doing big things, there’s no getting around the need for mass approval. Trump wants to change the Republican Party fundamentally, which means he also wants to change the Democratic Party fundamentally. In theory, Trump could do this by uniting the populist left and populist right—by slowing down or reversing trade deals, raising some trade barriers, getting a lot of infrastructure projects going, and defeating the cheap-labor lobby by enforcing the law on immigration and wages. In practice, the populist left can’t stand him. It sees the president, fairly or not, as an avatar of white nationalism, and unless Trump conducts some unprecedented outreach—of a sort that’s hard to imagine—he’ll build no bridges to the other side. This prevents a realignment and locks the Republicans and Democrats into their current identities, which is how they prefer it anyway. Like a body rejecting an organ transplant, Washington is rejecting the new president.

That leaves Trump with only two sorts of leverage: his Republican fan base and the powers explicitly assigned to him in the Constitution.

The hard-core Republican fan base makes up a small share of Americans—maybe a quarter—but it’s formidable. Back in May 2016, Trump claimed to Megyn Kelly that he didn’t view himself as powerful, an assertion that struck me as alarmingly lacking in self-awareness. But now I realize Trump was just being dishonest. (Phew!) We can now read that Trump had already once threatened to unleash his “beautiful Twitter account” on Kelly, and, when he did so, Kelly experienced a bruising ordeal. Republicans, according to some reports, are scared of having the same thing happen to them. Another Republican fear is that of getting a primary challenger, despite the low risk of ouster. It can hurt to be attacked from the other side, but not nearly as much as it hurts to get attacked from your own side.

Whether Trump’s supporters are of a number and intensity sufficient to force Republicans to abandon previous stances on war and trade is a question Trump hasn’t yet chosen to probe—failure would be crippling—but some indications are in his favor. Well over 80 percent of Republican voters say they’re happy with the president’s performance so far. That’s one big reason why he held yet another rally in Florida in late February: it was a show of force to his fellow Republicans. Because Trump must rely almost exclusively on his own party to get legislation passed, he’s doing his best to use his fans to turn up the heat.

Trump’s second source of clout is what the Constitution gives him. The veto is a powerful tool, as is the executive order. Commanding the armed forces is no small power either. (Technically, he can even temporarily adjourn Congress, although no one ever does this, and if Trump tried it—well, just imagine.) If he wanted to, Trump could reverse almost every executive order issued by Barack Obama. If he wanted to play rough, he could even threaten to undo all protections for recipients of Obama’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals unless he got concessions from Democrats on boosting border security.

But Trump, for all his brutishness, is less cold-blooded than that. Despite a record of taking advantage of little people (unpaid contractors, fleeced students), he feels he’s fighting for them, and he thinks of himself as a “nice person.” Officially, he also rejects hardball methods. “I believe that the key to striking a deal is persuasion, not power,” he writes (or his ghost writer does) in Trump 101: The Way to Success. “Present your ideas in a way that will not intimidate your adversaries or make them feel that they are being forced to surrender.” While Trump has the legal option to make some bloodcurdling threats, he probably won’t. Trump has said nasty things about Democrats and journalists and others, but so far he seems to be going the schmoozing route, with Democrats getting invited to the White House for bowling.

Currently, Trump’s plan for gaining leverage seems to hinge on satisfying his base and winning over a sliver of new people. He would benefit from having a showdown with some widely reviled opponent and coming out on top. But he has no enemy as perfect as Obama did when rich financiers were making demands for government support despite having tanked the economy. (That Obama chose to squander this chance—indulging these bankers rather than bringing them to heel—is a separate matter.) Perhaps he thinks bashing the press will get him somewhere—and journalists are admittedly unbeatable when it comes to unwarranted self-regard—but there’s no way to win against the media, short of suppressing it Putin-style, and the likelihood of that is on par with Paul Krugman taking a faculty position at Trump University. He could pick a fight with a major foreign power, but so far he’s been far more level-headed on foreign policy than many of his fellow politicians. (Do you really prefer the statesmanship of Lindsey Graham, who recently vowed to make 2017 “a year of kicking Russia in the ass”? Visionary stuff.) So we’re left with a president who seems to be slowing down and surveying the terrain, with occasional breaks to rile people up with talk.

Does all this mean that Trump is losing power? Yes, possibly, or he’s at best holding steady. He has lost capital over the botched travel ban, and he’s still operating without a broad mandate. Overall, therefore, Trump seems to be trying to gauge the landscape and spending a lot of time thinking about his next move. So we wait and watch. He could yet become a lot more powerful, or he could weaken. Either way, he’s probably becoming less scary. And that much is good.