Donald Trump and Jimmy Carter revisited, Part III: Responding to legislative failure

 Picking up on Part II, this is where we begin to see the most important distinctions between Donald Trump and Jimmy Carter as presidents.  In Part II, I elaborated on Nelson W. Polsby's model of party connections, and how an outsider's lack of connection to the national party can lead to a president's failure to bargain successfully with Congress, even under unified government.  Carter failed to convince a Democratic House and Senate to pass much of his agenda, even with a 60-seat majority in the Senate after the 1976 election.  To be sure, that majority included more ideological diversity than it would today, but still.  Carter was a little out of his depth.

Trump, of course, has always been way out of his depth.  He has never been anything other than a fraud and a con man.  Being a con man, as I often remind people, doesn't require being intelligent.  If you are being chased by a bear, you don't have to be faster than the bear.  You just have to be faster than the guy next to you.  Similarly, if you are a con man, you don't actually have to be intelligent.  You just have to be smarter than the mark.

And the American public?  Let's just say that if I'm running from a bear next to these people, I like my chances.

Trump came into the White House with no knowledge of public policy, no desire to learn, no understanding of the legislative process, detested by his own party's congressional leadership, and contrary to his Art of the Deal charade, completely uninformed about how actual negotiation works.  Predictably, then, he was unable to achieve any significant legislative victories beyond what any Republican empty vessel-- the Grover Norquist body-with-a-pen-- would have "achieved."  Congress passed a tax cut, and Trump signed it without any input on its structure.  And probably without any knowledge, illiterate as he is.

Trump's inability to convince even a Republican Congress to pass policies such as his vanity wall meant that Trump broke from the Carter path.  He turned to executive orders.  In order to fund his wall-- mostly still unbuilt because Mexico was never going to fund it, and anyone who ever believed that is intellectually slow enough to be eaten by a bear-- Trump exploited a loophole in federal law to declare a phony emergency on illegal immigration, while simultaneously admitting that it wasn't actually a national emergency.

He then usurped Congress's Article I powers to appropriate federal money, moving it from a project funded by Congress to his own vanity wall under the false premise of a national emergency.  I am not going to bother engaging with any of the disingenuous, unserious arguments attempting to construct a legal basis for Trump's actions here.  The Constitution is as clear as can be on this, and plenty of congressional Republicans knew this, acknowledged this, and pointed out what would happen should a Democrat decide to exploit the precedent for such a gross violation of the constitutional separation of powers.

Carter never would have considered anything like this, and it demonstrates a basic point about the difference between Trump and Carter.

Like Carter, Trump is inept, but unlike Carter, he is an authoritarian.  So, when faced with the consequences of his own ineptitude, he turned to clearly and grossly unconstitutional usurpations of Congress's Article I authority.  Why?  By his own telling, he believes that Article II gives him the power to do whatever he wants.  Does it?  Of course not.  Donald Trump is simply illiterate.  In addition to being an authoritarian.  Carter was highly literate, and not an authoritarian.  So, when faced with his own failures, Carter just... accepted.  In a system with separation of powers and checks & balances, though, that's the right thing to do.

The idea of unconstitutionally usurping Congress's Article I powers shouldn't be on the table.  And back in 2016, I didn't see it coming.  I keep coming back to the pigeon playing chess analogy, but the basic problem is that I didn't see what the inept authoritarian would do.  It never occurred to me that he would try that.  It was so far outside the past experience of this country that... I didn't see it coming.  Silly me, trying to think like a chess player when faced with a pigeon who just shits all over everything.

I went wrong.  I saw Trump as Carter in the making because I didn't see how he would respond to his inevitable legislative failures.

Yet, Carter faced pushback from his own party to a much greater degree, both within Congress, and within the electorate.  Both are important here.  Support mechanisms have built up around Donald Trump that have allowed him to operate far outside his constitutional authority.  Those are coming next.  In a way, Trump's authoritarianism is a response to his own failure and ineptitude, and the perversity is that the support mechanisms that have built up around him are there to prop up a failure.