Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
How Trump’s Politics Betrayed Him and All of Us
On June 6, I wrote a post about the dangers of Trump following the Bush political playbook, as he does, and how that could trip him up. The parallels between W. Bush political strategy and Trump’s political strategy are uncanny. Further, the Left reacted to both men in almost the same way. We are still, for all the talk of Hope and Change and Draining the Swamp, in a Bush-Clinton Family political moment with the Republicans and Democrats both running different versions of Bush and Clinton when they aren’t running someone with that name.
In my previous post, I wrote that the danger for Trump would be the mainstream media finding a weakness in his aggressive, fighting tendencies or lack of knowledge about our norms. In his child separation policy, the media found a perfect and telling issue to hammer Trump and force him to fold.
Trump’s misunderstanding here is similar to W. Bush’s mistake in nominating Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court in 2005. Bush lost his base and lost the Democrats provoking a crisis right after his triumphant re-election, that made people question one of Bush’s greatest political assets, his leadership. In Bush’s case because he was not pursuing any kind of Conservative ideology but selling himself, his style, and his transactional ability to get some Conservative agenda items passed, Miers seemed a smart choice for the Supreme Court.
Bush, much as Trump, sold himself as a deal maker and able to work across the aisle to get things done. When he came in the first time he managed to get education reform passed with Edward Kennedy and now, at the start of his second term, it made sense to Bush to get a Supreme Court nomination passed with strong bi-partisan support. Surely, the Conservatives would follow him and back him on this? The people were voting for Bush and his sensibilities not for Conservative ideology, right? Wrong; it turned out. As much as the Republicans were a party of Bush, at the time, they were not going to surrender on this and Bush was forced to back down and name someone of talent and Conservative integrity to the Supreme Court.
Trump is making a similar mistake. Unfamiliar with many of the issues he addresses, he calculates things out politically and how they affect his “brand” as a politician. With the child separation policies, I can see why he thought it might be a winner. Getting tough on the border, enforcing the law and discouraging illegal immigration are all things that he was elected to get done and his child separation policy does all those things.
Americans hate being cold, cruel and unkind. America is a land of political contradictions on all kinds of issues. Americans often become passive militarily and want to withdraw from the world. We hate getting into other people’s business and we rather everyone just left everyone else alone to get on with making money. This was most defiantly true in 2008 for instance. These themes are often a winning political message but the minute, second even, this policy makes America look weak, the American people become bloody-minded warmongers ready to take the fight anywhere and to anyone who thought we were weak. The shock of this shift in public mood has often wrong-footed politicians. When they recognize and understand it, they can lead and guide this switch of opinion to great political success.
As with immigration. Many Americans, enough of them at the very least to elect Trump President, were tired of uncontrolled immigration at the border. They sensed that our leaders and business elites playing “normal” Americans for fools and that our laws were dead letters on the border. When Trump is attacking this, he has a lot of support; when the media elites go against him on these issues, they get little traction. This attitude can only hold as long as Americans perceive themselves as the victim and not as the villain.
Trump, with little ideology to guide him, lacking understanding in the American character and not very experienced at politics (though extremely talented at elections), fell right into a perfect storm of separating children from their families at the border and turning the American people from saps who are being played into the cruel villain. Americans, as Reagan understood best of all, love to play the hero. We hate, hate to be the villain.
This is not a large mistake and can be fixed. Trump, for all his “fighting” ability, seems to be backing down and retreating from his policy quickly. Politically that is good, in the moment, but for the long term it is troubling. The administration had no solid plan for why they had to do this, and so had trouble explaining themselves. Because of that, they could not take advantage of the Leftists overstating their case and calling us Nazi Germany for temporarily separating families. This is the kind of mistake that will often happen to administration with no well-formed ideology and simply doing what the boss wants done.
Third, it shows the administration is not thinking through their policies for what is best for the country and the problem at hand but viewing things through the optics of support on each issue. Trump and his administration could have put together a zero-tolerance policy that was effective, provoked over-the-top leftist outrage, was good for our border policy and was morally and practically defensible. The fact that neither Trump nor any of his team thought this policy through does not speak well of them.
At a basic human level, this policy was going to dramatically impact and harm innocent children and non-violent parents in a very painful way. The Trump administration seems to have given all that little thought. That is not the Conservative way, it is no way to do politics, and it leads to evil results.
Bush made this kind of mistake at the beginning of his second term. While he recovered from the Miers nomination, he was vulnerable to Katrina and the chaos in Iraq. All of this probably helped scuttle his Social Security reform.
Trump’s mistake is more severe. He messed up one of the most basic of American political truths. Americans sympathize and often reward a politician for being too compassionate on an issue and then getting tough. It is a story that Americans love to tell themselves embodied in the old saying, “Never start a fight but always finish one.” Americans don’t like a tough policy that is implemented in the wrong way. If we are tough we have to get it right because we love the powerful to get their comeuppance.
If Trump starts out too tough and has to back off, he looks weak — and weakness for Trump is political death. To be tough, one has to be competent and the Trump administration has been anything but competent on this issue. Trump is now in a dangerous political moment. If he continues to appear weak, his administration is doomed. But if he stays tough and wrong, he will be destroyed.
It will be interesting to see how he handles this test … and we aren’t even at his first midterm yet.
Published in Immigration
I disagree with your use of the term “child separation policy,” although I do agree that this could have been handled better, and likely have achieved similar ends, with more foresight and planning. But let’s also not forget that the matter has been demagogued to death.
Well said.
Thank you sir!
Ok but I did not know how else to phrase the problematic policy in another way. I did not think it pejorative but descriptive.
Oh I forgot this. True it has been demagogued to death but the policy lent itself to that very thing and while we could have normally took advantage of this the policy flaws are so severe here that we can’t. We are dealing with real people, often times in real distress and that fact was not fully thought through and American horror at the policy results here is justified.
The degree of demagoguing is not justified by the policy IMO. We have a right to expect a reasonable presentation of the issues, and, most importantly, how we got here. It’s likely the “horror” would be lessened if we received one, especially considering the relative lack of outrage when Obama did something very similar with a significant number of children.
That said, the Administration should well have anticipated that they would not receive anything close to an objective assessment of causes and effects, which goes back to your point about thinking a policy through.
What is the difference between doomed and destroyed in this case?
Bush also made a similar mistake. The mainstream media will do nothing that they are not forced to do for the Republicans. I remember my great frustration that Bush though the success of the Surge would speak for itself and the media just went silent and the Surge didn’t “speak” at all.
Imagine that Trump started the policy and on the first day went to Congress asking for a fix to holding families together. Forcing the Democrats to advocate for the release of everyone with a kid at the border into America and Trump saying he just wants to enforce our laws in a humane way. What a great fight to have! It would have been good politics, split the Democrats, made Democrats up for election squirm and put the Democrats on the clock to fix the problem, before any child was ever separated from their parents. And best of all it would have been a good policy.
Instead we got the mess we are in now…
But how could an administration that likes to hamhandly imply that all migrants are MS-13 gang members have possibly overlooked this fact? Trump’s own demagoguery on the issue created this blind spot or intensified it. And now their biggest worry is that it looks bad for them, further betraying their lack of empathy for these people.
To my ear destroyed sound more immediate. Doomed is something that can unfold over a longer period of time. I see Trump being exposed as being weak would be “dooming” his administration slowly over time. Standing firm on this policy now and fighting(!) will “destroy” him right now. He is in a tough spot he can escape it, I think, but he put himself and his administration in danger for no good reason.
Yep. I hate that our politicians since Bush I have concentrated almost all their skill on getting elected and pay very little attention to governing. As Bush I showed getting elected is important but the most important thing is how you govern, what you actually accomplish. In that regard we have had a bad run of Presidents and in this one way Trump is right in line with Clinton, Bush and Obama.
“Imply.” That’s always an interesting choice of a word.
And perhaps that blind spot was at least partially created by the previous Administration showing the same “lack of empathy” to modest criticism.
Trump is going to detain both the parents and the kids. This both keeps families together and enforces zero tolerance. And when the courts intervene, it’s back to family separation. Only this time, it’s court-ordered family separation.
That could have worked too. Not the best way I think but better than what Trump actually did.
Did I end up on the Main feed somehow by mistake of is the website just being funky….Not that I am complaining mind you…
I believe it would violate the much discussed Flores consent decree. Since it now appears I’m writing for the Main Feed, I should say that’s an off-the-cuff thought.
This is what he just did.
My understanding is that it will force catch and release for families at least. Since the courts have already ruled you can’t detain them for longer than 20 days (I think).
So all the courts have to do is just rule that the old settlements and rulings apply. Then Trump is just back in the same position he was before they started doing this.
Also I just saw that he has issued a new executive order stopping the separation. In classical disorganized trump fashion they apparently had a typo in the title of the order…is Kelly on vacation or something?
Did he follow through with that. I heard him float it earlier but was not sure he followed through. I don’t think that helps him much now but if he had started that way it would have been better than what he did. But being better than his first policy is a very low bar to hop over.
Thus, inviting court intervention . . .
Which is court-ordered separation of families, no?
Very well stated. This fiasco is not unlike the first two “Muslim Bans” which were not well thought out, and created chaos at airports as people in the air were turned away. (The third “Muslim Ban” finally removed the errors caused by the first two “Muslim Bans.” Finally.)
From the end of the post:
Trump’s mistake is more severe. He messed up one of the most basic of American political truths. Americans sympathize and often reward a politician for being too compassionate on an issue and then getting tough. It is a story that Americans love to tell themselves embodied in the old saying, “Never start a fight but always finish one.” Americans don’t like a tough policy that is implemented in the wrong way. If we are tough we have to get it right because we love the powerful to get their comeuppance.
If Trump starts out too tough and has to back off, he looks weak — and weakness for Trump is political death. To be tough, one has to be competent and the Trump administration has been anything but competent on this issue. Trump is now in a dangerous political moment. If he continues to appear weak, his administration is doomed. But if he stays tough and wrong, he will be destroyed.
I hope that Trump will stop shooting from the hip, and acting impulsively without thinking things through. I don’t think that he is able or willing to do so.
The issue is not over yet. Just because the other side is making a lot of noise, doesn’t mean the issue is decided yet.
Yes, but I’m not sure it’s that simple. There may be sanctions for violating a consent decree that go beyond just a return to the status quo ante.
Sanctions for keeping families together? I love it!
Why was this promoted to the main feed with only two likes as of 2:32 P.M. Pacific standard time? I don’t mean to be nasty but what posts make it to the main feed and what posts don’t and why?
Editorial juggernaut?
I am equally surprised. An editor liked it or they needed a post on the immigration controversy on the main feed perhaps? I have posts disappear and reappear before on the sight for no apparent reason…
Oh did the switch cause you to loose your tracking of the conversation. I recall that used to happen.
True, true but Trump is in a bad situation no matter what happens and he put himself there. The pitfalls of this policy should have been obvious that they were not obvious to the Trump administration is bad sign. Besides the policy as it appears was simply a bad one. It was more than a political mistake.