Understanding a New Presidency in the Age of Trump. Joseph A. Pika
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on the events of Inauguration Day itself. Section III assesses Trump’s first hundred days in office, organizing the analysis around the president’s roles in the legislative process, executive management, and communicating with the public. Section IV then pushes the timeline past an unusually intense second hundred days, which some observers had predicted would be a better measure of Trump’s success than the first.7 Faced with growing distractions and legislative failure on the domestic front, Trump—who had campaigned as an isolationist—increasingly turned his attention abroad. Section V examines continuity and change in Trump’s evolving foreign policy, and asks, did an overarching Trump Doctrine emerge? Finally, a concluding section reflects more broadly on the challenges posed by the Trump presidency to James Madison’s system of shared but competing governmental powers.
I. The Transition
Since 1937, when Inauguration Day moved from March to January, presidents have had just three months to pivot from full-time campaigning to full-time governing. As Stephen Hess once put it, this pivot involves a focus on the “three Ps”: personnel, process, and policy.8 One of the first orders of business for a newly elected president is to select personnel. This step involves picking not only his most trusted advisers, including the White House staff, but also nominees to fill the top Cabinet positions and a wide range of departmental slots. In addition to the fifteen Cabinet secretaries and seven others often denoted as “Cabinet-level” (such as the budget director), there are more than five hundred other executive branch positions that require Senate confirmation. Thousands of others serve at the president’s discretion but do not go through the Senate. In all, some nine thousand jobs in the executive branch are listed and described in the so-called Plum Book, published every four years by the Government Printing Office to advertise jobs in the new administration.9 Before filling these myriad positions, potential candidates must be systematically recruited and thoroughly vetted.
Selecting personnel gets a great deal of media attention, but process is just as important. Process refers to decisions about how the incoming president will organize his White House. Does he want a highly centralized staff structure with a chief of staff empowered to act as a gatekeeper, or a more decentralized—or even competitive—advising process? Are there existing White House units he wants to abolish or new entities he wants to create? How will his staff relate to the Cabinet and other government units like the Pentagon’s Joint Chiefs of Staff? Such decisions may not get much publicity, but they can profoundly influence the effectiveness of the decision-making process in the new administration.10
Photo 2 Vice President –Elect Mike Pence, who headed the Trump administration transition team, waves at reporters as he enters Manhattan’s Trump Tower on November 17, 2016.
Spencer Platt/Getty Images
Finally, the president-elect and his team must begin to craft a policy agenda for the new administration. Given the complexity of modern-day government and the magnitude of the issues it confronts, this task is very complicated. Moreover, establishing a policy agenda is only half of the puzzle. The transition team must also be thinking about how to implement it, which brings the discussion back to process. How will Congress, interest groups, and the public react to the policy proposals? In what order should they be introduced? Who should draft their specific language? How should they be promoted?
To deal with all of these issues, a transition team must be poised and ready to spring into action as soon as the election is over. Both Trump and Clinton put transition teams into place months before Election Day, groups that typically consult with figures who served in the last administration controlled by their own party for lessons on how best to proceed. Trump initially tapped New Jersey Governor Chris Christie to lead this effort, but three days after the election Trump booted Christie and replaced him with Vice President-elect Mike Pence. Clay Johnson, who ran the White House Office of Presidential Personnel under President George W. Bush and advised the Trump transition team, said that the shift from Christie to Pence wiped out months of work and meant that the operation to select personnel started over from scratch after the election: “They started out at ground zero, without a playbook and no recommendations.”11
Since passage of the Presidential Transition Act of 1963, the U.S. General Services Administration (GSA) has offered significant support to both the incoming and outgoing administrations. Upon request, it provides services and facilities to the President-elect and, prior to the election, to other eligible candidates.12 The Trump transition team began taking advantage of that space in Washington, DC, almost immediately after the election, but Trump opted to use his own properties—Trump Tower in Manhattan, which housed both his personal residence and the offices of the Trump Organization, Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster, New Jersey, and his Mar-a-Lago estate and golf club in Palm Beach, Florida—for most of the high profile work of the transition. The locations proved convenient for Trump—indeed, he would frequent them during the early months of his presidency too—but led some critics to allege that he chose them to advertise his properties.13 Providing security at these locations also proved to be expensive. New York City alone had to foot a bill of $25.7 million to protect Trump Tower between Election Day and the Inauguration, a cost that federal taxpayers ultimately covered when Congress agreed to reimburse New York and other localities that protected Trump during the transition.14
Trump did move relatively quickly to identify his key advisers and initial Cabinet nominees. Just five days after the election, he named Republican National Committee chair Reince Priebus as White House Chief of Staff and former Breitbart News executive Steve Bannon as White House Chief Strategist and Senior Counselor. He then announced his first Cabinet pick—Senator Jeff Sessions (R-AL), an early campaign supporter, as Attorney General—just one week after Election Day. By contrast, Bill Clinton, who ran a notoriously bumpy transition in 1992, did not name his White House Chief of Staff until mid-December and did not announce his first Cabinet pick until over a month after the election.
However, Trump’s relative speed in announcing senior nominees masked the fact that his transition team had done little and in some cases no advance vetting of those he selected.15 By contrast, Barack Obama’s 2008 transition team had begun vetting potential nominees before the election even took place, as did Hillary Clinton’s transition team in 2016.16 The Trump transition team’s failure to do this meant that the time-consuming process of gathering documents for background checks and financial disclosure requirements delayed the confirmation process for some nominees. Vetting derailed the process altogether for others, notably Trump’s nominee as Labor Secretary, Andrew Puzder.17 Puzder eventually withdrew from consideration after revelations about his business practices and personal life eroded support for his confirmation even among Republicans. Two days before Puzder withdrew, Michael Flynn resigned as Trump’s national security adviser after less than a month on the job amid controversy over his contacts with the Russian government. Proper vetting earlier on might have avoided those embarrassments.18
The Trump transition team largely ignored another important aspect of personnel: sub-Cabinet appointments. In all, more than 550 positions that the new president is expected to fill require Senate confirmation. By the end of his first hundred days in office, all fifteen of Trump’s nominees to fill the Cabinet had been confirmed by the Senate (the last, Alex Acosta to be Secretary of Labor, on the ninety-ninth day), as had six of the seven other Cabinet-level appointments that require Senate confirmation (with