A Presidency Like No Other

      As vote counting began on the evening of November 8, 2016, just about everyone was sure how it was going to work out. The Clinton campaign had designed an elaborate show, complete with a glass ceiling scheduled to be demolished when her victory was announced. Hillary Clinton herself had picked out a white suit to commemorate the work of suffragists who had worked a century earlier to win the right to vote for women. Americans never saw that show because American voters stunned everyone—even the Trump campaign. The story of the first year of the administration of President Donald J. Trump was one no one really expected to write.

      That year created a presidency like no other. Many people were sure that, after the election, Trump would put aside his favorite smart phone and cut down on tweets. He did not and, in fact, turned tweeting into an entirely new form of presidential communications, unmediated by the media. Trump had promised to “drain the swamp,” and in his first 100 days he issued more executive orders than any president since Harry Truman. He pledged attacks on illegal immigration, Obamacare, and the Paris climate agreement and launched frontal assaults against all of them. But he battled to post legislative victories.

      The first year of his administration saw an unprecedented frenzy. Tweet storms came, often unpredictably. The exhausting pace of the president’s policy announcements came side-by-side with a growing investigation into Russian efforts to influence the 2016 presidential election. Not long ago, TV manufacturers warned consumers not to keep any image long on their televisions because it would burn into the screen. “Breaking news” would have been indelibly branded onto everyone’s television by the end of 2017.

      Trump admitted he was struggling to master his new job. In an April interview with Reuters, he confided, “I loved my previous life. I had so many things going.” And, in a telling admission, Trump said, “This is more work than in my previous life. I thought it would be easier.”¹

      It will take political scientists and historians decades to sort out the remarkable tale of the Trump presidency. But there are important clues in the first year’s battles over four important policy issues: immigration, health insurance, climate change, and the campaign against “fake news.”

      Immigration: The Wall, Religious Tests, and Extreme Vetting

      If any pledge was the cornerstone of Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, it was his promise to build a wall between the United States and Mexico—and to make the Mexican government pay for it. It was important for many reasons. It captured a core part of his “Make America Great Again” theme by suggesting one of the reasons that America was not great was because immigrants were taking American jobs and causing crime. And it reflected an important part of his campaign strategy, of floating out big themes in front of big rallies, gauging the audience’s response, and amplifying the themes that got the best reaction. Few themes worked better than the wall.

      In fact, Washington Post writer Philip Bump tracked Trump’s ever-growing promises for an ever-bigger wall. He started with a speech in August 2015:

      So you take precast plank [of concrete]. It comes 30 feet long, 40 feet long, 50 feet long. You see the highways where they can span 50, 60 feet, even longer than that, right? And do you a beautiful nice precast plank with beautiful everything. Just perfect. . . . . I want it to be so beautiful because maybe someday they’ll call it the Trump Wall.²

      And just how tall would the wall be? With tongue firmly in cheek, Bump tracked Trump’s speeches and estimated that the wall would range between 30 and 65 feet, depending on the sweep of the candidate’s rhetoric. The important thing was that the height of the wall was a signal of Trump’s resolve. So too was his pledge to make the Mexican government pay for it, although current and former officials continually said there was no way that was ever going to happen. But as signs of his resolve, the rhetoric constantly brought Trump’s audiences to their feet.

      Trump’s promise to build a wall connected tightly with his call in December 2015 to prevent all Muslims from entering the United States until the country can “figure out what is going on,” especially following terrorist attacks in Paris and in San Bernardino, California. Just a few months before, he had said that “I love Muslims.” He surprised many of those following his campaign