“Imagine how much closer to normal this administration would be in the absence of Twitter,” I pondered, also on Twitter, following a weekend consumed by a frenzy of activity resulting from President Donald Trump’s tweeted accusation that Barack Obama wanted his communications surveilled. The stream of self-righteous replies from incensed Trump skeptics and liberals over the very notion that this administration could ever be construed as “normal” made my point. The president’s preferred social media venue is one that rewards instant gratification and emotive preening. This is a form of art that Trump has perfected, but is it an impediment to running a successful White House? That is far from certain.
The Trump administration appears to be operating on two parallel tracks. One is on its face extremely cynical, conspiratorial to the point of paralysis, and burdened by warring West Wing factions. The other is aggressively activist, policy-focused, and effective. It is that second administration that has largely escaped due scrutiny.
The first Trump administration is the one that preoccupies the minds of political media and dominates the conversation around America’s dinner tables. That White House seems obsessive, paranoid, and addicted to drama. It is led by a president who, without warning, throws the nation into chaos by contending that his predecessor spied on him. He’s the same president who has compelled Americans to spend hours debating and debunking the claim that millions of illegal immigrants voted in 2016, that his inaugural crowds were record-setting in size, that the press is covering up news of terrorist attacks, and that “fake news media” are inventing stories of Trump associates having contact with Russian officials.
A president less enamored with unreliable but flattering media outlets could have chosen far more defensible grounds on which to wage a fight with the last administration over intelligence gathering. We know as a result of “transcripts” conveyed to reporters that Trump associates were caught up in surveillance of the communications of Russian diplomatic officials. The substance of one of those calls was revealed to the public via media reports. That exposed the fact that former National Security Advisor Mike Flynn had allowed Vice President Mike Pence to go to reporters with information Flynn knew to be false, resulting in his forced resignation. There was no purpose to revealing highly-sensitive intelligence like that to reporters save for the desire to see blood drawn from this administration. Regardless of whether or not you think such a mission is noble, the precedent that sets is a dangerous one. Given the scale of the efforts by members of the last administration to undermine Trump in the press, the Flynn episode is unlikely to be the last of its kind.
Observers could be forgiven for thinking that this kind of prudence is anathema to Donald Trump and the White House he leads. There is, however, another side to this president and the Congress his party controls that gets short shrift: the effective side. The Trump administration has abandoned the Trans-Pacific Partnership free trade zone, ceding regional economic influence to China. It has approved construction of the Keystone XL and Dakota Access pipelines. It has authorized new sanctions against Iranian targets. It has pursued an executive order limiting immigration from six majority-Muslim nations and imposed dramatic constraints on America’s refugee resettlement program (presuming it resumes at all after a 120-day moratorium).
The Trump administration is busily dismantling the regulatory state that ballooned under Barack Obama. Legally dubious EPA regulations prohibiting lead bullets and fish hooks in national wildlife refuges, criticized as an effort to impose prohibitive restrictions on ammunition purchases, will be repealed. Elements of the Dodd-Frank financial regulatory reform law criticized by the financial industry as designed to make their services more costly to consumers as a result of increased legal impediments are gone. Auto manufacturers are no longer required to abide by regulations that compelled them to produce more electric and hybrid vehicles. Rules that forced telecommunications companies to devote vast resources to ensuring consumer data security and privacy protection have been softened.
These and other matters of consequences are the subjects of solid reporting, but not much public scrutiny. They are featured in a dispatch or two, but they rarely dominate the front pages or make the cut for the broadcast networks’ evening news programs. Their effects are long-lived but their periods of public inspection are remarkably short. Soon enough, the next controversial, id-driven Trump tweet drops and the nation forgets.
In the case of President Trump’s deregulation efforts, it’s inarguable that the inner monologue spilling out onto his Twitter account have created enough white noise to serve as a distraction. Trump’s twitter tirades should not, however, be confused for strategy. Invariably, assertions like his support for a retributive boycott of the retailer Nordstrom or his claim that Obama tapped into his communications as a candidate compel the congressional GOP to focus on issues they’d prefer to avoid. Republicans would surely like to be laying the groundwork for this week’s roll out of their replacement of the Affordable Care Act. As a result of Donald Trump’s weekend Twitter habits, it’s a luxury they will not be afforded.
The Trump administration is a self-contradictory thing. It is simultaneously an administration obsessed with distraction and with distracting, but it is also effective in its own way. As TIME’s Zeke Miller observed, there are two Donald Trump’s: the adroit one who spoke before a joint session of Congress last Tuesday and the petty, self-obsessed one we read on Twitter. It isn’t just Trump but his entire administration that suffers from a split-personality syndrome. It’s not clear, though, that this president’s social media habits have hamstrung his administration in the way his critics insist.
