With just about a month to go before we close out the first full year of Donald Trump’s presidency, those of us who have survived can take stock of our good fortune. To take a retrospective survey of the liberal opinion landscape in the wake of Trump’s surprising victory is to inventory Democratic anxieties. Admittedly, the left did not have Trump pegged entirely wrong, but many fears about the extent of the damage a Trump presidency would do to the American civic compact should yield a national sigh of relief.
Among the horrors the Trump presidency was expected to yield was the presumption that women would soon be relegated to second-class citizenship. In November of 2016, New Yorker’s Margaret Talbot speculated that funding for Planned Parenthood was soon to be phased out (it wasn’t) and the Affordable Care Act was to be gutted (not yet), and she scoffed at Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price’s revelatory comments about expecting women to pay for their own birth control (he resigned). In a separate article for the New Yorker exploring the spasm of outrage Trump’s election yielded among young female activists, Jia Tolentino recalled seeing a galvanizing sign at the protests that sprouted up organically in late 2016. “Why Don’t Sexual Assault Victims Come Forward?” the sign read. “Because Sometimes We Make Their Attackers the Leader of the Free World.” Talbot’s closing line: “The United States almost had its first female President, who, however flawed as a candidate, would certainly have protected the fundamental rights of women, among other now newly vulnerable groups.” In fact, the cascade of women who have come out against male abusers in positions of authority is arguably a direct outgrowth of Trump’s presidency.
From Hollywood, to media outlets like NPR and the New York Times, to the Democratic Party on Capitol Hill; it isn’t just the GOP that’s reckoning with their abusers. Before men like John Conyers and Al Franken could be dealt with, Democrats had to confront their party’s efforts to shield Bill Clinton from public and legal scrutiny. That would not have occurred under President Hillary Clinton. It takes courage and a support structure to publicly accuse the powerful of career-ending offenses. As Samantha Holvey, one of the women who accused Trump of misconduct, said on Monday, “The environment’s different.” It is indeed. Most notably, of course, because accusing powerful men of impropriety doesn’t compel Democrats to rally around the Clintons out of the fear that such accusations will reflect negatively on their party’s most important figures.
Another concern shared by liberals in the heady period following Hillary Clinton’s loss was that the GOP would capitulate to whatever Donald Trump demanded of them. “There will be precious few checks on President Trump,” the novelist and playwright George Packer wrote. This is demonstrably false.
Trump demands loyalty from his fellow Republicans, but the only tribute he appears to require are displays of cheap obsequiousness. That’s too steep a price for some, but most have been willing to pay it. Those displays can mask the fact that this is a president with a tenuous command of his own party. Donald Trump’s campaign is under investigation by four separate congressional committees. His occasional flirtation with the prospect of going after his own Justice Department or Robert Mueller’s special counsel is met with explicit threats of retaliation from his fellow Republicans. By a vote 419-3 in the House and 98-2 in the Senate, a GOP-led Congress voted to take away from the head of their own party the authority to administer sanctions on entities like Russia, Iran, and North Korea.
Not only did Packer not anticipate these actions, he also suggested it was a matter of time before the GOP-led Congress tried to undermine the nation’s independent institutions. “Congress could try to impeach the most independent-minded judges,” he speculated, “and Trump could replace them with loyalists.” Wrong again. From the various incarnations of the travel ban to an attempt to prevent transgender enlistees from serving in the armed forces, the courts have regularly stayed Trump’s hand when he overreaches.
And what about immigration, the issue on which Trump showed almost no restraint during the campaign? As Univision anchor Jorge Ramos noted in 2015, Trump’s America would be nothing less than a dystopic nightmare for the nation’s legal and illegal immigrants alike. Trump’s 2,000-mile-long border wall would destroy bilateral U.S.-Mexican trade and tourism relations. His deportation proposal would devour $137 billion and, following the rapture of millions from the labor force, yield a recession. And, of course, Trump had promised that “the 14th Amendment would be repealed.”
Former George W. Bush ethics attorney Richard Painter has emerged as one of the harshest critics of both Trump and the Republican Party’s members in Congress. He sued the president just days into his presidency over the early (and failed) attempt to impose a “travel ban” on certain Muslim countries via executive order. Painter has been sharply critical of Trump’s comportment in office, his failure to divest entirely from his private sector enterprises, and the congressional GOP’s failure to defy its president. And yet, in Painter’s immediate post-election analysis, he averred that many of Trump’s most radical ideas were unfeasible and unlikely to be implemented. He was right.
Newsweek’s Matthew Cooper also deserves honorable mention for swimming against the apoplectic tide by having suggested that the Trump presidency was unlikely to be especially productive, much less authoritarian. “Trump is no match for the American political system,” he wrote. Not only has Trump failed to impose despotism on the nation, he’s been spectacularly unsuccessful as a legislative president. If anything typifies the Trump presidency, it’s cosmetics.
Trump boasts of deregulating the economy, taking credit for nixing hundreds of regulations that were either already sun-setting or never implemented. Trump has ended the Obama-era deferred deportation program for the children of illegal immigrants—well, he will in six months, that is, and he may just reinstate it himself if Congress doesn’t act first. Similarly, Trump decertified the Iran nuclear deal by kicking it to Congress, knowing that a risk-averse legislature is unlikely to allow the program to elapse. When Trump announced the intention to move the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem from Tel Aviv, he did so after signing yet another 6-month waiver that allows the State Department to take all the time it needs. As positioning statements, these are all valuable. But positioning is theater, not substance.
Sadly, not all of the doomsday predictions issued by Trump’s critics in these early days were entirely off the mark. The president’s habit of venting conspiracy theories on Twitter has done national comity no favors. He has an ugly penchant for attacking the legitimacy of institutions he leads, like the FBI and the Justice Department. Critically, Trump’s reckless tendency to give comfort to racists has likely emboldened them. Arguably, this unlovely trait contributed to the conflict in Virginia that culminated in the death of a young paralegal in a white nationalist terrorist attack. And yet, those who forecasted the end of the republic as we knew it on November 9, 2016, well overshot the mark. That’s something to be thankful for. And yet, it’s funny how you don’t hear many sighs of relief.
