Crucible: The President's First Year

INTRODUCTION

STEFANIE GEORGAKIS ABBOTT AND JEFFREY L. CHIDESTER

The first year is a uniquely important time in the life of a presidency. Fresh off an election victory, the new president is offered a rare window of opportunity to craft a vision for the nation, free from the day-to-day burdens that will accumulate later in the term. Most presidents claim some sort of electoral mandate, and Congress and the media typically afford the new president a honeymoon period in which to staff the administration, establish decision-making processes, and set priorities. Over the course of the next three or seven years, such blue-sky thinking gradually will become engulfed by the realities of occupying the most powerful office in the world. But all that lies ahead. On Day One, a new president inherits maximum opportunity and minimal burden.

Presidents often use the first year to promote signature legislative priorities. Lyndon B. Johnson spent both of his first years—the twelve months following the assassination of John F. Kennedy and the year following his own inauguration in January 1965—passing a broad package of domestic legislation known collectively as the Great Society. Ronald Reagan achieved the cornerstones of Reaganomics, including tax cuts and increases in defense spending, midway through his first year. Even in the midst of responding to the September 11 terror attacks, George W. Bush secured passage of the No Child Left Behind education reform bill weeks before his one-year anniversary in office. The Affordable Care Act was passed in the early part of Barack Obama’s second year, but he spent much of his first-year political capital pushing it through Congress.

In many ways, then, presidents are at the height of their power in the first year. At the same time, they are at the lowest point of their experience. They are still figuring out how to take the reins of a government with more than 4 million civilian employees and uniformed service members around the world. They are staffing several thousand positions across the executive branch, many with people who are in their first tours of government duty. Meanwhile, allies and adversaries are taking the measure of their new counterparts, the latter often testing the new leadership in its first year. It is a time of peril as well as promise.

Throughout history, new commanders in chief have stumbled on the world stage when confronted with their first challenge. Kennedy approved the ill-fated Bay of Pigs incursion into Cuba. George H. W. Bush’s first foray into Panama in the fall of 1989 was marred by setbacks, leading critics to deride the new president. Bill Clinton’s intervention in Somalia in October 1993 left eighteen American soldiers dead and the new president badly bruised in his first international action. Yet these same presidents went on to lead the Cuban Missile Crisis negotiations, the end of the Cold War, and the Bosnian peacekeeping intervention, respectively, indicating that the damage was short-lived. No matter how good a president’s team looks on paper, new administrations often take time to hit their stride.

No amount of time or planning can prepare a new administration for the exogenous shocks that occur in every first year. Since Reagan’s first term, presidential first years have witnessed an assassination attempt, the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe, two separate attacks on the World Trade Center, and the biggest financial crisis since the Great Depression. In an earlier time, John Adams was greeted when he took office in 1797 by the XYZ Affair. In May 1801, the pasha of Tripoli declared war on the United States, leading Adams’s successor, Thomas Jefferson, into armed conflict barely two months into his presidency.

To expect the unexpected is axiomatic in the first year, and each new president faces his or her own set of challenges and opportunities. Nonetheless, there is a long list of questions that every first-year president must address: How does one build a national security team? What does one do about the first budget due on Capitol Hill just weeks into the new presidency? How does one deal with promises made during the campaign? What is the proper division of labor between cabinet departments and White House staff?

In addressing these questions, history is instructive. In October 2015, the Miller Center at the University of Virginia launched First Year: POTUS 2017—a three-year project aimed at providing a historical framework to guide future presidents and their teams in the first year. The project has explored some of the core governance questions facing a new president, including how to approach the first year, how to navigate a broken political system, and how to thrive in a changing media environment. It also has examined challenges and opportunities in certain policy areas, including national security, race, immigration, opportunity and mobility, and fiscal policy.

Within each of these topic areas—posted as volumes on the firstyear2017.org website—we asked leading thinkers from the academy and policy community to provide guidance for incoming administrations, drawing from their experiences in office, the latest academic research, and often both. The authors are as diverse as the subjects they cover: progressives and conservatives, idealists and realists, Boomers and Millennials, scholars from various disciplines and practitioners from numerous agencies. Although history has much to offer any new administration, the applications are not always immediately apparent. The First Year Project offers a unique combination: it pairs historical evidence with contemporary policy analyses and identifies the points of intersection. Individually, the essays offer important perspectives to incoming government officials. Collectively, they provide a comprehensive blueprint to guide each new administration during its crucible year.

Part I of Crucible: The President’s First Year begins by examining the rise of Donald Trump in 2016 and reflecting on his first six months in office in 2017. Yale University’s Stephen Skowronek encourages each new president to ask a critical question before entering the first year: what time is it? According to Skowronek, the various elements of American government run on either secular time, during which the president’s main job is finding solutions that work, or political time, which occurs between periodic resets of the nation’s ideological trajectory.

Michael Nelson of Rhodes College and the Miller Center provides an early review of the first year of the Trump presidency. The history of the Trump administration will be fully written in the years to come, but Nelson makes some early observations in light of the insights offered throughout this volume.

Part II begins by presenting an overarching view of the first year as a distinct period in one’s presidency, worthy of focused examination. The essays center on a fundamental question: Why does the first year matter? Why not focus, as many—journalists, pundits, and most presidential candidates—do, on the first one hundred days? Or the entire first term? This part casts the first year as a useful frame for all incoming chief executives. New administrations are often eager to hit the ground running, delivering on campaign promises and taking advantage of the traditional post-inauguration honeymoon. Yet, when the adrenaline of the first hundred days wears off, more complex policy proposals often come to the fore and greater political capital must be expended. More than one hundred days is needed for a president to build a team and seriously tackle larger policy challenges.

University of Virginia presidential scholar Sidney M. Milkis sees the first year of contemporary presidents as the fulfillment of a trend that began with the Progressive-Era administrations of Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson. It was during this time that the White House, not the parties or Congress, became the center of domestic and foreign policymaking—a trend that expanded dramatically during the New Deal and continues to the present day. Milkis argues that the next president should practice restraint in his first year by empowering a strong cabinet and cultivating relationships in Congress.

H. W. Brands of the University of Texas at Austin argues that the first year initially is shaped by how the president enters the White House, whether by succeeding to the office, surviving a close election, or winning a landslide. Nonetheless, all new presidents must appoint a cabinet and White House staff, build a domestic policy agenda, and establish their leadership as commander in chief. Using history as a guide, Brands offers guidance on these three critical tasks.

Michael Nelson suggests ten lessons for the first year from those who actually served in recent administrations. Using the vast collection of interviews from the Miller Center’s Presidential Oral History Project, Nelson organizes his advice into lessons for the transition and for taking office. These lessons, drawn from the insights of senior officials in the Carter, Reagan, Bush, and Clinton administrations, include building relations on Capitol Hill, staffing the administration wisely, and advancing a policy agenda.

Barbara A. Perry of the Miller Center examines court vacancies in presidential first years. As Perry notes, Trump took office in an unusual position: no other new president since Harry S. Truman has had the opportunity to choose a Supreme Court nominee in his first year.

Northwestern University’s Daniel J. Galvin discusses the structural constraints faced by the president, which put campaign promises and ambitious agendas to the test during the first year. As Galvin notes, presidents often find that their ability to enact lasting change is constrained by institutional realities.

Robert F. Bruner, dean emeritus of the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business, examines the inevitable first-year crisis. Bruner’s essay focuses on domestic financial crises, describing eight that happened during various presidents’ first years. One can either harness the power of the nation’s economy, or be run over by it, Bruner concludes. The historically informed new president masters four principal levers of influence: priorities, personnel, processes, and politics.

In the concluding essay of Part II, Peter Wehner, who served as director of the Office of Strategic Initiatives under George W. Bush, draws on his experiences in the White House to chart how the new president can maximize the chances for successful leadership. His Dear Mr. or Madam President memo covers a range of topics, from using political capital to selecting advisors to engaging with both Congress and the public.

The eight essays in Part III focus on the new president’s role as commander in chief. The historical evidence is that the first year is the most dangerous in a president’s tenure in the foreign-policy domain. Previous first years offer instructive lessons to help minimize these dangers.

Marc Selverstone of the Miller Center offers the Bay of Pigs episode as a case study in first-year course correction. The Kennedy administration used the botched invasion to examine and implement changes in the management of national security policy. A review conducted after the invasion by retired general Maxwell Taylor led the administration to make a series of important structural and personnel changes, as well as to create a more formal procedure for handling national security during the remainder of the Kennedy presidency.

Johns Hopkins University professor Hal Brands examines the lessons of the Reagan administration for national security policymaking. He credits Reagan for bringing into office a set of core strategic ideas that helped orient his policies and his subordinates. Brands also notes three first-year deficiencies that future presidents would be wise to avoid: failing to select advisors who are compatible with the president’s management style, disempowering the national security advisor, and refused to change poor advisors or unsuccessful strategies.

Jeffrey A. Engel of Southern Methodist University credits the first year of Reagan’s successor, George H. W. Bush, with a Hippocratic strategy of first doing no harm. The first year of the Bush presidency was a time of remarkable change on the world stage—the fall of communism in Eastern Europe, the Tiananmen Square crackdown in China, and attempted coups in Panama and the Philippines. In each of these ambiguous situations, the Bush administration demonstrated that less can be more.

University of Texas at Austin historian Jeremi Suri argues that although Bill Clinton hoped to focus almost exclusively on domestic policy in his first year, global events required his immediate attention. Like Kennedy, Clinton eschewed organized planning in favor of improvisation as he dealt with challenges in Haiti, Somalia, North Korea, Eastern Europe, and the former Soviet Union. In the end, the Clinton years demonstrated the importance of consistent presidential focus on personnel, goals, and strategies.

Melvyn P. Leffler of the University of Virginia assesses the personnel challenges that plagued the first year of the George W. Bush presidency. Although Bush’s national security team was impressive on paper, the principals did not agree on a policy vision or trust one another, leading to fragmentation and disorder. Bush became more engaged after the September 11 attacks, but any new president, Leffler argues, would do well at the outset to establish clear lines of authority, effective processes, defined goals and priorities, and a strong national security advisor.

Two essays by former senior policymakers Michèle A. Flournoy, undersecretary of defense for policy under Barack Obama, and Philip Zelikow, who served under George H. W. Bush and George W. Bush, offer remarkably consistent advice to the new president. Both authors emphasize the importance of choosing a good staff; of setting clear goals, priorities, and plans to achieve them; and of focusing early on the budgetary aspects of national security policy.

Part III concludes with an essay by Harvard University professor Jeffry Frieden, who argues that because the threat of financial crisis is the greatest danger facing the global economy, new presidents should work to minimize this danger by harmonizing financial regulation and macroeconomic policies among the world’s major economies.

Part IV concerns domestic affairs, with essays on a range of policies, including health care, fiscal reform, infrastructure, and rebuilding the American Dream. University of Virginia professor Peter Norton uses the Interstate Highway System to illustrate that the predicate for a fourth-year legislative achievement may sometimes be a first-year legislative push. Dwight D. Eisenhower’s deliberate approach to articulating a strategy, building coalitions, and selling the proposal to Congress ultimately led to his greatest domestic achievement.

Guian McKee, a Miller Center scholar, offers a case study on how Lyndon Johnson succeeded in passing Medicare and Medicaid legislation during what some consider the most successful first year in history. Johnson’s patience, agility, and ability to negotiate with allies and adversaries alike offer useful lessons for any new president.

Next, a series of essays examines the use of first-year action to advance the needs of the working and middle classes. Michael Nelson begins with another look into the Miller Center’s Presidential Oral History archives for insights from the Carter, Reagan, Bush, and Clinton presidencies. Nelson highlights key moments in the politics of opportunity and mobility, including Jimmy Carter’s food stamp policy, Reagan and the AIDS epidemic, George H. W. Bush and the Americans with Disabilities Act, and Clinton’s health care reform effort.

How policymakers can build a more secure future for those not yet in the workforce is the subject of University of Washington historian Margaret O’Mara’s essay. She makes the case for investing in the next-generation economy so that more Americans can enjoy the fruits of innovation. O’Mara uses examples from throughout the twentieth century to call for greater investment in people and ideas, an internationalist approach defined by more open borders, and a commitment to income security.

Turning to infrastructure, an area with seemingly bipartisan potential, Albright College historian Mason B. Williams reaches into the 1930s to support a call for substantial investment to modernize America’s cities as a way to expand both economic growth and social justice.

The University of Virginia’s Willis Jenkins reframes the political question of how humans interact with the natural environment. Humans have fundamentally altered nature, and political considerations must now be directed toward questions of how and not if we will alter evolutionary systems.

Part IV concludes with paired memos from Democrat William A. Galston, who served as deputy domestic policy advisor under Bill Clinton, and Republican Peter Wehner, each of whom offers suggestions for how the new president can build an opportunity agenda. Wehner and Galston identify several areas of consensus between the two parties, including tax reform and workforce training.

Part V examines a broad theme that has animated several recent presidential elections: race, immigration, and American identity. In the first essay, University of Oregon political scientist Daniel Tichenor offers Lyndon Johnson’s 1965 immigration reforms as a case study in coalition building and compromise.

The next three essays explore challenges awaiting new presidents in the area of race relations. Orlando Patterson, a professor of sociology at Harvard University, identifies matters that should be addressed in the first year, including mass incarceration, police training and culture, and residential and school segregation. Georgetown sociologist Michael Eric Dyson urges the president to use the bully pulpit both to confront America’s legacy of racism and to seek a common way forward. Finally, the Miller Center’s Douglas A. Blackmon examines how a president’s rhetoric can influence racial dialogue. Historically, presidents have limited power to enact policies to tackle discrimination. However, Blackmon urges, the president does have the ability to employ moral persuasion and should do so on matters related to race, gender, and other similar concerns.

Part VI examines how presidents can effectively manage the executive branch, particularly in an era of partisan dysfunction. As bitterly contested as some recent presidential elections have been, University of Virginia historian Alan Taylor reminds us that it has always been thus. The election of 1800 brought about the first transfer of presidential power from one party to another, but for a time Jefferson faced the specter of civil war from a Federalist Party that did not want to surrender authority to its bitter foe. Taylor urges the new president to pursue a moderate course and engage fully Congress and the public.

Next, Gary W. Gallagher of the University of Virginia examines the first year of Abraham Lincoln’s presidency—what many consider to be the worst first year experienced by any president in history. Although Lincoln’s first year was unlike any other, it illustrates that in times of heightened division, presidents must try to build bridges to political opponents, including bringing some into the administration.

Brookings Institution scholar Elaine C. Kamarck’s essay shifts the focus from the politics of the presidency to the management of the executive branch. As the head of Clinton’s Reinventing Government initiative, Kamarck urges new presidents to concentrate on understanding the capacities and knowledge of the federal government. By giving attention to the managerial presidency, the president increases the likelihood that good governance and good politics go hand in hand.

Andrew Rudalevige from Bowdoin College cautions against the excessive use of executive action. Acting unilaterally, although tempting, especially in a fractured political climate, endangers a president’s policy legacy and does not guarantee lasting results. Instead, for both political and policy reasons, any new president would be wise to work toward bipartisan solutions.

Patrick O’Brien urges new presidents to concentrate on two powers that are often ineffectively used: the appointment power and the agenda-setting power. Doing so can be especially helpful, O’Brien argues, in seeking to improve the economy.

In the essay written by McKinsey and Company’s Carolyn Dewar, Tom Dohrmann, Andrew Erdmann, Ryan Harper, and Kunal Modi, the group analyzes a set of CEO transitions and offers twelve management lessons that could apply to an incoming presidential administration. These lessons include the importance of establishing an overarching vision and a limited set of priorities, building an effective team, and constructing a model that can be sustained throughout the presidency, not just during the early phase.

Bruce Katz of the Brookings Institution presents a pessimistic view of what can be accomplished by the federal government and encourages the next president to empower cities and metropolitan areas to be the source of innovation. He argues that the partisan dysfunction that has plagued Washington in recent decades has sparked a range of ambitious, bottom-up solutions. The next president can seize this energy by giving cities greater flexibility in designing federal investments.

Finally, the five essays of Part VII assess how the president can seize the bully pulpit in the first year, particularly in an age of new media. Rutgers professor David Greenberg debunks the hype surrounding the First One Hundred Days and cautions new administrations to ignore this arbitrary benchmark in favor of longer-term goals. Successful first years have less to do with communication techniques and more to do with good policy, Greenberg argues. Develop a short list of substantial policy proposals, including a major economic plan, and good headlines and positive social media posts will follow.

According to Clinton speechwriter Jeff Shesol, The diminishing draw of the bully pulpit is a reality of the contemporary presidency. In his essay, Shesol urges new presidents to forgo high rhetoric in place of a more authentic, conversational style; to revamp the traditional State of the Union address; and to fully empower the speechwriting staff.

Mary Kate Cary, who served as a speechwriter under George H. W. Bush, examines so-called micro-moments—the many times throughout the day when people check their smartphones for a quick hit of information, creating excellent opportunities for the administration to deliver content tailored to each new platform or device.

Susan J. Douglas of the University of Michigan offers a blueprint for navigating the increasingly fragmented and ubiquitous media environment by balancing the perils of heightened scrutiny with the benefits of more direct connectivity with the American people. Like Franklin D. Roosevelt, Kennedy, and Reagan, presidents must understand the media environment within which they operate and harness the tools at their disposal.

Finally, Obama White House Communications Director Anita Dunn urges her successors to evolve with the changing media environment. As the pace of technological change quickens, the White House must be an early adopter of new technology and seek to bring content directly to the public. The traditional bully pulpit no longer exists. The ability to govern effectively depends on the ability to communicate effectively in this new environment.

Successful American presidents have come from the left and the right, from the decisive and the patient, from the educated and the self-made, from the exceptionalist and the internationalist, from the creator of destiny and the beneficiary of good fortune. Important lessons can be drawn from both the best and the worst presidencies in American history, as well as from all those in between. Although the election of 2016 and the presidency of Donald Trump have been seen as unusual, there is historical precedent for many unprecedented presidencies. No common thread runs through the list of forty-five presidents, no playbook provides the right answers to all the challenges future presidents will face. What we do have is more than 225 years of presidential history to inspire, deter, and ultimately enlighten each new administration.

I    DONALD TRUMP’S FIRST YEAR

WHAT TIME IS IT?

Tracking Trump in Secular and Political Time

STEPHEN SKOWRONEK

The oath each new president takes on inauguration day marks the start of an implacable four-year countdown. But the calendar is only one measure of time for the nation’s political leader. In the course of a presidential campaign, competing candidates offer the nation different answers to the question, what time is it? Capturing the moment is critical to their leadership prospects in office, but getting it right is seldom straightforward.

It is hard for modern presidents to tell time because the organization of American government and politics is increasingly complex, and its various aspects run on different clocks. One clock keeps secular time. It marks the inexorable thickening of the institutional universe of political action, the widening array of stakeholders in government policy, and the press of ever-more-complicated problems for government to solve. Secular time casts the president as a hands-on manager of the government’s sprawling commitments, as the master orchestrator of expected services and competing demands, as the responsible steward of a policy state. In secular time, performance is about finding solutions that work.

Another clock keeps political time. Political time measures the years that unfold between periodic resets of the nation’s ideological trajectory. It tells of the state of the political movements contesting national power, of the expectations of the mobilized polity. Those thinking in political time see the president as an agent of change poised to break through the knot of interests and institutions that block concerted action on the agenda the candidate was chosen to champion. They anticipate a populist intervention, a purge of the entrenched, a thoroughgoing reconstruction of governmental operations. Performance in political time is about reconfiguring government to conform to a particular political ideal or reform principle.

Nothing in recent years has so tested the political skills of incumbents as striking a workable balance between these two competing frameworks for presidential action. Consider Ronald Reagan, the last president to successfully reset political time. The revolution of 1980 thrust a conservative insurgency into control of the national agenda, and Reagan’s first budget followed up with a programmatic breakthrough that locked in movement priorities. Implementation, however, proved a management nightmare, as fabricated budget projections and a collision of priorities with policy at the Federal Reserve sent the nation into an economic tailspin. It was just the opposite for Reagan’s successor, George H. W. Bush. Although an affiliate of the Reagan Revolution, Bush chose to elevate responsible management over movement priorities. But when he orchestrated an ecumenical budget compromise designed to address the nation’s economic problems through a balanced scheme of tax increases and spending cuts, he drew the wrath of the conservative insurgency, sending his presidency into a political tailspin.

What time is it now? Since Reagan reset the political clock nearly four decades ago, we have had two iterations of affiliated leadership. Like his father, George W. Bush had to wrestle with the dilemmas of upholding conservative orthodoxy while trying to respond to the relentless press of new demands for responsible management and problem solving. He avoided his father’s misstep on taxes with cuts that appealed to his political base, but other initiatives—on education, prescription drug benefits, and emergency responses to the financial crisis—confounded the expectations of movement conservatives and stiffened their confrontational stance.

We have also had two iterations of opposition leadership. Neither was able to dislodge the conservative project and reconstruct American government and politics, but both Bill Clinton and Barack Obama exploited vulnerabilities in conservative orthodoxy and exposed its difficulties in coming up with responsive new solutions to the problems of the day. Clinton disavowed orthodoxies on the right and the left alike. He goaded both sides with a policy strategy of triangulation and achieved great popularity with the political attractions of his Third Way. Obama was more aggressive. He wanted to change the trajectory of national affairs and do for progressives what Reagan had done for conservatives, but he promised to do it in an ecumenical way, one that acknowledged the full range of interests in national action. His signature initiative, the Affordable Care Act, pulled his followers in the progressive movement kicking and screaming behind a measure that reached out to all the stakeholders in the health care industry. But again, implementation proved a management nightmare, and the movement mobilization was all on the opposition side.

The political sequence as it has unfolded since 1980 fits well-known historical patterns. Think for example of the rise and fall of Jacksonian Democracy between 1828 and 1860 or the rise and fall of New Deal liberalism between 1932 and 1980, each of which followed a similar rotation of alternating victories, first for the party that carried forward the newly installed political orthodoxy of the day, then for the party at odds with it. Affiliated leaders marked political time with increasingly awkward adjustments to received governing formulas; opposition preemptors marked it with increasingly candid but still unresolved challenges. The current sequence has the added complication of widening disparities between the demands of political and secular time. By historical standards, the Reagan Revolution was relatively shallow, the president increasingly deferential after that first budget to demands for responsible problem-solving and interest management.

The Trump administration must navigate these cross currents, testing their relative strength. But there is mistaking how it is telling time. No incumbent since Ronald Reagan has so forcefully avowed his intention to reset the political clock and reconstruct American government and politics. Although he ran as a Republican, Donald Trump crafted a sui generis political brand. He trounced a field of more orthodox candidates in the party’s primaries, and even after winning the nomination, he barely mentioned Reagan’s name. Asserting his distance from both parties, Trump renounced the political system in its entirety, declaring it rigged, corrupt, a mess, and a disaster. He promised a great disruption and a redemptive drive to make America great again. His aggressive populism and strident nationalism recalled the rise of Andrew Jackson, prompting many conservatives to declare him risky and dangerous.

If reconstructive moments could be created by presidential proclamation there would be a lot more of them. Trump deftly capitalized on the political frustrations that mount as old orders linger and grow more confused, but following through is another matter altogether. Since the Reagan Revolution, the incorporation of new groups into the managerial calculus has proceeded apace and the interdependence of interests has become even more pronounced in judgments of performance. Trump lost the popular vote in 2016 by a substantial margin to a candidate who had countered his promise to transform the state with promises to make it work. Hillary Clinton was all about leadership in secular time—programs vetted by experts, experience in solving problems, managerial prowess. Although many predicted she would win the 2016 race, it is worth noting that such an outcome would have come as a conspicuous wrinkle in political time. Never has an opposition leader like Bill Clinton and Barack Obama (both of whom fell short of a fundamental reordering) been able to pass power to a handpicked successor. And yet, Al Gore and Hillary Clinton each outpolled the Electoral College victor, largely on boasts of competence and continuity. Secular time has not yet overtaken political time in presidential politics, but the competition between these two frames for action is getting stiffer, and the former harder to discount.

The prospects for reconstruction are further clouded by Trump’s relationship to his own ostensible allies. The Trump victory threatened to displace the conservative/progressive cleavage that has defined American politics since the Reagan Revolution, and although Republicans took control of all branches of the federal government, the president’s agenda cuts against many of the core commitments of his fellow partisans in Congress. On a strict reading of political time, this looks less like a reconstructive moment than a late, shaky, conflicted reinstallment of the conservative regime, and if history is any guide, the prospects for leadership in those circumstances are especially daunting.

President Trump would be well advised to consider carefully the plight of presidents similarly situated in earlier political sequences. The closest exemplar historically is Jimmy Carter, a third-round affiliate of the liberal, New Deal order. Reaching back farther, Franklin Pierce, the third-round affiliate of the Jacksonian regime, is also illuminating. In each instance, a long-dominant party had grown so fractious and ideologically strained that it could not coalesce around any one of its recognized national leaders. In both cases, the party chose an outlier, reaching for a candidate on the distant fringes of power and hoping to control him once victory was assured. Pierce won the presidency on a pledge to take no further action with regard to slavery, the very issue that was tearing his party and the nation apart. Carter won in a campaign in which he cast a wary eye over his party’s liberal agenda. There were, he advised, no easy answers to the questions facing the nation. Trump’s boast upon accepting his party’s nomination, I alone can fix it, was eerily reminiscent of Carter’s campaign slogan, Why Not the Best? as each candidate substituted his own unique skill and personal acumen for his party’s collective resolve, emphasizing independence from orthodoxy and distance from party commitments.

In all three of these cases, the mobilized elements of the coalition the president brought back to power were pressing more extreme and controversial demands on government, demands that threatened the new incumbent’s standing as a responsible steward of national affairs. Pierce and Carter opted for different ways out of this shared dilemma, but on assuming office, both threw the old order into an existential crisis. Pierce broke his pledge on slavery, reached out to his party’s stalwarts, and pushed through the controversial Kansas-Nebraska Act, which repealed the Missouri Compromise and let new states decide for themselves whether to allow slavery. That choice crushed his presidency under a political revolution. It provided the opposition with proof that the old order was bankrupt of responsible solutions to the problems of the day, and it ultimately led Pierce’s own party to drop him as a political liability. Carter, on the other hand, stiffened his resistance to his party’s orthodoxy, even to the point of reversing the Democrats’ traditional formula for economic management and elevating the fight against inflation over a commitment to full employment. Charges of betrayal from liberals within his ranks fueled a dump-Carter movement, leaving him politically weakened in the face of an emboldened conservative insurgency.

For Trump this dilemma appears particularly acute. If he shifts too far toward his congressional party, he risks losing much of his appeal as an independent movement leader. But Republicans in Congress are far more secure in office than their president; the pressure to release the pent-up demands of the party caucus and seize the opportunities presented by unified party control will be intense. The choices at hand all appear explosive. On the one hand, presidential resistance to congressional Republicans threatens a conservative implosion; on the other, presidential indulgence of an all-fronts assault on the policy state tempts a political counterrevolution. For all the talk of a decisive reconstruction, Trump appears to be courting a politically disastrous disjunction of the sort experienced by Pierce and Carter.

The difference between Pierce and Carter is instructive. Pierce chose to stand with his party’s stalwarts and quickly found himself marginalized and discarded by them as damaged goods; Carter resisted his party’s stalwarts, took his stand as a steady manager of national affairs, and defeated their challenge to his renomination. Carter deployed the expanded institutional resources of the modern presidency to project a national political persona that was steady and responsible, indifferent to the ideological alternatives contending for the passions of the electorate. He used the president’s enhanced position in secular time to elevate the managerial ideal. It was a gamble he ultimately lost, but it was also a bet on the future. For a president desperate to escape the dismal cycles of political time, the opportunities opened by secular time beam brightly.

At this writing, it appears unlikely that Trump will adopt either the Pierce or Carter strategy. Rather than capitulate to his party’s leaders in Congress or take his stand for responsible management, the president appears determined to press ahead with his own vision of a new order. In the circumstances at hand, that will be a telltale test of the political capacities of the modern presidency to transform American government by its own lights and remake parties at will. The odds of success would appear slim, and the results may, paradoxically, demonstrate the opposite of what the president has chosen to seek. The question that hangs in the balance is whether the best bet for modern presidents is to govern in secular time.

DONALD TRUMP’S FIRST YEAR

Decreasing Influence without Increasing Effectiveness

MICHAEL NELSON

Donald Trump won an astonishing victory in the 2016 presidential election. At each turn of the electoral calendar, from June 16, 2015, when Trump announced he was running, until well into the evening of Election Day—November 8, 2016—political analysts of every stripe were confident that he would not be the forty-fifth president of the United States. His candidacy would not last long enough even to contest the Iowa caucuses and New Hampshire primary, they—we—all said. The Huffington Post, for example, refused for months to report on Trump’s campaign as part of [our] political coverage. Instead we will cover his campaign as part of our entertainment section.¹ Election eve forecasts placed his chances of victory against Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton at 1 percent (the Princeton Election Consortium), 2 percent (HuffPost), even 0 percent (the celebrated Democratic political strategist David Plouffe).²

The presidential election was not the only one whose outcome surprised the experts. Most forecast that the results of the Senate elections, in which the Republicans were forced to defend more than twice as many seats as the Democrats, would turn over control of that chamber from the Republican to the Democratic Party. Wrong again. The Democrats gained just two seats, not the five they needed to secure a majority. Predictions for the House elections generally were that the Democrats would add about fifteen to twenty seats, bringing them within striking distance of a majority. That didn’t happen either. They gained a paltry seven seats, leaving the Republicans in charge of a united party government: the presidency and both houses of Congress.

Although surprising in its result, the 2016 election was less remarkable in its magnitude. It was not, as Trump claimed, a massive landslide victory, as you know, in the Electoral College, much less the biggest Electoral College win since Ronald Reagan.³ From 1788 to 2012, forty-five of fifty-seven presidential elections were decided by a larger electoral vote majority than Trump’s 306–232 victory over Hillary Clinton (304–227 after seven faithless electors voted for different candidates than the ones to whom they were pledged).⁴ In the seven elections after Reagan, the winning candidate outdid Trump in the Electoral College five times. In only four elections in two and a quarter centuries did the winner fail to secure more votes from the people than his opponent. Yet Trump ran a record 2.9 million behind Clinton in the national popular vote, and his postelection claim that between three and five million illegal votes [for Clinton] caused me to lose the popular vote was completely unsubstantiated by evidence.⁵

Similarly, although the election gave Trump a united party government the Republican majority in both congressional chambers was perilously thin. In the House of Representatives, Republicans outnumbered Democrats by 241 to 194, and in the Senate by 52 to 48. In the face of cohesive Democratic opposition, this meant that any legislative proposal that alienated just a small group of Republican members was unlikely to be enacted. This was