Donald Trump's Unexpected Place in History

Donald Trump is not a surprising human mutant with Presidential hope born of our troubled times.  He had a precursor.  An earlier crisis in our national history spawned the first similar presidential misfit, Lincoln's successor Andrew Johnson--Trump’s forerunner.  The issues are different, but the similarity in behavior is uncanny.   

Hearken to what Jeffrey Tulis (an essayist in, Presidential Leadership, James Taranto, ed.) says about this earlier aberrant leader. He notes that Johnson was [as is Trump]

"a 'semiliterate' man with a "gift for delivering speeches on the stump, impassioned appeals that skewered his opponents as he responded, quickly and effectively, to the reaction of his audience.  These were not polished orations, prepared in advance with appropriate literary references or attention to how the speech would be read after it was delivered. Johnson's [and Trump's] talent was for the extemporaneous, crowd-pleasing harangue.

“When Johnson became president he conducted the office [as Trump would] in the only way that he knew—as a demagogue. His main strategy to secure support for his policy toward the South was a presidential "Swing Around the Circle," a speaking tour in which he delivered sixty speeches, all variations on one speech. [Trump has had a tour ready-made for him in the televised campaign debates] Johnson carried a rough outline in his head and modified it to respond to each audience. In the typical speech, he would invoke the spirits of Washington and Jackson, claim his own devotion to the principles of Union [Trump's mantra is, "I will make America great again"), deny that he was a traitor [or "fraud" as per Romney; pathological liar, as per Sanders] as others had alleged, attack some part of the audience (depending on the kinds of heckles he received) [like Trump accusing his hecklers of being sent by Sanders]. . . . Nothing could be further from the Founders' intentions than for presidential power to depend upon the interplay of orator and crowd."

       But beyond the public persona of these two men, their relationship to the office of U. S. President has a disturbing odor.  Johnson became president by accident, and Trump is yet but hopeful.  Johnson’s term in office played out as what Tulis calls a model for a "plebiscitary" president—one who draws his supporters from a coalition "cobbled together personally through appeals that did not track prevailing party positions or organizations."  Johnson, a Democrat from Tennessee, was an addendum to the “refashioned" Republican party ticket by Lincoln’s choice--a border state senator who opposed secession. He was voted into the Vice Presidency  by happenstance.  

        At this point it appears that Trump is the choice of the disenchanted, to the consternation of the “establishment” element of his party. The word plebiscite stems from a combination of the Latin plebe (common people) and scitum (decree), hence the dictate of commoners, suggesting rebellion rather than official sanction.

A plebiscitary president also suggests one who personalizes his unusual mandate, which in turn hints at a tortuous twist on the constitutional scheme of inter-branch governmental cooperation. Tulis defines it as making policy "by employing unilateral powers, executive orders, and bureaucratic maneuvers rather than through legislation." This is the tactic of the (any) president who wants to "thwart the will of an unjust or a tyrannical Congress."      

Presidential power by “administrative” design rather than Constitutional authority draws energy from the veins of public opinion, bypassing institutional checkpoints.  (A plebiscitary mandate and administrative design are birds in the same nest.) Administrative Presidents view the personal power that comes with authority "as attributes of their own democratic skills [and personal appeal] rather than as derivative from their constitutional station." The Constitution becomes their "instrument" for authority rather than the "source" of it.  Even political parties are "refashioned" to be instruments of personal power, rather than organizations that "produce," "mold," and "limit" the president.

At the heart of Trump’s appeal is his vocalizing of public frustration with a do-nothing Congress and a spineless incumbent President.  With his announcements that he knows how to “deal” with problems and his take-charge presumptuousness, Trump clothes himself in the robe of an administrative presidency, an implied but shadowed acknowledgement that this kind of "power" reveals the weakness of traditional definitions of "power."

Tulis presents  Andrew Johnson as ”the first and most effective” president we have had  with this style.  I wouldn’t expect Trump to admit, if he even knew, that Johnson was a perfect model of how to administratively operate in a three branch government, because Johnson went down in flames.  But Trump has a laser instinct for how to do it Johnson’s way.  Johnson had different motivational issues--racism and sectional pride.  Trump has his own fountain of prejudices and spites (immigrants, Muslims, weakness and physical handicaps).

Trump’s daily display of his bully habits doesn’t leave much to our imagination for how he would go about “leading.“ Tulis provides us an eye opening account of the havoc Trump’s precursor wrought with this leadership style. He describes how Lincoln’s successor “repeatedly ignored  the deliberate  will  of Congress,  [as] he fashioned policy through [peacetime] use of unilateral power that was, and still is, unprecedented. Johnson  refused  to enforce  many  properly enacted laws; he refused to spend money  appropriated for congressionally constructed  institutions;  he  pardoned countless Confederates, arrested by his own  military establishment, who would not pledge allegiance to the United States; he seized and returned land to former slave  owners  that  had been legally confiscated  and  distributed to slaves who had worked the land; he used patronage power to bully politicians throughout the nation to  support  his version of reconstruction; and [bullied] Congress to protect his understanding of the Constitution."

And you know what happened to Johnson—he was impeached. (After his impeachment, Johnson was acquitted by one vote.) Being that impeachment is only "indictment," it falls short of assessing conviction with incarceration. Convicted as charged only ousts the defendant from office. But let’s save ourselves the effort of "removing" Trump from office down the road. We can informally impeach him now by not electing him, since he already stands guilty of promoting "administrative" executorship.  He is flying through the primary voting season, petulantly displaying all the signs of an Andrew Johnson returned to life.

Johnson is now postmortem but remains a troubling marker. Tulis explains that this accidental president’s main legacy "was to disgrace the office" by repudiating the forms and formalities of leadership" that accorded with "constitutional order."  He "overlegalized the political relationship of President and Congress.  After repeatedly losing  legislative disputes with Congress,” he fell back  on the Supreme Court to arbitrate the clashes. [Trump can only think of expediting matters by sucker punching the “bad, very bad” protesters]  To Johnson, "the courts and the people  were preferred venues in a process of political forum shopping.”

This explanation underlines the Constitutional impropriety of Johnson’s mode of operation. George W. Bush was clever enough to keep his “administrative” steering under the radar.  He was not the first president to accompany his signature with remarks of interpretation and reservations to the laws he signed. But his “signing statements” challenged more than a thousand statutes in the legislation he initialized.  These “signing statements” signaled to his department how to “manage” the new laws.  Bush used Johnson’s “administrative” executive tool, but possessed a different temperament. I don’t think Trump is capable of being that subtle; he is a Johnson with the boost of media flare.

On another more oblique  but disturbing level Johnson demonstrated his mental divorce from the intentions of our Founding Fathers.  In defying the Tenure of Office Act he triggered the trivializing of the impeachment process, otherwise structured to confront “high crimes.”  His bullying provoked the Judiciary Committee to strike back in defense of the more cerebral Constitutional principle of balanced power. Congress, however took a deep breath, cooled down and edited out “bad rhetoric" in the list of impeachment charges.  This assured Johnson’s acquittal.  Congress caved.  Johnson survived but the Presidency became a carrier for a virus.

Historians have swallowed the trivialization of the impeachment “check” by stressing that the vote count was party line.  In Tulis’ judgment, Congress, wounded by Johnson's legal literalism, has been deprived of  its core constitutional weapon in the separation-of-powers dispute--that is, the power to democratically punish an executive who disgraces his office or who abuses the Constitution by repeatedly undermining laws [duly] enacted by  a deliberative democracy."

Donald Trump is so much like Andrew Johnson it is scary.  In most presidential rating polls, Johnson is tagged as a failure.  History can be music to our ears, but it helps to put it on speaker phone to hear the rumble tones and crashing sounds.

Doug Good