Trump is ‘easily the worst president in U.S. history’
I asked Donald Kettl, a professor emeritus and former dean of the School of Public Policy at the University of Maryland and the author of “The Right-Wing Idea Factory: From Traditionalism to Trumpism,” which will be published in May, to assess — without regard to merit — how consequential the Trump presidency will be.
On this measure he placed Trump in the Top 5 of American presidents, alongside George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson, noting, however, that “Trump’s consequences have been aggressive efforts to unravel the ideas of the other four presidents.”
Kettl listed some of the same permanent or semi-permanent Trump legacies that I already described, but he added a few:
He’s driven a deep divide into the country: between the states, between migrants and many others, between classes and between the intellectual elite and the rest of the country.
He’s slashed the size of the federal bureaucracy and made federal jobs much less attractive. It will be a very, very long time until college students will trust the federal government with their careers.
He’s fundamentally undermined the idea of an annual budget process and the concept of a balanced federal budget. These ideas were teetering before his presidency, but the Trump administration gave up on any pretense of seeking balance or an annual spending plan.
Michael Bailey, a political scientist at Georgetown, prefaced his assessment of Trump’s consequentiality by pointedly noting that he would rank Trump “as easily the worst president in U.S. history. The corruption and damage to long-term U.S. institutions and reputation are far beyond anything we’ve seen before,” including Andrew Johnson, James Buchanan and Rutherford Hayes.
As for being consequential, Bailey continued, Trump has been “highly consequential in an overwhelmingly negative way. He will leave a lasting negative legacy.”
Bailey listed three of these legacies: “The erosion of trust in the U.S. by European and Asian allies; the erosion of U.S. dominance of higher education; and huge budget deficits (not only due to Trump, but exacerbated by him).”
Kate Shaw, a constitutional law scholar at the University of Pennsylvania, cited “Trump’s violation of numerous statutes passed by Congress” to note:
It’s not that particular decisions to violate statutes can’t be undone or reversed; many, perhaps even most, can. But the combination of the president’s numerous and flagrant statutory violations and Congress’s failure to challenge those violations has created a permission structure for future presidents to disregard statutes any time they find those statutes inconvenient.
Gary Jacobson, a professor emeritus of political science at the University of California-San Diego, expanded the case against Trump:
He has done serious damage to many aspects of American government and politics that will be difficult and costly and, in some cases, impossible to undo.
The mass firing of dedicated and experienced civil servants has made government dumber and weaker and will make it harder to attract talented replacements even if the next administration wants to make it smarter and more effective.
The damage to scientific and medical research, the environment, relations with allies and trading partners, disaster preparedness, consumer safety, higher education, military leadership, civil rights, etc. will take years to repair even in cases where that is possible.
It is already clear, Jacobson continued, that “Trump is among the most consequential presidents in U.S. history, and not in a good way.”
In an email replying to my questions, Barbara Walter, a professor of international affairs at the School of Global Policy and Strategy at the University of California-San Diego, wrote:
To flag one thing that belongs on your permanent list that likely won’t show up in the obvious places: norms.
American democracy remained strong for so long because both its political parties and its presidents respected a set of unwritten rules.
Adding that while formal checks “were essential, the oil that would grease the wheels of democracy would be norms,” Walter continued. Trump “has shown that you can violate them and survive politically. He’s torn down the invisible wall that kept the worst impulses of political life in check, and once that’s torn down, a new, ugly world emerges.”
Yphtach Lelkes, a professor at Penn’s Annenberg School for Communication, shares Walter’s concerns, writing by email:
I’m less confident about which specific policies or institutions belong on which list than I am about the broader effect on norms. My guess is that this is where Trump’s longest shadow will fall.
Norms take a long time to develop because they rest on habits of restraint and on the expectation that violations will be punished. But they can disappear quickly once it becomes clear that punishment is not coming.
As a result, Lelkes wrote, “Trump’s most consequential legacy may be less any single policy than the lesson he taught politicians: Norms can be broken, repeatedly and openly, without necessarily paying much of a price.” [Continue reading…]