To listen to some Trump supporters, you'd think a President Trump would swoop into Washington, apply his mad skills and business acumen to clean up Washington, pull in the reins on the federal bureaucracy, tame the IRS and get things running in a ship-shape manner.
To listen to some of his critics, Trump would destroy all rights for minorities, women and the disabled while completely mismanaging everything Washington does and ultimately pushing all the nuclear buttons, thus destroying the world.
An actual Trump presidency would be unlike either one of these scenarios, if only because both put far too much emphasis on the power and personality of the president to the exclusion of other elements of the federal government.
If Donald Trump becomes the 45th president of the United States on January 20, 2017, he will presumably do so with his party having maintained control of both the House and Senate. That will mean that for the first time in 10 years, there is an opportunity for policies and reforms favored by Republicans to be passed by Congress and signed into law by the president.
Trump is often criticized for not having an intimate understanding of the details of public policy. There is some truth to that criticism. But House Speaker Paul Ryan and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell understand policy very well. Expect them to charge their respective Republican committee chairs to start working on legislation in the following areas:
Repealing and replacing ObamaCare while dealing with the millions who have signed up for it in the meantime.
Returning to regular-order budgets and reconsidering all the spending priorities of the federal government.
Rewriting the tax code, probably in a manner fairly close to what Trump has proposed.
Developing new energy policies that open up the development of more domestic energy resources, especially on federal lands.
And in the Senate, preparing for hearings on a Trump nominee to the Supreme Court.
McConnell will have to eliminate the 60-vote requirement to end a filibuster in order to get much of this passed. Given the profligacy of the Democrats over the past decade and the nation's urgent need to solve these very serious problems, I think there's a decent chance McConnell will do so.
The legislative initiatives will come from Congress. Trump's priorities will be a factor, with Vice President Mike Pence helping him to bridge the gap between his basic instincts and the realities of how you work with House and Senate leaders. But there is not much Trump can really do on the policy front without congressional leaders driving it. Expect him to sign the ObamaCare repeal within his first year, as I suspect it will take that long for the House, Senate and White House to work out the details of what they're going to do.
A real budget with real changes in spending priorities is probably feasible to be passed in the fall of 2017 for Fiscal Year 2018.
Trump will have more leeway when it comes to revoking Obama executive orders, and he can set some priorities about how executive branch departments will function. Who he chooses for his cabinet positions will say a lot about how the administrative state will function. The IRS's targeting of conservatives for political purposes will stop. New appointments to the National Labor Relations Board will stop putting their thumbs on the scales to favor labor unions. Homeland Security and ICE will return to serious enforcement of immigration laws.
Things like a border wall and a moratorium on immigration from terrorist-sponsoring nations will be hard to achieve, both because of the money required and because of the complicated nature of implementation. I'm not saying they'll be impossible, but they won't be the low-hanging fruit. The first things you'll see will be long-embraced Republican priorities like those described above.
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It may be true that Trump is not a committed ideological conservative, but he would gain nothing from vetoing these bills. He knows we cannot continue the present direction of the country.
Presidents have only so much power in our system of government, and presidents who are scant on the details of policy are usually led by legislative leaders. In all likelihood, the nation's policy agenda will be led by Mike Pence, Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell during a Trump Administration. Obviously Trump can set limits and parameters, and he can establish lines that new policies can't cross. But he won't be a dictator and he'll have a lot more incentive to work with a Republican Congress than to fight with it.
All in all, this is a pretty appealing scenario. We will probably get the primary changes we've been needing for years, and we will no longer have a president who stubbornly resists every desperately needed change in direction.
Many of the things Trump says that get a lot of attention might never translate into actual policy implementation, although you never know. But when you step back and look at the whole of how things operate under our three branches of government, you realize that an actual Trump presidency - at least the key policy outcomes - would be a lot less extreme and bizarre than people think. And as long as Republicans hang onto control of Congress, pretty positive for the country.
To listen to some Trump supporters, you'd think a President Trump would swoop into Washington, apply his mad skills and business acumen to clean up Washington, pull in the reins on the federal bureaucracy, tame the IRS and get things running in a ship-shape manner.
To listen to some of his critics, Trump would destroy all rights for minorities, women and the disabled while completely mismanaging everything Washington does and ultimately pushing all the nuclear buttons, thus destroying the world.
An actual Trump presidency would be unlike either one of these scenarios, if only because both put far too much emphasis on the power and personality of the president to the exclusion of other elements of the federal government.
