With Donald Trump back on the campaign trail, now seems like a good time for this post. For all the complaints about Donald Trump’s lack of competence as president, it was actually his incompetence that was the saving grace of his presidency. Former President Trump was good at some things. He knew how to energize those who supported him. He identified people who had been ignored for years, if not decades, and spoke for them. His skill at public relations and his ability to play the media in the 2016 campaign was impressive. He didn’t need to spend as much as his opponents because he knew how to get free publicity from the media.
But, while he knew how to get elected, he didn’t know how to govern. He was competent at getting elected president. He was incompetent at being president.
While former President Trump’s administration accomplished lots of things, most of them weren’t done by him. House Speaker Paul Ryan and Pennsylvania Senator Pat Toomey were among those who got the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 written and passed. It was competent people in the bureaucracy, people who knew how to run government, who got regulations adopted and policies changed during the Trump administration.1 It was Mitch McConnell and the Federalist Society who got good judges onto the Supreme Court and Courts of Appeals.
Many of those who didn’t like former President Trump were appalled by the chaos in his White House. But if you didn’t like his ideas (whatever they were), the chaos and the incompetence were actually saving graces. A competent President Trump could have done a lot more harm.
In fact, if you didn’t like former President Trump, the scariest possibility is not former President Trump running and winning in 2024.2 It is, rather, the election of somebody who believes what former President Trump said but who knows how government works and how to actually do things.
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1 Whether you liked what she did with respect to sexual assault and harassment in colleges (I do; I think they were a necessary rebalancing of the policies the Obama administration implemented by “Dear Colleagues” letters), Education Secretary Betsy DeVos followed the Administrative Procedure Act to properly adopt regulations on the subject. See here and here,
2 No president who lost re-election has run again and won except Grover Cleveland in 1892. But Grover Cleveland actually won the popular vote in 1888, the year he lost. Which makes him the only person, besides Franklin Delano Roosevelt, to win the popular vote for President more than twice. (Two caveats: One, while Andrew Jackson got more votes than John Quincy Adams in 1824, a number of states did not have a popular vote for president in 1824. State legislatures in those states chose their electors, so it is hard to say who won the popular vote. Two, see this from Edmund F. Kallina, Jr., Courthouse Over White House (1988), p. 106-07:
“Yet was Kennedy the true leader in popular votes [in 1960]? Disregarding the issue of voting irregularities, one can argue that Kennedy benefitted from an overly generous estimate of his vote in Alabama. Its Democratic electoral slate was composed of five electors pledged to Kennedy and six unpledged electors who were hostile to the national ticket. Nevertheless, the media were counting all Democratic votes in Alabama for Kennedy. The unpledged slate was ignored as if it did not exist. There were problems with any tallying method in these peculiar circumstances, but the obvious and perhaps fairest way was to take the highest count for any Democratic elector and divide it proportionately (i.e., 5/11 and 6/11) between Kennedy and the unpledged slate. Such a method would have made Nixon the winner of the popular vote.” (italics in original)
On this theory, Richard Nixon won the popular vote three times, too.
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