Democrats And Trump Loyalists Have One Shared Interest
Get Trump to see that his desire to be loved and his desire to be domineering are in conflict.
It’s a measure of Donald Trump’s unfitness for office that even Republicans understand his presidency presents an unusually broad spectrum of risk, forcing everyone else working in and around the system to think through how to avoid the scary tail, where Trump bungles another pandemic or worse.
This time around, Democrats have looked for silver linings in the fact that Trump’s changing inner circle is actually pretty heterodox, united mainly by venal vices: greed, wrath, lust for power. Who wins in a fight between Elon Musk and the older party interest groups as to the merits of electric vehicles and renewable energy? Who wins control over food and drug regulation when RFK Jr. comes into conflict with Trumpers whose brain worms are only figurative? The hope is that the saner of the sides in any internal debate will prevail, or that everyone will remain too mired in infighting to accomplish much of anything.
But there’s an insight here for Trump himself as much as for anyone hoping to shift the spectrum of risk. In many cases it will be Trump who makes the call between competing factions; in some cases his advisers will be trying to talk him out of bad ideas. In every instance we will all share an interest in curbed ambition.
Donald Trump is going to take power in January under much different circumstances than he did eight years ago, in ways that will be a poor fit for both the conduct of his first presidency, and the radicalism of his third campaign.
He and his incoming team will be better at navigating the the federal government than they were eight years ago as total novices, and less constrained by law or fear of consequences. If they want to come in and break shit, they can.
At the same time, why do they think they’d be exempt from the damage?
Trump is poised to inherit a strong economy once again, but this time with less labor-market slack. If he hustles the agenda he campaigned on into law, it will drive inflation, and he’ll suffer for it politically. He’ll also take office having defeated his opponents—he won the election outright, there’s no organic backlash to his illegitimacy. It would be odd for him to simply pick up where he left off in January 2021 (or January 2020, before the pandemic arrived) lashing out at his defeated opposition. That’s a good way to squander converts.
Trump’s desire to be well remembered and admired by most Americans is within reach, a lifetime of sin notwithstanding. The biggest impediment is his impulse, and the impulses of those around him, to be extreme and introduce chaos.
CONFOUND INTEREST
If Trump were capable of listening to and seriously contemplating advice from people who don’t just kiss his ass and hope to ride his coat tails, here’s what I’d try to communicate to him: