New Interview at The Signal on the Biden Presidency

I recently spoke with Graham Vyse of The Signal about the state of Joe Biden's presidency in the spring of its second year. We covered Biden's depressed approval ratings, the political implications of the continued COVID-related economic disruptions, what makes Biden different from Barack Obama and Bill Clinton, and why his presidency so far has disappointed some of the people who voted for him in 2020. You can read a summary of our conversation here.

State of the Union Address Review: Biden Tries to Cheer Up the Country—and His Party

In the early weeks of Joe Biden's second year in the presidency, the nation he governs is by some important measures moving in the right direction. Job, wage, and economic growth are all positive; the prevalence and deadliness of COVID-19 is (at least for now) fading rapidly; and there are no ongoing domestic crises or major scandals. But the national mood has become increasingly sour over the past year, a pessimism reflected in Biden's declining job approval ratings and an emerging Republican advantage in midterm election polls.

Biden's State of the Union address contained a familiar sequence of policy proposals and details—the "laundry list" approach to speechmaking that is especially beloved of leaders in the Democratic Party, where many different constituencies all demand recognition. (And it won't be hard to find complaints that he didn't say enough about this or that pet liberal priority, as if these speeches are capable of exerting transformative effects on the policy agenda of the American public.) Biden's own communication instincts were reflected in his emphasis on economic issues over cultural matters; his aversion to overly abstract or metaphorical oratory; and his regular claims to stand for bipartisanship, pragmatism, and common sense. 

Biden's State of the Union address did not "make news" in the sense of revealing a major new initiative or governing approach; even the planted media hints from earlier in the day that he would be signaling a redoubled focus on deficit reduction or inflation-taming seemed to oversell the novelty of the speech. What the address seemed to represent, most of all, was something like a national halftime pep talk. "I want you to know that we are going to be okay," Biden said while discussing the Russian invasion of Ukraine, though this sentiment seemed to apply to his message on the economy, COVID, and domestic policy as well. Rather than invoke the constitutional purpose of the annual address near the beginning of his remarks, as most presidents do, Biden saved his "report . . . that the State of the Union is strong because you, the American people, are strong" for his conclusion of his speech, adding, "we are stronger today than we were a year ago and we will be stronger a year from now than we are today."

While the White House would be happy to convince anyone of this view, there's little doubt that a particularly important audience for Biden's words are the members of his own party, who are less enthusiastic about the Biden presidency than they once were and whose energetic mobilization will be necessary to avoid a national Republican sweep in the fall midterm elections. Biden cannot count on the personal devotion or symbolic importance that his immediate predecessor enjoyed. His voters will not reward him for merely picking a fight on camera with a reporter or mocking an opponent at a rally; they expect much more tangible returns on their support. 

And so even the opening language in tonight's speech that detailed the Biden administration's efforts to assist Ukraine and punish Russia, for all its appeal to national and political unity, had a clear second meaning that extended to later passages on infrastructure and COVID. You can be proud of your president, they said; all things considered, he's doing okay. So cheer up a little, America—and cheer up a lot, Democrats.

Voters Don't Often Reward What They Like...But They Do Punish What They Don't Like

Joe Biden finally signed the infrastructure bill into law this past Monday after a three-month delay separating its approval by the Senate from its passage in the House of Representatives—a delay insisted upon by House liberals who attempted to use it as leverage to guarantee the simultaneous enactment of the larger and more ambitious reconciliation bill. But the reconciliation bill, named the Build Back Better Act after a campaign slogan of Biden's, still remains in legislative limbo, as a few pivotal moderates in the Senate have remained coy about exactly what they will support and when they will support it. The House leadership plans to move forward on the bill as early as this week, but the Senate's timeline for action will remain unclear until the entire Democratic caucus signals that it's ready to proceed. At the moment, final passage of the bill shortly before the Christmas recess seems like the most optimistic plausible scenario for Democrats, and it's still possible that nothing will end up passing at all.

It might seem logical to draw a connection between the slowing momentum of the Biden legislative agenda and the simultaneous fade in the president's job approval ratings over the course of the late summer and fall. Perhaps, one could imagine, voters who are dissatisfied by the pace of national policy change are taking out their frustrations on the president. If this were true, both the recent enactment of the infrastructure bill and the potential forthcoming passage of Build Back Better—both popular measures according to opinion surveys—would hold the promise of giving Biden and his fellow Democrats a popularity boost heading into the midterm elections next year.

One problem with this assumption is that there are other, more convincing explanations for Biden's declining approval. The resurgence of COVID-19 infections caused by the delta variant, combined with the continued disruption of the job market and rising inflation, seems quite sufficient to account for increased public discontent since the spring. Even Biden's imposition of mandates for vaccination or frequent COVID testing as a condition of employment, though favored by a narrow majority of Americans, may have cost him some support among certain segments of the population.

But we also don't have many historical examples of voters rewarding presidents and governing parties for legislative productivity. Even when the bills being passed are popular or transformative, they don't seem to attract new supporters to the president's side or protect him from criticism on other grounds. The congressional sessions of 1965–66, 1981–82, and 2009–10 were all marked by unusually prolific policy-making innovation, enacting laws that continue even today to shape national politics and federal governance. In all three cases, the president's party suffered a significant loss of congressional seats in the subsequent midterm election.

Voters are tough to satisfy and have short memories, especially for success. (In May 1945, Winston Churchill and the other Allied leaders declared victory in the European theater of World War II; two months later, Churchill's party lost 189 seats and control of Parliament to the opposition.) Americans happily accepted the economic stimulus payments included in the American Rescue Plan earlier this year, passed through Congress on a party-line vote, but did not respond to this provision of benefits by showering the ruling Democrats with their enduring affection. But when the party in power does something unpopular, or even fails to effectively ameliorate the day's crisis or economic hardship, we can almost always foresee a public backlash. In politics, grievance is a far more predictable response than gratitude.

Anyone who would wish electoral outcomes to serve as a reliable means of rewarding legislative achievement and punishing legislative inertia will find this pattern endlessly infuriating. But it's a good reason why the importance of new policy shouldn't be judged only through the lens of its potential short-term electoral consequences, which may be nonexistent or even negative. Democrats paid a heavy political cost for passing the Affordable Care Act in 2010, which contributed to their loss of the House for what turned out to be the following 8 years. But when Republicans sought to capitalize on public dissatisfaction with the ACA by attempting to repeal it in the first year of the Trump presidency, the direction of popular sentiment immediately swung in the other direction—and House Democrats soon found themselves back in the majority. A party expecting an electoral reward for enacting new laws may just need a lot of patience; the political payoff, if it comes at all, may not be realized until the opposition comes to power and tries to undo the accomplishments of its predecessors.

Biden's Declining Popularity: An Interview with The Signal

I spoke recently with Michael Bluhm of The Signal about the recent decline in Joe Biden's job approval ratings. We covered the likely causes of this trend, their political implications, and the contributing role of America's broader climate of partisan polarization. Excerpts of the interview are posted here, and a more complete version is available to subscribers.

The Biden Administration's Demographic Diversity Is Where the New Progressivism Meets the Old Democratic Party

History was made on Wednesday when the daily White House briefing was delivered by Karine Jean-Pierre, the chief deputy press secretary, filling for press secretary Jen Psaki. The briefing itself was not unusually newsworthy. But Jean-Pierre was the first openly gay or lesbian person ever to fill the role, and the first Black woman to do so in three decades. The Biden administration proudly publicized this milestone, which attracted significant media notice including a post-briefing televised interview with Jean-Pierre by MSNBC's Joy Reid.

The White House's enthusiastic promotion of Jean-Pierre's turn at the briefing podium fits a larger pattern. Biden and his team have been especially devoted to presenting themselves as commited to increasing demographic diversity in government. This theme dates back to the 2020 campaign; Biden promised to choose a female vice presidential nominee near the end of the Democratic primaries and ultimately signaled, prior to the selection of Kamala Harris, that he would probably name a woman of color as his running mate. Since then, Biden has claimed credit for unprecedented aggregate representation of women and racial minorities in senior administration positions, as well as a long list of individual history-making appointments: the first-ever female treasury secretary and director of national intelligence; the first-ever Black secretary of defense; the first-ever Native American and openly gay Cabinet members; the first-ever transgender sub-Cabinet appointee; the first-ever all-female White House communications team. (Biden has also promised to name the first Black woman to the U.S. Supreme Court, but an opportunity has yet to arise.)

This emphasis can be seen as attempting to satisfy contemporary progressive activists' intense interest in categorizing individuals by social identity and judging the fitness of an organization by counting the members of historically disadvantaged groups within its ranks. But there's nothing new about a president, especially a Democratic president, working to ensure the visible representation of his party's major constituencies. Franklin Roosevelt was the first chief executive to appoint a woman to the Cabinet, and Lyndon Johnson the first to appoint a Black Cabinet secretary. Bill Clinton, hardly a left-wing purist, promised "a Cabinet that looks like America" during the 1992 campaign, and ultimately appointed the first-ever Asian-American secretary and the first women in history to serve as attorney general and secretary of state.

For Biden, attending to and publicizing the demographic composition of his administration can simultaneously accommodate the traditional organized interests of his party and appeal to ideological activists who increasingly prize social group diversity as a core political value. With narrow congressional majorities and the Senate filibuster presenting serious long-term obstacles to the administration's ambitious legislative agenda, Biden's appointment decisions may turn out to be an important way for him to satisfy the priorities of multiple blocs of supporters.

Of course, diversity in government can mean more than one thing. Biden's administration contains no top Republicans or independents, and the only member of his Cabinet whose educational credentials are limited to a single bachelor's degree is Marty Walsh, the secretary of labor. The dominant substantive ethos of the Biden presidency is a technocratic liberalism that appears to prevail across its senior personnel regardless of ethnic or gender identification. But this merely reflects the current state of the larger Democratic Party, where fundamental ideological divisions have eased over time even as the number of component social groups seeking representation only continues to grow.

Biden at 100 Days: An Interview with The Signal

Graham Vyse of the new online publication The Signal called me yesterday and we chatted about the record of the Biden presidency at the 100-day mark. Normally, my interviews with reporters yield a quotation of a sentence or two in a larger news story, but this time our discussion was turned into a more in-depth Q&A covering many different aspects of the current political moment. You can read an edited transcript of the interview here; the site requires an email address to sign up but access to the piece is free.

Of Course Biden Is Running for Re-Election

The Washington Post ran a story on Tuesday about Joe Biden's decision to house his political operation within the Democratic National Committee instead of creating a parallel organization as Barack Obama had done. Obama never had much affection for the DNC, which was not exactly a center of support for him when he ran against Hillary Clinton in 2008. But Obama's neglect of the party's institutional strength while president in favor of the personal vehicles Organizing for America and Organizing for Action ultimately neither provided major electoral payoffs nor won him appreciation among Democratic politicians and committee members. A party regular through and through, Biden has decided that his interests are best served by remaining integrated with the traditional Democratic organizational apparatus heading into the 2022 midterms, rather than siphoning staff members and donor money into a separate political structure.

The Post report mentions, almost as an aside, that while Biden will wait until after the midterms to build a formal re-election campaign and publicly declare his candidacy, his advisors are "working under the assumption that he will once again top the Democratic ticket in 2024." This might be shocking news to some; I have encountered multiple politically aware people since Biden first entered the 2020 race who presume that he would only seek to serve a single term. But it shouldn't be a surprise at all.

The idea of the self-declared single-term president has had a romantic appeal to editorial-page writers (and few others) since well before Biden became the oldest person in history elected to the job. Like many other ideas with romantic appeal, it is disconnected from political reality. Declaring oneself a lame duck from the early days of an administration is not an effective strategy for a president to build or maintain influence, both inside and outside the party. The perception that you might be there awhile is a much better way to attract talented subordinates, pursue ambitious goals, and pressure members of Congress for support, and the inability to seek re-election is one reason why modern presidents' second terms tend to be less focused and successful than their first.

The main point made by the Post article—that Biden is at heart a loyal party man—also applies to the re-election question. Unless an unforeseen governing disaster occurs, Democratic leaders will perceive that they are far better off with Biden running again, and presumably benefiting from the electoral advantage that incumbents normally hold, than with the risk of a damaging internal fight over the 2024 nomination. Even if Kamala Harris were able to quickly consolidate support within the party as Biden's heir apparent, she would still stand in the general election as both a less tested national figure and as a liberal woman of color seeking the presidency in a highly polarized era.

Leading Democrats who have their president's ear are thus very likely to encourage his intention to seek a second term—and to be terrified that a premature Biden retirement would only further increase the chances of a Trump comeback in 2024. Even if Biden were to have doubts about his ability to serve a full eight years, a successful re-election and subsequent mid-term handoff to Harris, setting her up as an incumbent in her own right before she had to face the voters, would be a much more desirable solution according to prevailing Democratic calculations. And Biden has already shown that he's the kind of president who cares a lot about what other people in his party think.

Yes, health considerations or other events may alter these plans. It's certainly possible that Joe Biden will not still be running for a second term when we get to 2024. But right now? Of course he's running. He's already started.

Biden's Early Moves Reflect the Declining Strength of the Center-Right

The predominant media storyline of the new Biden presidency so far is that it is surprisingly liberal and surprisingly partisan. A Washington community that has long viewed Biden as an instinctive ideological moderate who prides himself on his ability to work with members of the opposite party, and that interpreted his nomination as a decisive defeat for the purist left, has been forced to recalibrate its perceptions in the face of his early governing choices. Progressive observers have found much to cheer so far in Biden's policy and personnel decisions, with some even indulging the hope that his presidency might represent a historical turning point in American politics. Meanwhile, conservative critics have already begun to complain that the new chief executive is failing to live up to his own calls for political unity.

The "moderate" label was always a poor fit for Biden, used mostly as a facile shorthand to denote that his politics differed from those of Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. As I observed after his selection of Kamala Harris last August, Biden's actual career-long persona is "regular Democrat," with issue positions and priorities that have evolved over the decades in parallel with the mainstream of his party. The appointment of progressives to multiple administration positions—especially at the sub-cabinet and agency levels—and the ambition of Biden's major proposals in a range of policy areas can be viewed as a simple reflection of a recent leftward shift within the Democratic Party as a whole.

But there's another change that's important here. Biden and his team aren't just being pulled by internal partisan dynamics toward a strengthening left wing. They are also much less motivated than previous Democratic administrations to court the approval of the ideological center-right.

Both Bill Clinton and Barack Obama appointed Republicans to their administrations and pursued bipartisan policy solutions in part to build reputations among political elites as mature statesmen capable of rising above mere partisan loyalties. Their primary audience for these decisions was an "official Washington" composed of media thought leaders, think tank staffers, executives and lobbyists, and other political actors who had become accustomed to view Republican rule of the executive branch as the natural order of things (Republicans held the presidency for all but 4 years between 1968 and 1992, and all but 12 between 1968 and 2008) and to venerate right-of-center figures like Colin Powell and Alan Greenspan as the ideal personifications of public service. Much of this official Washington applauded Clinton's and Obama's "responsibility" and "toughness" when they departed from traditional liberal doctrine to pursue deficit reduction at home or military intervention abroad, and sympathetically portrayed non-Democrats within their administrations like David Gergen, Bill Cohen, and Robert Gates as the adults in the room keeping a necessary check on liberal naïveté.

Expectations that the Biden presidency would follow a similar path had caused a certain anticipatory disaffection on the left. But Democratic veterans of the Clinton and early Obama eras see a very different Republican Party when they look across the aisle today. The last decade of American politics, marked by the Tea Party movement and ascendancy of Donald Trump, has convinced even "establishment" Democrats that making concessions outside their party doesn't provide them much benefit—for either producing major policy achievements or realizing significant political advantages. And official Washington has discarded the once-prevalent assumption that the Republican Party is a valuable source of expertise and experience upon which Democratic presidents should productively draw. After the last four years, which party has a better claim to be the adults in the room?

If Biden had defeated Trump by a landslide margin in November, it might have paradoxically tempted him to govern in a more cautious style as a way to keep a wave of new defectors from the GOP inside his coalitional tent. But the last two elections have demonstrated that the anti-Trump Republicans who populate high-status editorial pages and Beltway professional circles are not representative of a numerically populous mass constituency; their approval might make a positive impression within a limited peer group, but it simply doesn't sway many voters. As long as the Republican Party remains devoted to Trump's style of politics if not Trump himself, Democrats may calculate that moderates and conservatives who find Trumpism intolerable will have little choice but to root for Biden's success even if his record is more liberal than they'd like.

The new opportunities for influence granted to the American left by the decaying position of the center-right may turn out to be one of the most unexpected political legacies of the Trump years. Center-right elites used to see themselves as the natural leaders of a "center-right nation." But today they are increasingly abandoned by both partisan sides, facing the realization that they speak mostly for themselves.

In the End, the Trump Presidency Was a Failure on Its Own Terms

The most surprising political development of the 21st century was that Donald Trump became president of the United States. The least surprising development was that he turned out to be bad at the job.

Evaluating presidential performance can be difficult. Some presidents' qualities only become clear long after they leave office, as previously unknown information comes to light and the revelations of history render their decisions more or less justified than they seemed at the time. Ideological predispositions inevitably color our views of political figures, who sometimes rise or fall in retrospective estimation as subsequent intellectual trends shift the grounds on which they are judged—like the renewed emphasis in recent years on the importance of civil rights that has bolstered the reputation of U. S. Grant among presidential scholars while damaging that of Woodrow Wilson. And there is no consensus, even among experts, on what the responsibilities of the president are and what standards are appropriate to determine success in office.

Regardless of these challenges, the general verdict on Trump among historians and political scientists, reporters and commentators, and most of the Washington political community (including, at least privately, many Republicans) is guaranteed to range from disappointment and mockery to outright declarations that he was the worst president in American history. And there is little reason to expect that the information yet to emerge about the internal operations of the Trump administration will improve his reputation in the future. Instead, it's far more likely that there are stories still to be told about the events of the last four years that history will find just as damning as today's public knowledge.

Trump's defenders will respond that the scholars and journalists who claim the authority to write this history are fatally corrupted by hostile bias. It's certainly true that these are collectively left-leaning professions, and that the Trump presidency treated both of these groups as political opponents from its earliest days. So what if we tried for a moment to give Trump the benefit of the doubt by attempting to evaluate his presidency as much as possible on its own terms? Did Trump succeed in achieving what he wanted to do, even if it wasn't what others wanted him to do?

One approach to answering this question involves returning to the 2016 campaign and comparing the positions of Trump the candidate to the record of Trump the president. Trump did deliver on some of his promises once in office: he cut taxes and regulations, he strengthened barriers to immigration and travel from overseas, and he appointed a large number of conservatives to the federal judiciary. But his signature proposals were never enacted, including the repeal and replacement of the Affordable Care Act, the significant renegotiation of international trade agreements, a major federal infrastructure investment, and a wall spanning the nation's southern border funded by the Mexican government.

There was also a more general set of failures that didn't concern specific policies as much as a basic approach to the job. While a candidate in 2016, Trump presented himself as an energetic deal-maker who would fight harder than his predecessors in both parties for the interests of the American people. But he turned out to be much less invested in his official responsibilities than in spending his daily "executive time" watching cable television and his weekends playing golf; he was sufficiently self-conscious about this lack of work ethic to inelegantly deny it in public ("President Trump will work from early in the morning until late in the evening. He will make many calls and have many meetings") but not to actually alter his behavior. 

Trump's pre-election suggestions that he would attract an all-star team of executive personnel to join the government similarly stood in sharp contrast to the actual staff of his administration, which was by some distance the least qualified and talented group of subordinates assembled by any modern president of either party. (And many key positions were filled by acting appointees or were simply left vacant for months and even years.)

With Trump's evident lack of interest in substantive details, his instinct for combativeness (a universally-acknowledged personal quality which many of his supporters admired), and his apparent difficulties in grasping the motivations of others, the promised knack for deal-making never materialized either. Both major legislative achievements of his presidency—the 2017 tax cut bill and the two rounds of COVID relief in 2020—were, by all accounts, developed and enacted with minimal direct involvement by the president. When Trump did insert himself in legislative negotiations in late 2018 and early 2019 by demanding that Congress approve funding for his border wall, the result was a prolonged government shutdown and subsequent retreat after Senate Republicans abandoned their support for his position.

Of course, politicians occasionally have been known to make promises on the campaign trail that they do not expect to keep if elected. Maybe it's inaccurate to treat public commitments in the midst of a tough electoral race as evidence of a president's true goals. So, based on the actions of the Trump administration once it began, what can we conclude about what it wanted to do and whether it succeeded in doing it?

The primary animating force of the Trump presidency, the juice that fueled the president and his subordinates every day, was the waging of a permanent political war against an array of perceived enemies. The Democratic Party was one such enemy—this was by far the most thoroughly partisan presidency in memory—but hardly the only one. The news media, career bureaucrats, intellectuals and educators, the entertainment industry, and any insufficiently supportive Republican were all dependable targets.

This war was unrelenting, but achieved few victories outside the bounds of the Republican Party (where Trump's influence and threats were most effective at punishing dissenters). Trump's critics spent the past four years feeling sad, angry, offended, and even fearful about the potential destruction of American democracy. But it's hard to make the case that their political or cultural power was weaker at the end of his presidency than it was at the beginning.

Trump succeeded in preventing Hillary Clinton from leading the country, but he wound up empowering Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi, and Chuck Schumer instead. He railed against liberal elites who predominate within social institutions like universities, media organizations, and technology companies, but his time in office only saw a continued progression of leftward cultural change in American society and a parallel departure of highly-educated voters from the Republican Party. The conservative intellectual project has not suffered as much damage in many decades as it did over the past four years; conservative thinkers and writers were internally divided into pro- and anti-Trump factions, were exposed as holding a limited ability to speak for the conservative mass public, and were deprived by Trump's behavior of a precious claim to moral superiority over the left. And the fact that the Trump administration is leaving office complaining of being "silenced" and "canceled" by a multi-platform social media ban imposed on its leader is evidence enough of its lack of success in gaining influence over the tech sector.

A final, inadvertantly-acknowledged testimony to the failure of the Trump administration was its prevailing communication style. Both the outgoing president and his succession of spokespeople stood out for two distinctive traits: a lack of commitment to factual accuracy and a perpetually grouchy demeanor. The typical public statement from this White House was a misleading claim delivered with a sarcastic sneer. Of course, no member of the administration would admit on the record that the Trump presidency was anything less than a parade of unparalleled triumphs. But it doesn't make sense to lie so much unless the truth isn't on your side, and there's no good reason to act so aggrieved all the time if you're really succeeding as much as you claim.

Will 2020 Dim the Myth of the Campaign Guru? Let's Hope So

Michael Deaver. Ed Rollins. Lee Atwater. James Carville. Dick Morris. Karl Rove. David Axelrod. Steve Bannon.

Every recent president has had at least one top advisor who has been given generous credit for being the strategic mastermind behind his political success—credit that these operatives have seldom discouraged. As the conduct of campaigns has become more professionalized over time and the press has devoted more attention to the game within the political game, strategists and consultants have increasingly become famous in their own right. These figures are considered worthy of awe based on the assumption that the choices that they make during the course of the campaign—which messages to adopt, which ads to produce, which voters to target, how to attack the opposition—are likely to be crucial to the outcome.

These choices are important, and in a close election they might indeed be decisive. But there is reason to believe that the influence of campaign activity and strategy over electoral results is much more modest than it is often assumed to be, especially in the general elections for the presidency that command the most attention and publicity. For example, we can get a fair way toward predicting the final vote distribution in any particular election simply by accounting for a few basic variables like the state of the national economy, the identity of the party in power, and whether or not the incumbent is running—all factors that lie outside the campaign itself.

The quadrennial celebration of the key strategists behind the winning candidate as unrivaled masters of the political arts usually reflects an assumption that the outcome proved them to be savvier or more ruthless than their counterparts in the losing camp. But most of the time, there are equally smart and tough people on both sides of a race. One competitor will inevitably be elected and the other defeated—it's the nature of the business—but that doesn't mean that the winners are always geniuses and the losers always incompetents.

Interestingly, the 2020 election may be the first in a while that has not generated substantial press coverage of the top professional staffers in the two major presidential campaigns. Of course, there are other big stories to cover these days. But these stories have themselves managed to illustrate how elections can be powerfully influenced by forces independent of the campaigns themselves—forces like a pandemic, or a recession, or a newly energized social movement.

The 2020 race has also demonstrated how elections with an incumbent seeking another term in office tend to become a referendum on that incumbent's perceived performance. President Trump's strategic decisions have indeed had electoral effects, but those decisions do not appear to be guided by aides within his campaign apparatus. His current organization lacks a Bannonesque svengali figure able to provide a coherent intellectual frame to his quest for re-election. And since Trump's recent behavior has coincided with, and probably contributed to, a notable slide in the polls, there aren't too many subordinates eager to take credit for his candidacy's current trajectory in conversations with reporters.

And then there's Joe Biden. Biden engineered a fairly remarkable comeback in the Democratic nomination contest and has now pulled into a national lead unmatched at this stage of the campaign by any candidate in either party since Bill Clinton's 1996 re-election. Yet neither he nor his brain trust seem to be getting much credit in the media for this record of success: the resurrection of his primary campaign is mostly attributed either to Jim Clyburn throwing him a rope in South Carolina or to the fortuitous mistakes of the Sanders, Warren, and Bloomberg candidacies, and his growing lead in the general election race is similarly laid at Trump's feet. (I'd guess that even many regular consumers of political media would have trouble recalling the name of Biden's campaign manager; I certainly did before writing this post.) With the pandemic limiting his ability to wage a visible campaign, Biden has received a certain respect only for having enough patience and base cunning to stay out of the way as Trump's position deteriorates.

The press isn't being particularly unfair to Biden and his aides. But it has misled in the past by overstating the importance of strategic maneuvering by campaign gurus, excessively hyping the presumed architects of electoral victory while disparaging the unsuccessful team for supposedly blundering its way to defeat. If the 2020 election provides an unusually dramatic example of the fundamental importance of external factors and the limited power of short-term tactics, it will provide us with a useful lesson in the true nature of presidential campaigns. Yes, hiring a brilliant political mind can sometimes help win the White House. But with the most important factors remaining out of the hands of the candidates and their staffs, the biggest electoral asset of all remains sheer luck. Maybe what was needed to finally convince the media of this fact was Joe Biden—whom one prominent New York Times reporter recently called a “very flawed candidate running a flawed campaign”—nevertheless becoming a heavy favorite to be the next president.

The Weakest Modern Presidency Faces a Pandemic From the Couch

For three years now, political scientists Jonathan Bernstein and Matt Glassman have been arguing that Donald Trump is a historically weak president—probably the weakest of the modern (post-FDR) presidents. This is a contrarian view in some respects. Trump dominates the day-to-day media coverage of politics like no other figure in memory, and even many of his harshest critics often describe him as ruthlessly wielding the power of his office.

But I suspect that this argument will become more popular over time, especially once Trump departs the presidency and is no longer the constant obsession of the political world. Even prior to the current emergency, Trump had rarely been invested in the substantive responsibilities of his office and had never been able to attract sustained popular support for himself or his policies. He has presided over an executive branch whose administrative and political capacity has been constrained by mismanagement, infighting, and a cast of substandard subordinates serving alongside an array of temporary appointees and outright vacancies. While other presidents learned on the job from early mistakes, Trump has seemed incapable of significant growth or adaptation.

The COVID-19 crisis has exposed this weakness to public view like no previous event. Other than signing economic aid legislation for citizens and businesses—initiatives that were chiefly negotiated by Treasury Secretary Mnuchin and congressional Democrats with little personal involvement by the president—Trump does not appear to be leading an ambitious national response to the epidemic. Governors and other state officials complain of insufficient federal assistance (and even active federal interference). According to recent reporting, Trump is unengaged with the substance of his administration's COVID mitigation efforts: his discursive appearances at task force meetings reveal a limited understanding of relevant subjects when he attends at all, and he spends much of the workday watching cable television.

Trump has angrily disputed these accounts, suggesting that he may be the hardest-working president in history. But the amount of time that he has visibly devoted to complaining on Twitter or holding extended press briefings is evidence enough of where his attention has been directed. Though they were initially assumed to be politically beneficial, the president's daily briefings have only turned out to advertise his limitations, impressing nobody who wasn't already a supporter. It's thus understandable that Trump's post-COVID bump in job approval was both comparatively modest and unusually short-lived.

Unlike the governors and mayors who are earning public support across party lines for their handling of the crisis, Trump seems incapable of understanding that projecting strength requires exhibiting intellectual command of the facts and toning down personal grievances. Rather than learning from experience, he repeats the same mistakes over and over: claiming that the virus will "just go away," touting unproven or nonsensical remedies, and making quickly-falsified predictions about how long the crisis will continue or how many Americans will die. And the president has repeatedly shifted responsibility for solving the problem from himself to state and local officials—quite a departure from the "I alone can fix it" rhetoric of the 2016 campaign.

The fundamental passivity of the president's response to COVID-19 is especially instructive given his normal preoccupation with projecting executive decisiveness, populist sympathies, and Type-A swagger. Trump's desire to comport to the ultimate "strong leader" archetype is indeed powerful, but not so powerful that it can overcome a limited interest in information-gathering, an inability to think strategically over the long term, a lack of mental focus on any subject other than himself, and a general absence of committed energy for the tasks of governing.

All of these traits were visible before COVID came along. But now the demands on this presidency have grown stronger while the president looks less and less comfortable in the job, unable even to mimic the seriousness of purpose that other elected officials have marshaled in the moment. He seems to be hoping that he will wake up one day and the virus will simply be gone—via miracle cure or act of providence—without the need for any dedication or sacrifice on his part. That's admittedly a relatable wish, but it's not how a strong president would act.

Four Reasons to Be Cautious About Trump's Approval Ratings

Ever since the COVID-19 coronavirus crisis began to accelerate a couple of weeks ago, political obsessives have wondered about the likely effect that it would have on President Trump's job approval ratings—and, by extension, his chances of re-election in November. The few surveys that have been conducted over the past week or two don't show any dramatic movement—the FiveThirtyEight model currently estimates Trump's national approval at 43 percent, which is more or less where he's been since the end of the government shutdown in February 2019. But the lack of any apparent decline, combined with recent surveys that showed more respondents endorsing Trump's handling of the coronavirus outbreak than disapproving so far, have inspired some analysts to argue that the president may actually be benefiting politically from the crisis at the expense of the Democratic opposition.

Perhaps that's true. But realistically, it's far too soon to glean much about either the American public's ultimate response to Trump's management of the pandemic or its implications for the upcoming election. Here are four good reasons to exercise some patience before jumping to conclusions:

1. Political leaders' popularity often rises temporarily after the onset of a crisis. Political scientists call this pattern the "rally effect," and it's been documented many times over decades of history; most dramatically, George W. Bush's job approval shot up from about 50 percent to about 90 percent virtually overnight after the events of September 11, 2001. There are several plausible factors contributing to this phenomenon: citizens close psychological ranks around their national leaders in a moment of uncertainty and fear; they evaluate these figures on different criteria than they did before the crisis erupted; and the normally critical opposition party (sometimes) mutes its attacks on the incumbent. Both French president Emmanuel Macron and Italian prime minister Giuseppe Conte have enjoyed spikes in popularity during the current coronavirus outbreak, despite (especially in Italy's case) substantial national dislocation and tragedy.

But these popularity bumps fade with time. Either the crisis is soon resolved and citizens turn their attention to other things, or it is not, in which case they start to grow impatient with the effectiveness of their leader. The 2020 general election is still far enough away that even if Trump were to benefit from the rally effect in the short term, it wouldn't be a very reliable signal of his popularity more than seven months in the future.

2. Americans are still learning about the severity and likely duration of this crisis. National journalists are closely following each development of the coronavirus outbreak; most also live in places like New York and Washington where daily life has already been dramatically changed. But large sections of the country aren't as strongly affected so far, and the less obsessively attentive typical resident of middle America will not have experienced the same degree of disruption. Many Americans are presumably still unaware of the probable length of time before things get visibly better, much less return to normal—for example, while it seems quite apparent based on the trajectory of infection that many public school systems that are now closed are unlikely to reopen before the end of the academic year three months from now, few state authorities have yet acknowledged as much in public. Citizens who anticipate that the crisis will only last a matter of a few weeks may see little reason at this point to re-evaluate their opinions about the president, but they may start to feel differently if the inconvenience persists for longer than they first assumed.

3. Americans already have strong opinions about Trump, and most of them disliked him before the crisis. Trump has never consistently exceeded 50 percent job approval as president even during three previous years of relative peace and prosperity. His approval rating among Democrats has seldom reached double digits—it stood at 7 percent in the last Gallup survey—and his approval among independents (as measured by Gallup) has generally stayed between 35 and 40 percent for most of his presidency. The only way that his popularity could fall much further would be for elements of his remaining base—consisting almost entirely of habitual Republican voters—to become disenchanted with his performance, but these citizens are unusually resistant to changing their minds about him. Their partisan alignment means that they are already predisposed to support a Republican president, they are prone to discount criticism from Democrats and mainstream journalists, and they are disproportionately exposed to Trump-friendly messages from conservative media sources.

The good news for Trump is that he may be spared significant erosion in his popularity by the strong loyalty of his fellow partisans. But a steady approval rating could also be a problem, because he's already in a vulnerable position heading into re-election and is consistently running behind likely opponent Joe Biden in national polls. Even if the crisis were merely damaging enough to prevent Trump from boosting his public support by November, that itself might turn out to be a decisive factor in the election.

4. It's not the virus, it's the economy (stupid). The most worrying component of this crisis for the Trump administration and re-election campaign isn't the spread of COVID-19 itself and the casualties that it leaves in its wake. Instead, it's the larger impact on the economy. While the specific quantitative estimates of current forecasting models should be treated with skepticism in such an unprecedented and fast-moving environment, it seems inevitable that there will be a sudden and catastrophic economic shock that will at least temporarily push the U.S. into a recession.

Trump and his supporters will argue, with justification, that it would be unfair to blame him for the economic misery that a worldwide pandemic is poised to inflict on the nation. But voters tend to reward presidents for good economic times and punish them for bad times regardless of the incumbent's actual responsibility for either outcome. It wouldn't be surprising if Trump's popularity remained stable or even rose a bit over the next few weeks during (presumably) the strictest anti-COVID remediation measures, only to decline later in the year once the larger consequences, especially declining income and employment, became more visible to average citizens. He therefore has every reason to wish not only for a shallower economic plunge than most analysts now foresee, but also for a historically rapid national rebound once the worst is over.

This Week in Impeachment: Trump Torches His Inside Reputation

The pioneering political scientist Richard Neustadt is best remembered for his insight that the unilateral powers of the presidency are much more limited than the expectations hung on the office by the American public and the ambitions of the people who occupy it, requiring presidents to engage in productive collaboration with other political elites—members of Congress and the bureaucracy, interest groups, foreign leaders, even the president's own direct subordinates—in order to achieve success. Neustadt believed that the maintenance of a positive personal reputation was necessary to convince these other actors to cooperate with the president; the power of the presidency, he argued, was largely "the power to persuade."

The developments of the past week have confirmed that Donald Trump is the ultimate anti-Neustadtian president. Trump's personal reputation among other elites, both at home and abroad, has always been low, but it took an even bigger dive this week when the ongoing Ukraine affair—already the focus of an impeachment inquiry in the House—was compounded by an abrupt policy change in Syria touched off by Trump's approval of an incursion by Turkey in a Sunday phone call with the Turkish president. Trump's withdrawal of American military defense from the Kurdish population in northern Syria received bipartisan disapproval in Congress and strong criticism across the ideological spectrum of foreign policy experts.

Several journalists have pointed out that it seems risky for Trump to alienate his fellow Republicans in the midst of an impeachment push, since (assuming that the House impeaches him) he'll depend on their votes in the Senate to avoid removal from office. That's true, but the Syria situation is unlikely to directly affect how Republican senators respond to an impeachment vote that may be months in the future.

The bigger danger for Trump is that impeachment, like any political process, will play out in a larger environment where his interests will be advanced or damaged by the choices made by other elites. At various points along the way, certain potential witnesses will be weighing whether to comply with congressional subpoenas, and whether to share or omit pertinent information. Accomplished attorneys will be weighing whether to accept offers to take Trump's case. High-ranking judges will be weighing whether to give deference to legal arguments made by White House representatives. Partisan officials will be weighing how passionately they should attack or defend the president. Political candidates will be weighing whether to run in the 2020 election. Journalists and other opinion leaders will be weighing whether to publicly endorse impeachment or removal from office.

All of these choices will be influenced to some degree by high-status decision-makers' evaluation of the president's personal attributes and behavior. And yet Trump's comportment has become even more idiosyncratic over the past week. Rather than reassuring attentive observers, he seems only to be unsettling them.

Trump habitually struggles to read people. Perhaps this difficulty reflects an adult lifetime during which his interactions with other human beings have been structured by corporate hierarchy and pop-culture celebrity, and during which he has taken in most of his information about the world around him via the distorted lens of television. Perhaps it's more foundational, more characterological in its source. Regardless, it sets him apart in the realm of politics, where most successful practitioners are experts at human relations and accustomed to grasping the perspectives and incentives of others.

Uniquely in American history, Trump was able to harness national fame to move directly from private life into the presidency without working his way up via an elective or military career where success tends to be dependent upon making a good personal impression on knowledgeable peers and superiors. But he has been repeatedly unable to recognize past mistakes in this area, as in many others, and thus to avoid repeating them. If anything, the push toward impeachment has provoked a perceptible deterioriation in judgment.

Jonathan Bernstein points out one dramatic example from this week's events: Trump not only sent Turkish president Erdogan a blustery letter on the Syrian issue, but also believed that releasing it publicly would bolster his standing in the eyes of other political leaders. Yesterday's meeting with congressional leaders at the White House was similarly disastrous; at least one Republican participant agreed with Democratic descriptions of a Trump "meltdown" that unnerved assembled officials in both parties. And what other than an unusual lack of emotional intelligence can explain his attempts to engineer a surprise reconciliation between the grieving parents of a British accident victim and the American diplomat's wife whose vehicle fatally struck him, as a live made-for-TV stunt with the White House as a backdrop for assembled cameras?

A central operating assumption of the Trump White House is that the Washington community is dominated by sworn enemies worthy only of being ignored or sneered at. And, indeed, it's only fair to acknowledge that Trump managed to achieve the presidency without the support or respect of many of its denizens. But failing, or not even trying, to build a positive reputation among influential insiders has costs and risks of its own. Just like anyone else, elites occasionally do have their uses.

What's Missing from the "Ideology vs. Electability" Debate

We're still in the early stages of the 2020 presidential campaign, but a common media frame has emerged already: will Democrats prioritize pragmatic electability when selecting a challenger to President Trump, or will the party instead prize ideological purity? Again and again, news coverage of the Democratic nomination contest has boiled a well-populated, multi-faceted candidate race down to this either-or choice, with Joe Biden usually personifying the "electability" option while Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren represent the "purity" alternative.

News outlets have repeatedly publicized surveys of Democratic primary voters designed to measure how they come down on this supposedly inevitable dilemma. "Which type of candidate would you prefer to see the Democrats nominate for president in 2020: a candidate who agrees with you on almost all of the issues you care about but does not have the best chance of beating Donald Trump, or a candidate who has the best chance of beating Donald Trump but who does not agree with you on almost all of the issues you care about?" "Who would you choose if you had a magic wand and can make any of the candidates president—they don't have to beat anyone or win the election?"

One problem with this increasingly ubiquitous concept of the race is that Democrats might not register an obvious collective preference after all. As a general rule, most political analyses in the "now we have come to a fork in the road" style don't turn out well in retrospect; politicians and voters alike are demonstrably adept at avoiding clear choices and generally muddling through. Past nominees like Barack Obama have often found success by finessing differences within the party rather than planting their flags firmly on one end of an internal debate. Kamala Harris, for one, is clearly pursuing a strategy of presenting herself as simultaneously more liberal than Biden and more electable than Warren or Sanders, and perhaps that will turn out to be the most effective approach in the end.

But the more serious danger is the underlying assumption that these are the only major considerations for primary voters as they deliberate over their preferred candidate. While both policy positions and electoral strength are highly appropriate grounds on which to evaluate candidates, they are not the only important attributes when choosing a nominee or potential president. Surveys and media accounts that presume otherwise thus present an oversimplified and distorted picture of presidential politics. And because voters in primaries are heavily influenced by media coverage, endless news stories that frame the race as fundamentally a tradeoff between just two criteria—idealism vs. practicality, head vs. heart, sincerity vs. calculation—could persuade many citizens to view their alternatives in precisely those terms, and to pay less attention to other deservedly relevant candidate qualities.

Like. say, competence.

Surely it's highly sensible to evaluate candidates in terms of who would, and would not, prove to be successful presidents if they wound up in the job. One of the benefits of the old system of presidential nominations is the influence it granted to politicians within the party who knew the various candidates personally and had previously worked with them in government. But the candidates' own records, as well as the kind of campaigns they run, can provide valuable evidence in this area, and voters should not be discouraged from placing effectiveness at the center of their considerations.

In this particular race, there are several candidates who lack the traditional credential of previous service in Congress or a state governorship, plus others who have served only for a brief time in federal office. Two of the candidates with the most experience are also approaching their 80s. At least one candidate seems to have chronic difficulties getting along with subordinates. Candidates also disagree over the optimal approach to accomplishing policy change: stakeholder compromise or mass mobilization? All of these factors and more seem highly relevant to the question of potential future success in the presidency, independent of the policy positions or personal popularity of the various contenders.

Discussions of competence can lack the drama of ideological battles or the savvy calculations of electoral strategy. But how—and how well—a president governs ultimately matters a lot. The more that voters, activists, and journalists acknowledge this truth during the nomination process, the healthier our political system will be.

Donald Trump and the Electoral Benefits of Presidential Weakness

I recently argued that Donald Trump has been, so far, the weakest of the modern (i.e. post-FDR) presidents in exercising the power of the office on behalf of policy goals. Moreover, the Trump presidency does not appear to be gaining in capacity over time. Rather than learning from early failures and bringing in experienced Washington hands to steady the ship, as previous presidents like Bill Clinton did, Trump has opted instead to retreat further into a skeletal executive branch increasingly bereft of managerial talent and substantive expertise. The power of presidential speech has also been diluted to an unprecedented point, since attentive audiences within the political system—members of Congress, journalists, bureaucrats, even the president's own subordinates—have learned through experience that Trump's words often bear no relationship to his actions or those of his administration.

This is a prescription for nothing much getting done. Indeed, it seems as if progress on the president's agenda has either slowed or stalled on nearly every major policy dimension. Such a development is bad news for anyone invested in those policies. But it's probably good news for Trump's re-election chances.

One of the major lines of attack on Trump in 2016 was that he represented a potential threat to the survival of the nation, or even the globe. Jeb Bush called Trump a "chaos candidate . . . [who] would be a chaos president," while Hillary Clinton argued that "a man you can bait with a tweet is not a man we can trust with nuclear weapons." Some otherwise persuadable voters may have declined to support Trump over these concerns; as Clinton advisor Mandy Grunwald recalled after the 2016 election, "I don't think we ever had a focus group where somebody didn't say, 'He's going to blow up the world. I just can't do that.'"

Trump's administration may indeed be fairly described as chaotic, but he hasn't introduced the kind of visible instability to the nation, or the world, that swing voters might easily perceive and punish in 2020. The weakness of his presidency has prevented him from accomplishing major policy objectives that would also have been politically treacherous. For example, both the repeal of the ACA and the instigation of multi-front trade wars would have resulted in economic disruption within a significant segment of the national electorate, and it is surely to Trump's electoral benefit that neither goal has (yet) been achieved. Mass deportations of DACA beneficiaries would likewise have caused a political firestorm from which judicial intervention has, at least up to this point, helpfully protected the Trump re-election campaign.

Though he has failed to deliver on many other promises as well—he did not get Carl Icahn to negotiate new trade agreements with China and Japan, or end birthright citizenship, or bring back the coal industry, or invest an additional $1 trillion in infrastructure, or enact a federal child care plan designed by his daughter, or prove to be so dedicated a president that he was too busy to take vacations—Trump has remained overwhelmingly popular among his 2016 supporters. In addition, the president has benefited from a solid economy and strong record of job growth. Here, too, the frustration of his greater ambitions may have worked to his political advantage—what would have happened to the financial sector in the wake of, say, a hard exit from NAFTA rather than the quiet negotiation of a near-identical successor agreement?

Trump is now positioned to run for a second term less as a transformational figure continuing his project to remake American politics and society than as a defender of the status quo against what will no doubt be characterized as a radical socialist alternative. If he loses, it will be due more to his existing unpopular personal qualities than to any particular act that he committed while in office. The enduring weakness of his presidency may well prevent Trump from making much of a mark on history, but he could earn a second term if he's able to convince enough voters that they don't have much to fear from more of the same—and that it's the Democrats, instead, who offer a risk America can't afford to take.

A Historically Weak Presidency Just Keeps Getting Weaker

Donald Trump dominates the popular, electoral, and media landscapes of American politics like no other figure in living memory. Trump remains a ubiquitous presence in the daily press coverage of current events. The 2018 elections were almost entirely a referendum on Trump, with the various individual candidates running for Congress serving merely as proxy vessels for voters to register their approval or disapproval of the president amid record national turnout for a midterm. Many of Trump's supporters view him in admiring terms as something of a national savior, while his detractors accuse him of being a uniquely potent villain leading America down the road to authoritarian rule.

But in terms of actual effectiveness in using the tools of the office to achieve policy ends, the Trump administration so far ranks at the bottom among all the modern presidencies. Trump the political personality is historically strong, yet Trump the president is historically weak.

The evidence for, and reasons behind, this weakness have been catalogued by my political scientist colleagues Jonathan Bernstein (here, here, and here) and Matt Glassman (here, here, and here). One set of difficulties concerns Trump's personal qualities. This president is bored or impatient with most substantive policy questions or discussions. He seems unfamiliar with many aspects of how the government operates and uninterested in becoming educated on this point. And, crucially, he has repeatedly demonstrated that he cannot be trusted to keep his word either publicly or privately, which reduces his ability to negotiate productively with other power centers within the political system or around the world.

Another source of weakness is the executive branch surrounding the president. Trump promised during the 2016 campaign that he would select the "best people" who were "truly, truly capable" to serve at the senior levels of the government. But he has been unable to attract, or to identify, consistently skilled deputies across the various cabinet departments and within the White House itself; personnel choices frequently seem to reflect preoccupations with perceived loyalty or "looking the part" on television rather than actual talent. The high turnover rate of presidential appointees, extraordinary number of unfilled positions, excessive dependence on "acting" officials who lack the clout that comes with permanent status, and absence of a coherent policy-making process make it even more difficult for the Trump presidency to gain the deference from bureaucrats, judges, members of Congress, and other actors that is usually necessary to implement significant policy change.

Finally, Trump's unpopularity in the mass public—and the toxic levels of antipathy that he provokes among Democratic voters in particular—means that even ideologically moderate or electorally vulnerable members of the opposition party see little benefit in cooperating with the president. Trump's mediocre job approval ratings also led directly to the Democratic victories in the House last November that have further curtailed his legislative influence and handed investigative power to his congressional critics.

Some presidents suffer from a rocky start but get the hang of the job as they go on. The Trump presidency seems only to be getting more ineffective over time. Trump's greatest strength up to now has been his power within the Republican Party; other Republicans have generally been reluctant to become enmeshed in public disputes with the president for fear that their own party's voters will take Trump's side and wreak punishment on dissenters. Recently, however, Mitch McConnell responded to Trump's suggestion that Republicans turn their attention (yet again) to health care reform by flatly shooting down the president's declaration in the pages of the national press. Imagine Harry Reid doing such a thing to Barack Obama, or Bill Frist to George W. Bush, and it becomes clear what an unusual act this was for the Senate majority leader, who was surely speaking for his caucus as a whole.

It's also clear that the executive branch's management of immigration policy—a rare subject on which the president demonstrates substantial personal investment—is an outright mess. The forced resignation of Homeland Security secretary Kirstjen Nielsen is merely the latest development in a chain of events that also included a lengthy federal shutdown that failed to secure border wall funding from Congress, the damaging revelation and subsequent public reversal of the practice of separating families seeking entry at the southern border, and the indefinite judicial suspension of the president's unpopular withdrawal of DACA protections in September 2017. Rather than identify hard-line aide Stephen Miller as a common element in his repeated failures to achieve lasting policy gains on the issue, Trump has apparently sided with Miller over Nielsen in one of many internal administration battles as Miller seeks to consolidate influence over DHS from the White House—which does not bode well for future success.

While Trump seems by now to have grasped that the job he has isn't the same as the job he thought he was running for in 2016, he hasn't managed to figure out what to do about it. If media impressions are accurate, the cacophonous frenzy of this presidency's early months—memorably marked by a parade of colorful characters constantly barging on- and off-stage—has evolved into a quieter, though not necessarily less chaotic, atmosphere structured (if that's not too strong a word) around the uneven energy of the president himself, who seems to oscillate between bursts of acute, though often unproductive, engagement and increasingly lengthy periods of retreat to television and Twitter. Even Trump's aggressive verbal taunting of potential Democratic opponents in a re-election contest that's well over a year away gives off the impression that the incumbent is somewhat unfulfilled by his governing responsibilities and yearns for the prospect of electoral competition to really get his blood flowing.

In other circumstances, a president who fails to deliver on major initiatives—and who prefers not to even show up at the office on the weekends, or in the evenings, or in the mornings—would inspire murmurs of discontent within the party whose platform forms the basis of his policy to-do list. Yet Trump has proven that the demands of today's Republican activist and voter base can largely be satisfied by symbolic appeals rather than substantive achievements. If his supporters ask of him only that he says the right things, and angers the right opponents, then it's possible for him to do the job they want him to do from the comfort of his couch at Mar-a-Lago. But as long as Trump himself continues to promise major policy change without demonstrating any idea of how to attain it, the strength that he so conspicuously attempts to project through his words will not be matched by his deeds.

Nothing Affects the Washington Climate Like Presidential Job Approval

There are many ways in which the Trump presidency is historically distinctive, but one of the most consequential is how unpopular it has been right from the start. Before Trump, even those new presidents who won a close election or entered office amidst controversy enjoyed a "honeymoon period" of elevated public support during the first months of their administrations. Of the previous twelve presidents who served during the era of modern survey research, eight ended their first year in office with average job approval ratings of at least 55 percent, and approving citizens outnumbered disapprovers at that stage of their term for all twelve.

But according to the poll aggregator at FiveThirtyEight, Trump's approval rating has never climbed higher than 48 percent—which in itself represents a transient peak reached briefly in the days immediately after his inauguration. The share of Americans who disapproved of his performance first exceeded those who approved on February 4, 2017, barely two weeks into his presidency, and reached 51 percent of all surveyed citizens (including those who responded "don't know") on March 16; it has not dropped below this level since.

These approval ratings matter a lot for presidents. Denizens of Washington, both in and out of government, pay close attention to the polls and maintain a rough consensus across partisan and ideological lines over whether the president is popular or unpopular, gaining or losing ground. Job approval numbers act as a kind of highly visible thermometer measuring the political climate surrounding the White House, and everyone in the vicinity agrees that high temperatures are much more comfortable than low ones.

Presidents with positive ratings can harness their popularity to pressure Congress, to win battles with organized interests, and to recruit strong candidates for their party in congressional elections (and discourage strong potential opponents). But the latest reported survey numbers also strongly color the press coverage that presidents receive. Journalists and commentators rely on approval ratings as an accessible and "objective" measure of presidential success, and they also tend to be very sensitive to accusations of being snobbish or out of touch with the wider public. How better to demonstrate that one is properly attuned to the preferences and perspectives of Mr. and Ms. America than by crediting presidents with effective leadership when the polls say the voters are happy and by dwelling on their failures when the electorate is doing the same?

In 2002 and 2003, for example, media coverage routinely characterized George W. Bush as tough, decisive, dedicated, politically deft, administratively effective, and surrounded by a skilled team of subordinates. By 2007 and 2008, after both the national economy and the Iraq War had fallen into crisis on his watch, Bush was frequently portrayed as detached, out of his depth, and hampered by political and managerial incompetence. It was almost as if the occupant of the White House had become a different person entirely. What had happened instead was that the same man—with, presumably, the same personal qualities—had seen his national popularity drop by more than 50 percentage points from one point to the next.

The various public mishaps and chronic internal tensions of the Trump administration would have produced a series of unfavorable media stories in any circumstance, but the collective Washington judgment that the current chief executive is fundamentally ill-suited to his position is much less likely to have formed if his approval ratings had remained above 50 percent. Trump had an opportunity immediately after his shocking electoral upset to convince professional observers that he served as an adept and formidable messenger of a growing populist rebellion. However, the public's dim response to his governing record from its earliest days forward has merely reinforced the general perception that he is instead something of an accidental president—and, above all, a particularly hapless one. If a consistent majority of Americans told pollsters that they trusted Trump's judgment on how to handle North Korea, viewed the Mueller investigation as illegitimate, and found the president's Twitter persona charmingly delightful, the tone of press coverage on these and other matters would be much different than they are. And Democratic leaders would be faced with persistent questions about whether their party was mired in an enduring crisis.

Given the current state of (relative) national peace and prosperity, it's likely that a president who lacked Trump's unappealing personal attributes would be enjoying positive job approval ratings these days. Another, more popular Republican incumbent would be in a position to protect the party's congressional majorities in the 2018 midterm elections—and even to sow havoc in the ranks of the opposition by forcing red-state Democrats to choose between angering their party base and alienating the general electorate in their home constituencies. (The extent to which Trump's foibles have limited the political pressure on vulnerable Democratic Senate incumbents like Joe Donnelly of Indiana and Claire McCaskill of Missouri is one of the undertold stories of the 2017–2018 session of Congress.) Even if one believes that the president has been more successful than acknowledged, or even that he is on track to win a second term, surely the opportunity cost paid by the Republican Party for electing President Trump rather than a President Rubio or President Kasich is still quite considerable.

A few weeks ago, a series of polls started to report a minor upward trend in Trump's job approval. Because the media love to have something new to talk about, this movement received a substantial amount of notice in the press even though the president's rating only rose a few points into the low 40s on average (41 percent according to FiveThirtyEight, 42 percent according to RealClearPolitics, and 43 percent according to HuffPost). In part, the approval bump attracted attention because it coincided with a narrowing of the Democratic advantage in the "generic ballot" polls asking voters which party they plan to support in the 2018 midterm elections.

Over the past 10 days or so, however, Trump's modest surge has started to reverse, and the generic ballot is also moving back in the Democratic direction. We'll no doubt experience several more such fluctuations between now and November, and a few media stories proclaiming a "Trump comeback" will likely ensue whenever the polls register upward momentum for a week or two. From a larger perspective, though, the current administration remains historically unpopular, and only a truly dramatic, double-digit shift in voter sentiment could fully convince the Washington community that the president had regained his touch with the public.

One particularly curious quirk of the oft-atypical Trump regime is the apparent absence of a standard White House political shop headed by a professional strategist with substantial internal access and influence—a Karl Rove, David Axelrod, or Jim Baker type. In a normal presidency struggling with subpar approval ratings and a looming national election, well-connected publications like the Washington Post and Politico would be filled at this stage with one story after another about this operation's internal analysis of its political difficulties and its planned strategies for restoring the political standing of its party in the months before the balloting started.

But the current president, his chief of staff, and many of his top aides all lack substantial partisan-elective experience; if there is indeed anyone directing such an effort, it seems to be a well-kept secret at the moment. (What's Kellyanne Conway up to these days?) Expect increasingly nervous congressional Republicans to soon start dropping hints in the press that a White House habitually shrouded in a fog of its own self-made distractions is not paying enough attention to the potentially perilous fate of its nominal allies on Capitol Hill. Members of Congress are Washingtonians too, after all—and just like everyone else in their community, they're keeping a close eye on those job approval ratings.

The Television President

It's fair to say that Donald Trump owes his political career to the medium of television. It was television that successfully sold Trump to the nation as the personification of American business success—from his frequent appearances on talk shows and newsmagazines in the 1980s and 1990s to his prime-time network reality show that lasted from 2004 until he began running for office in 2015. When Trump turned his attention to conservative politics during the Obama years, Fox News Channel offered him a weekly platform to promote his views. And when Trump threw his hat in the presidential ring, he received far more television coverage than any other candidate. Other politicians, from John F. Kennedy to Ronald Reagan to Bill Clinton, have often been recognized for their mastery of television, but only Trump harnessed modern media to leap directly into the White House without working his way up the traditional ladder of subordinate political offices, after-dinner speeches at state party fundraisers, and long days of hand-shaking and small talk at state fairs, train stations, and barbershops.

But public discussions of the relationship between television and Trump have perceptibly reversed course in recent weeks. Rather than emphasize Trump's reliance on television as a tool to reach his supporters, political observers have become preoccupied with television's influence on Trump.

The New York Times reported in December that Trump watches between four and eight hours of TV per day, while Axios revealed this week that the daily presidential schedule tends to be liberally sprinkled with periods of "executive time" during which the executive in question is often alone with his remote control. Trump has defensively denied these and similar claims, but the evidence is clear enough—the various subjects addressed by the presidential Twitter account frequently exhibit a close real-time correlation to the programming of cable news outlets, especially Fox News Channel. When combined with Trump's aversion to reading long memos or sitting through extended oral briefings—Michael Wolff has claimed in his new Trump exposé that White House aides view their boss as "semi-literate" and far too impatient to spend much time in meetings discussing substantive issues—as well as an apparent lack of Internet savvy beyond his beloved Twitter platform, we are left with a portrait of a president who absorbs nearly all his information through the tube.

Naturally, this behavior is treated by his critics as demonstrating Trump's profound personal unfitness for the office he now holds. But such conclusions also reflect the remarkably widespread acceptance of the belief that consuming hours upon hours of television news programming, day after day, still leaves viewers dangerously uninformed about current political events, the functioning of the government, and the state of international affairs—an assumption tacitly acknowledged by Trump's own furious denials of habitual couch potato-dom. If it's indeed true that relying on TV to educate oneself about the world is indeed a formula for perpetual ignorance, surely Trump cannot be the only one who is damningly indicted by this fact.

Television is on the whole pretty bad at covering politics, for reasons that extend from the limitations inherent in the medium to the financial calculations guiding the programming choices of television executives. Above all, television demands eye-catching visual footage—which directs its attention to individuals over institutions, to conflict over cooperation, and to activities that occur in public over those happening out of the camera's view. Compared to print media, television coverage tends to dwell on a small number of "top" stories over the course of a typical day, and its temporal frame of reference is nearly always instantaneous; small tidbits of "breaking" news win out over much more important long-term developments. Analysts and reporters are chosen for their ability to speak extemporaneously in real time—and for their more general polish and camera-friendliness—as much as for their substantive insights, and the perpetual desire to build as wide an audience as possible limits any focus on topics not deemed interesting to the average viewer.

These characteristics produce a fairly consistent set of distortions. Above all, television offers a view of the political world utterly dominated by the day-to-day behavior of the president; any other government official normally attracts a similar volume of coverage only upon the advent of a particularly juicy scandal. The internal operation of Congress is commonly treated as an impenetrable mystery or ignored altogether; judicial and bureaucratic politics seldom merit much attention. Events beyond the borders of the United States similarly receive extensive coverage principally on the occasion of American military action or acts of terrorist violence.

Given the consistently president-centric nature of television's political programming, it's surely understandable that Trump the TV addict has struggled for the entire length of his administration to reconcile the differences between the job he thought he was getting and the one he actually has. Trump has repeatedly chafed against the limitations of the presidency's formal powers, complaining repeatedly that members of Congress, federal judges, Cabinet departments, and even the media themselves don't automatically submit to his personal will. He appears much more engaged in those presidential duties that occur in public view—giving speeches, signing laws and executive orders, joint appearances with foreign leaders—than those relegated to the world off camera (such as substantive meetings and briefings, or the negotiations of legislative provisions). The Times report that Trump "told top aides to think of each presidential day as an episode in a television show in which he vanquishes rivals" surely rings true to most observers of his presidency—especially to nervous fellow Republicans who wouldn't mind it too much if the controversial and unpopular chief executive ceded the spotlight every once in a while.

This week, Trump reacted angrily to Wolff's portrayal of him as an emotionally unbalanced ignoramus by proclaiming on Twitter that he was, in fact, a "very stable genius" and "like, really smart." In order to substantiate these assertions, Trump unexpectedly allowed televised access to Tuesday's bipartisan congressional meeting on immigration over which he was presiding. Members of both parties came away from the experience without, shall we say, necessarily reporting more confidence in the president's intellectual acumen or command of policy on his signature issue—but it's a safe bet that Trump has not read the political scientist Richard Neustadt's classic work Presidential Power, which argues that presidential success requires maintaining a positive presidential reputation among other elite actors in the political system.

Instead, Trump claimed today that his appearance before the cameras was a triumphant personal success, based in part on his own consumption of the resulting attention on television: "It was reported as incredibly good [and] got great reviews by everybody . . . phenomenal [coverage] for about two hours . . . a lot of [news] anchors sent us letters saying that was one of the greatest meetings they ever witnessed. . . . I'm sure their ratings were fantastic; they always are." In other words, a very special episode.