This is what so many critics worry about with Mr. Trump β that his transformations will be more resonant of Richard Nixon than of our most esteemed presidents. Yet there is a complementary question that should concern supporters of Mr. Trump: Can he succeed? He has amassed enormous power in his party and is building an intensely devoted administration. Those factors will bring him wins in the short run. But it takes extraordinary skill to wield executive power successfully throughout an administration.
If past is prologue, Mr. Trump lacks the acumen to carry out his ambitious agenda. The first problem is management style. In his first term, Mr. Trump was a poor administrator because of his mercurial, polarizing style and a general indifference to facts and the hard work of governance. Second is the question of whether Mr.
Trump knows where he wants to go. But he lacks a coherent sense of the public ends for which he exercises power. Third, personal gain was neither a priority of the great presidents nor a guide to their exercise of power.
Fourth, Mr. Trump is unlike any previous president, even Jackson, in broadly delegitimating American institutions β the courts, the military and intelligence communities, the Justice Department, the press, the electoral system and both political parties. This will do him no favors when he needs their support, as he will. Fifth, Mr. If his stalwart subordinates carry out his every whim, as he hopes, bad policies will result. If the loyalists Mr. Trump is putting at the top of the Justice Department do not give him candid independent advice that he follows, he will violate the law and often lose in court, as happened in his first term.
The great presidents β¦ understood that hard power could go only so far and that persuasion and consent were surer tools to achieving lasting presidential goals in our democracy.
