Scattered across the United States, your faithful Mischiefs crew watched the last two days of presidential debates and formed some opinions. We offer those here.

Julia Azari

Identity politics was the winner of the debates.

This is a loaded phrase and I use it deliberately and advisedly. One big question in a field of 20+ candidates — perhaps half of whom are qualified and potentially viable — is which kinds of fault lines will arise. Tension between economic populism and (for example) racial justice has been part of the party’s move to the left.

No one really explicitly addressed that tension in the debates, but it’s notable that the two standard-bearers for left positions on economic issues did not shine on the more identity-related questions. Elizabeth Warren was basically left out of the immigration discussion in the first debate, with Julián Castro setting the agenda and forcing others to respond to him. Bernie Sanders was also tangential to the heated exchange of the second night, in which Kamala Harris took Joe Biden to task for both recent comments and past actions on racial issues. Buttigieg’s answer to questions about his record as mayor of South Bend and a recent incident of police violence is another standout moment of the second night.

Candidates also positioned themselves on gender and LGBT issues. Booker and Castro both mentioned the needs of transgender Americans on the first night. The discussion on Wednesday night also featured the candidates jockeying for who could most forcefully come out in favor of abortion rights and against the Hyde Amendment. On the second night, candidates pushed the envelope less but embraced liberal positions in clear terms. Kirsten Gillibrand highlighted women’s issues (using fairly traditional, gender binary language, in a stark but probably unintentional contrast with Castro). Buttigieg talked about his marriage in his closing statement.

Each night, the candidates answered questions about health care, the overall orientation of the economy (phrased in the second night in terms of socialism), and the need to address the needs of middle class and working American — whatever those terms may mean. The debate structure probably shaped this. If Warren had been on the second night with the other major players, she might have pushed them to address more economic questions and the populist framework in which she (and Sanders) present them. Similarly, if Warren and Sanders had been on the same stage, we might have seen an exchange between them about how exactly the rich and the corporations are messing everything up, and what to do about it.

It’s also worth noting that identity and economics don’t operate in parallel in real life. Marginalization and underrepresentation have economic consequences. But for right now, the discourse in the Democratic primary still kind of treats these as separate tracks, and this week’s debates brought the identity questions into the spotlight. 

Jonathan Ladd

In a crowded presidential field (and this is an extremely crowded field), the first task for most of the candidates is to be considered one of the top three or four contenders. You need to get voters to see you as a serious candidate so you are worth investing attention in learning about, and supporters will not be wasting their votes. 

So the big task for all of the candidates except Joe Biden is getting noticed by viewers and getting attention in post-debate news coverage. No matter how much people like your position or your ability to defeat Trump, you can’t ask people to throw their vote away. In that regard, in the first debate, Warren, Castro, and Booker did what they needed to do, and in the second debate so did Harris, Buttigieg, and Sanders. Add Biden to these six and it’s hard to see how the remaining 13 candidates can get attention going forward.

Kamala Harris’s performance stood out from all 20 candidates over these two nights. That is very hard to do in such a big field. But her ability to clearly press her points, which she has shown as a prosecutor and in Senate hearings, was on display here. Harris, Warren, Castro, and Booker were all able to clearly explain their plans in very limited time. But only Harris showed that she could also effectively go on the attack. Her attack on Biden’s record working with segregationists in the Senate and opposing busing worked both to hit Biden on a weak point and build up her own appeal to the African American community, given that some on the left have criticized her previously as being too aggressive as California Attorney General.

Finally, this was a bad night for Joe Biden. It was completely predictable that he would be attacked. Yet when he was attacked on his most obvious weaknesses — his age, his record on race, and his 2002 vote for the Iraq War — he had no good response to any of them. Compared to the others onstage, especially Harris, his answers were unfocused and his tone was tentative. These weaknesses have the danger of playing into concerns about his age.

Will this hurt Biden in the polls? It’s hard to say. It seems like his African American support is particularly vulnerable to the kind of attacks Harris laid on him. Time will tell. Debates often don’t lead to any movement in the polls, but Biden’s campaign can’t be happy with his performance last night.

Seth Masket

Overall, I didn’t see a lot from these two debates to shake up the larger presidential field. The real action was centered on a handful of candidates: Biden, Booker, Buttigieg, Castro, Harris, Sanders, Warren, maybe Klobuchar, and maybe O’Rourke. These candidates, for the most part, are the ones who have some party support behind them, in terms of endorsements, money, staff, etc. 

I’ll note that the candidates who stand to benefit the most from these debates — especially Booker, Harris, and Warren — are the ones who have been standing out in my surveys of early-state activists but not necessarily dominating public opinion surveys. The strong public performances we saw onstage this week are similar to what those activists have seen in the candidates; they’re just now being made available to the rest of us.

The other candidates got in a few good moments and few did anything to actually embarrass themselves, but they didn’t really do anything to destabilize the rankings, either. Swalwell got in an effective dig at Biden’s age, but that is likely to hurt Biden more than it helps Swalwell. My guess is that this bottom tier of candidates will have a harder time qualifying for later debates as more donors and backers concentrate their support on the upper tier.

It was hard not to be impressed by the exchange between Harris and Biden. Biden’s greatest strength so far in this contest has been his perceived electability; even those who do not necessarily prefer him as a nominee have been willing to support him because they believe he’s the most likely to defeat Trump. Harris, by sharply critiquing him on his recent comments regarding his collegiality with his segregationist colleagues, not only attacked him on an issue of great importance to a vast segment of the Party, but also made him look vulnerable and defensive about his record. His nomination may well still happen, but its aura of inevitability was punctured.

Hans Noel

The last two nights have revealed a new model for debates, building on the foundation that the Republicans began last cycle. Two debates, without even a hint of a top tier and an “undercard,” is the way to go. Even with a field as small as eight or 10 people, I think it makes sense.  

Some worried that spreading the debates over two nights, without an obvious top tier, would be trouble. Would it matter who you were drawn against? I don’t think it was a problem at all. 

Presidential nomination debates have never really been debates, in the sense of conflict over a proposition. They’re definitely not like high school or college competitive debates, or even a legislative debate, where different sides of an issue clash against each other. They have always been more like side-by-side press conferences, especially when there are more than two candidates.

So why not just have a series of press conferences? The “debate’’ format allows for accountability. While journalists can ask follow up questions in a town hall meeting, they often don’t. There is nothing like the incentive of an opponent to make sure a candidate doesn’t get away with anything. When Beto O’Rourke touted his plan for immigration reform, Julián Castro called him out over the details, notably Castro’s call for repealing Section 1325. If the moderators won’t ask Joe Biden about his record on race, Kamala Harris can do it.

None of this requires that all of the candidates be present. At this stage, all we want is to sort out the candidates who deserve more attention from those who do not. If Tim Ryan can’t stand up to criticism from Tulsi Gabbard, he should probably drop out. 

If everyone were on the stage at the same time, or if the “top’’ candidates were together, I don’t think my conclusions would change about who deserves more attention (Harris, Castro, Klobuchar, Gillibrand) and who does not (O’Rourke, Ryan, Yang, Williamson, and, yes, Biden).

We’re going to have a lot more debates, both this cycle and — probably even with reforms to the system — into the future. The split format is a great way to handle a field of eight or more. 

Richard Skinner

These were two bad nights for two old men. Biden and Sanders both looked and acted their age and then some. Biden began well by seeming above some of the squabbling among the other candidates and continually tying himself to Obama. But as the debate went on, he just seemed older and more sluggish. We’ll see how people react to the substance of the Biden-Harris exchange (I’d be pretty surprised if Harris talks about bringing back busing), but their optics were obvious: Harris seemed young, energetic, and unintimidated, while Biden appeared old, defensive, and caught off guard.

Meanwhile, Bernie Sanders kept shouting about the same handful of topics that have always obsessed him. Red-faced and surly, he was probably the most unpleasant presence onstage. Biden seemed like an out-of-touch grandfather whose time has passed, while Sanders was more like an ill-tempered neighbor yelling on his front porch. Everyone will probably forget Wednesday night’s debate, but the candidates who did best were generally the most liberal — Elizabeth Warren, Julián Castro, Cory Booker — and perhaps will compete with Sanders for support.

Kamala Harris put on one of the best debate performances I have ever seen. Sharp, energetic, well-informed, immaculately prepared, she seemed ready to take on Donald Trump. (Her experience as a prosecutor clearly has its advantages). Her attack on Biden’s record on race was expertly choreographed and beautifully delivered. (Smart move making it more about empathy than policy).

Before this debate, most Democratic voters liked Harris but relatively few supported her. This debate could change that. She’s already received an impressive number of endorsements; will her performance garner more? Two potential problems for her: Her call for ending private health insurance could be a real liability in the general election (will she flip-flop again?) and older voters may react differently to her exchange with Biden than did the throngs on Twitter. This could mean that her appeal will be less to the older moderates who currently back Biden and more to the younger liberals who like some of the other candidates.

Oh, there were other candidates? Pete Buttigieg seemed polished and well-informed, but the racial tensions in South Bend are clearly a lingering problem for him. Michael Bennet knew his stuff and made pointed criticisms of the two old men. But I doubt many will remember him. Andrew Yang mercifully said little, while Marianne Williamson not-so-mercifully did not. Eric Swalwell kept trying to make “pass the torch” happen. (Harris could have told him about exploiting the generation gap: “Show, don’t tell.”) Kirsten Gillibrand and John Hickenlooper performed well enough but were dwarfed by the bigger egos onstage.   

Debates rarely have a huge impact, but these may end up boosting Harris and perhaps some of the other mid-range candidates (Warren, Booker, Castro, Buttigieg), while dinging the support of Biden and Sanders. (Does Biden have anyone on his staff who can talk frankly with him about his performance?) I don’t think any of the candidates in the bottom half of the field got much out of these debates, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see many not qualify for the third round in September.

Jennifer Nicoll Victor

The Democratic Party’s first debates are a peek inside the sausage factory of American electoral politics. The process now playing out in public view is one that Democrats have done mostly behind closed doors for the last several generations. Winnowing a wide field of candidates to a single nominee is a complex process involving political connections, experience, policy knowledge, fundraising, and, of course, charisma. Democrats came under fire for following an elite-driven, somewhat closed process in 2016, and as a result they are airing their laundry now to settle on a candidate to oppose Trump. 

On Wednesday night, candidates concentrated on introducing themselves and displaying their qualifications. On Thursday, we saw more candidates position themselves vis-à-vis one another and Trump. The most meaningful exchange of the night was between Harris and Biden on the topic of civil rights. Harris directly challenged the frontrunner using a personal anecdote laced with experience and knowledge. Her example both dated him and exposed a fissure in the Democratic Party that she is trying to use to her advantage: How far are Democrats willing to go to correct civil rights injustices? Importantly, race is also the issue Donald Trump uses to appeal to supporters. In this way, Harris challenged the frontrunner in her party and previewed how she might confront the president.

The last two candidates Democrats have nominated are Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama: big-city, over-educated, policy-wonkish, non-white-men. Of the current field, candidates like Kamala Harris, Cory Booker, Julián Castro, and Elizabeth Warren look most like the party’s most recent choices.

But prior to the debates, Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders were clear frontrunners. While they performed fine in Thursday’s debate, they did not shine. Candidates like Harris and South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg were notable breakouts. Biden is already well known, and so is Sanders to some extent, so the early debates cannot help them that much. But for lesser-known candidates like Harris, Warren, and Booker, the debates can move their needles.

Debates are not likely to shake up the rankings in the field too much because the debate audience is primarily made up of people like those who write for and read Mischiefs of Faction. But, if Kamala Harris becomes the nominee, everyone will point to Thursday’s debate as a key moment on her road to success. 

There are a lot of reasons why South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg isn’t quite like the rest of the Democratic field. He’s younger. He’s in a same-sex marriage. He’s a mayor, and not of a major metropolis like New York or Los Angeles. He’s also appeared in a Fox News town hall and on various occasions criticized his own party. In public appearances, Buttigieg has appealed to some audiences and alienated others by talking about reaching out to Trump supporters.

His rhetorical rejection of partisan politics goes beyond that: He talks about morality, efficiency, governance. These are recurring themes in American politics, of course, but they are especially strongly associated with two Democratic ex-presidents: Jimmy Carter and Barack Obama. The connections suggest something we don’t see much in the conversation about Buttigieg (or anyone else in the Democratic field). Perhaps the reform-minded outsider isn’t so much positioning himself to be the next transformative president. Maybe his appeals sound more like someone who might be the final leader of a Democratic coalition that’s struggling to adapt to new political circumstances.

I want to be clear that this isn’t intended to be a criticism of Buttigieg. It’s intended as a commentary on the implications of some of the things he has said. Looking at this particular candidate through this lens also allows us to consider both the common features of a disjunctive president who flounders in the face of competing political pressures and a reconstructive president who’s remembered as the founder of a new political era. The crowded 2020 Democratic field also shows there are competing visions for what the Democratic Party should be. Candidates like Buttigieg, who seem invested in reconciling old and new visions, might be part of an important stage in a more fundamental transformation.

The question of whether Donald Trump is the disjunctive president who will bring an end to the Reagan era has been a topic among political observers since before Trump took office. This view assumes the political time cycle, which Stephen Skowronek discusses in The Politics of Presidents, has unfolded over the past 40 years more or less like it has in the past. Reagan Republicans took over as the dominant coalition in the early 1980s, and the two George Bushes “articulated” the values of administration in different ways, struggling to forge their own political identities and inviting criticism from others within their parties (seen especially in Pat Buchanan’s challenge to Bush in 1992 for being insufficiently conservative).

Democratic presidents, in this story, serve as preemptive leaders who navigate being opposition presidents even as the default political frameworks — shrinking government is good, public-private partnerships are more efficient, entitlement programs require serious reform — and the dominant coalition remain Republican. However, the theory allows for other possibilities. One in which Obama’s presidency was a very limited reconstructive presidency, motivated by reviving New Deal liberalism in ways that are opposed to Reagan conservatism.

Scott Lemieux has argued this, resting on two important ideas. One is that unlike a lot of preemptive leaders who borrow policy issues from the other side, Obama wasn’t really a “third way” president. Lemieux argues in particular that the Affordable Care Act had more in common with the New Deal/Great Society political tradition than anything that came after it.

The other is that the Reagan period didn’t really wipe out the Democrats’ core commitments and constituencies. If the New Deal era remained at least somewhat robust, then maybe Democratic presidents are still working through the different stages of political time in parallel with Republicans, not just filling the “preemptive” role of opposition presidents.

Lemieux has argued that Obama most closely resembled an “articulator” of a Democratic order; the 44th president pursued policies in line with the party’s values, both in the legislative arena and in executive branch policymaking. If this characterization is correct, then it stands to reason that the Democrats, like the Republicans, might be in for a disjunctive leader. And one of the candidates in particular has really fit the mold.

The outsider technocrat

Disjunctive presidents have to strike an impossible balance between their affiliation with the existing power structure — relationships, coalitions, ideas — and the need for the country to move past these older modes of governance. One way that presidents in this leadership position thread this needle is to highlight their credentials as outsiders, criticizing and breaking away from their own parties. Another way is to cast policy problems in terms of management and skill rather than ideology or coalition politics.

In various public appearances, Buttigieg has emphasized his experience as a mayor and used that to distinguish himself from “Washington.” For example, at a CNN town hall at South by Southwest, he expressed the idea that the national government could learn lessons from city government, where a shutdown would be “unthinkable.” In a conversation with Vox’s Ezra Klein, Mayor Pete spoke about different models of governing efficiency that could be applied when fixing potholes. On Fox News, he spoke about “managing” and getting the 3 am call.

Moreover, he’s also tried to distinguish himself from the Democratic Party as it drifts leftward (arguably, toward its own New Deal past), talking about climate change in terms of the more conventionally Republican idea of national security and endorsing an incremental approach to health care. He came in for some criticism after breaking with fellow Democrats over the issue of whether incarcerated felons should have the right to vote.

Morality and reform

Specifically, Buttigieg sometimes sounds like the last disjunctive Democratic president, Jimmy Carter. The two share a penchant for talking about morality. Carter was one of the first presidents to bring a distinctly evangelical sensibility to his governing appeals. Buttigieg has also sought to move the discussion about how Christian faith might inform political positions.

In a similar vein, the South Bend mayor has advocated for process reforms, using justifications that supposedly transcend politics. He’s called for reforming the electoral college, as Carter also did. (Although this issue has picked up some traction among Democratic presidential candidates in general). He’s also advocated for reforming the courts to make them “less political.”

These ideas — that government should reflect the goodness of its people (to borrow Carter’s language) and that reforms to insulate power from politics can solve problems — make sense as responses to the core dilemma of disjunctive leadership. Disjunctive leaders face a situation in which it is both necessary and impossible to break with the past. Insisting that the solution lies in improving the machinery of governance and engaging in moral renewal beyond partisan politics allows politicians to advocate for doing something different without challenging the core commitments and power arrangements of the governing order.

Identity politics and the Democratic Party

“Identity politics” has also been a prominent and fraught topic for Democrats. Buttigieg would be the first openly gay presidential nominee or president, a sign of progress unthinkable even a few years ago. At the same time, his record on racial issues has attracted criticism and commentators have noted that men in the race have attracted more media attention than several highly qualified women who are also seeking the nomination. The contours of the nomination race itself indicate that both practical and ideological questions of identity strain the Democratic coalition.

Mayor Pete’s critiques of the Democratic Party have included the “identity politics” question, arguing that “we have a crisis of belonging in this country” and suggesting that his own party has embraced identity issues in a way that might be divisive. He hasn’t hesitated to talk about racial inequality as well as gender inequality and LGBTQ issues, but these statements come alongside comments about American civic identity and shared values. In other words, when he talks about identity, he sounds less like a transformational leader and more like one who is wrestling with a contradiction that he has inherited.

It’s a fine line between disjunctive and reconstructive politics

In the original explanation of the theory, one thing that we see is that disjunctive presidents foreshadow the reconstructive period that came later. Herbert Hoover, Skowronek argues, experimented with new approaches to addressing the Great Depression and managing the nation’s economy. Carter advocated for an issue that would become of Reagan’s signatures — welfare reform. Late into a regime, leaders tend to cast about for new kinds of solutions. It’s the party connection with the existing order that makes it harder for them to make a clean break and offer something completely new.

The question of making a clean break with the status quo is a particularly complicated one right now. Among Democrats, there are people running with long records and those with hardly any national experience and everyone in between. Reconstructive leaders often push back against existing institutions, ideas, and governing coalitions, achieving the latter by building new majorities out of the wreckage of the old. They also offer ideas about renewal by reimagining old values, drawing on founding language and documents.

Both undertakings are a tricky business in the current political environment. Years of divided government, close presidential elections, and relatively frequent changes in control of Congress mean it’s hard to clearly define who is responsible for the status quo and who has the freedom to reject it. There’s room for individual candidates to make decisions about how they want to talk about their parties, the country’s history, and the recent past, and with more than 20 Democratic aspirants, there’s likely to be a range of choices about these questions. At least one candidate seems to be embracing the delicate and cautious stance of a president trying to preserve something that is breaking down. 

Joe Biden kicked off his campaign for president on Thursday by criticizing President Trump’s response to the 2017 white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. The clear intent was to highlight the president’s shortcomings and perceived unfitness for office.

Trump has responded predictably, praising the skills of Robert E. Lee and maintaining that he answered the question “perfectly.” But Biden’s critique of Trump was not just about the Civil War or what happened in Charlottesville. It was an attempt to bring American civic religion into the campaign, wielding it as a weapon against the sitting president.

In this sense, this opening statement as a presidential candidate was a bold one, offering a sharp and specific rebuke of Trump. The former Delaware senator and vice president used this strategy again in a speech on Monday, stating, “Donald Trump is the only president who has decided not to represent the whole country.”

In one respect, this approach is direct and addresses what many social scientists have concluded was a central theme in 2016: race and identity. An important book about the 2016 election is aptly named Identity Crisis. Study after study suggests that different types of identities drove the election result. Despite Trump’s victory, these findings don’t necessarily spell a winning strategy for Republicans in perpetually exploiting these divisions. By highlighting an event where the president’s worst — and quite unpopular — political instincts were on display, Biden dove right into a key issue. These questions became even more painful and relevant in the days after he entered the race: An anti-Semitic shooter killed one person and injured three others at a San Diego synagogue.

But in another sense, Biden made a high-stakes play that he’s likely unable to sustain. By starting his campaign with a video that juxtaposed Trump’s August 2017 remarks with the Declaration of Independence and Thomas Jefferson, Biden invoked the civil religion of the United States — the idea of national identity rooted in ideals. Immediately after introducing the central ideas, documents, and historical figures, we have to face the fact that the country hasn’t “always lived up to them,” in the language of the video. In other words, it’s a complicated and risky place to land in a presidential campaign.

Contemporary narratives about race and civic ideals often carry the idea that the country has been striving in a linear fashion toward living up to our values, impeding only by outdated institutions and evil people. The real story is more complex, and often devastating. Racism is rooted in society and institutions, and leaders who have sought to really change things have paid steep costs. The assassinations of major figures like Martin Luther King Jr. and Abraham Lincoln — to say nothing of less well-known activists who paid for their convictions with their lives — did not come out of nowhere. Making social equality and freedom for all a reality is a very difficult process, beyond well-chosen words and videos with stirring music. The treatment of civic religion as a point of national consensus and a political rallying cry isn’t totally true to that history.

At a time when the Democratic field is especially fractured, Biden’s choice of issue to lead with presses on both a potential fissure and a weak point for his own candidacy. While the two parties are less internally divided about race issues than at many points in the past, race and identity still have great potential to turn partisans against each other. We’ve seen this a few times, as the candidates have answered questions about racial inequality, voting rights, and reparations. To put it bluntly, some of the candidates have been called to acknowledge white privilege, a question made more complicated by other identities (gender, sexual orientation, religion) at play.

Still, it’s not entirely about the identities of the candidates — Kamala Harris, the most prominent candidate of color, has come under fire for her record as a prosecutor in California. Democratic candidates and voters might be in broad agreement that racial inequalities are a problem, but figuring out how to address them and reconcile new ideas with past records remains difficult.

Racial equality is also an issue that’s rife with liabilities for Biden, and his announcement didn’t sit well with some observers. (He also didn’t talk to the mother of Heather Heyer, who was killed in Charlottesville, before making the video.) Biden has a long record of statements, positions on issues like busing, and leadership on policies like the drug war that no longer fit with the Democratic Party’s mainstream positions. He runs a real risk of looking like he’s trying to gain political capital using issues where Trump can be cast as a clear villain, while neglecting to take on the difficult questions that divide his own party and failing throughout his career to show political courage when the well-being of African Americans was at stake.

In other ways, Biden’s choice might have been an apt way to audition for the role he seeks. His polls this week look good, especially among African American voters. Presidential rhetoric has been a way for ideas about American national identity to spread. This task is especially important and difficult because of the diversity of the country, and the next president will have to deal with a fragmented, frustrated nation in which identity has great political salience. It’s possible that by jumping into the campaign on a complicated and controversial note, Biden is demonstrating that he understands what that entails. But his record — and the country’s — suggests that the task he’s laid out won’t be straightforward or easy. 

The novelist E.L. Doctorow once wrote, “One cannot consider the U.S. Constitution without getting into an argument with it.” The sparse text of Article II, which establishes the executive branch, especially invites such argument. For one thing, in contrast with Article I, which lays out the duties and limitations of Congress, Article II barely says anything, leaving us to interpret what “executive power” means and what its limits are.

When we look at these two articles, the text and the structure of the Constitution are in tension. Congress has the power of the purse and to declare war, as well as a role in the foreign policy duties of the president (like the requirement for the Senate to ratify treaties). Yet the structure of the government puts the president in a position to both make decisions and articulate them in a way that Congress rarely can. American presidents lag behind their counterparts in other countries when it comes to legislative leadership, as Zach Elkins points out. But viewed through another lens, the presidency is also alarmingly powerful.

Questions about the boundaries of presidential power emerged almost immediately in the early republic — not with Andrew Jackson’s swagger and bank killing, not with Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War, not with the Progressives and the expansion of the administrative state. Our revered first president, George Washington, shaped the partisan debate over the new nation’s relationship with France and asserted the president’s authority to determine the direction of foreign policy with his 1793 declaration of neutrality in the conflict between Britain and France. Thomas Jefferson subsequently resigned from Washington’s Cabinet.

The Neutrality Proclamation example illustrates not only that presidential power has been controversial from the beginning, but also that the use of this power always plays out in a political context. The proclamation challenged some understandings of what the president can do and mapped onto substantive conflicts about the country’s relationships with Britain and France.

Certainly, the courts have sometimes stepped in to limit executive power, creating precedent around concepts like executive privilege, war powers, and the general scope of executive power. But the uncertainty around the bounds of acceptable presidential behavior remains, perhaps nowhere more apparent than in the question of impeachment. Accountability to the electorate, and not constitutional barriers, has served as the main way to place limits on an expansive executive branch.

Amendments to the Constitution have reflected this reality — few have taken on defining the limits of presidential power. A great deal of debate has been devoted to how presidents are selected, as Jonathan Ladd and Seth Masket point out. A few have altered how presidents are selected or leave office — but the text of the Constitution has changed very little with regard to what the president does while he or she occupies that office.

Presidents are now inaugurated in January instead of March, limited to two terms, and empowered to appoint a vice president if that office becomes vacant. They are also, at least in theory, subject to removal if their Cabinet and Congress agree that they’re unfit to serve. But no successful amendment has managed to clarify the conditions under which impeachment is necessary, the scope of presidential foreign policy power, or the proper boundaries between the president and Congress. Sometimes the courts have decided this, but often presidents can do what is politically feasible.

It turns out that is quite a lot.

Presidents can’t usually transform partisan debates or shift the power balances among actors in society. But their proclamations, executive orders, speeches, and military actions all take place against this backdrop, sometimes changing and ultimately reconfiguring political conflicts.

The president is increasingly the focal point of the political system. We know that the politics of the presidency have become highly partisan and that they have always been, well, pretty partisan, especially when issues like impeachment were on the table. The contemporary presidency finds itself at the intersection of a particularly nasty combination: highly personalized politics that also reflect symbolism important to each party, closely divided political contests and declining confidence in political institutions. It’s a perfect storm for partisans to identify with their president, look the other way from abuses of power, and provide no political incentives for other actors to keep the president in check.

Presidents began to build up their own bases of political power, separate from members of Congress or local political bosses, in the late 1800s. This process has now completed, and we are seeing with Donald Trump and congressional Republicans that the president, as the most visible symbol of partisanship that the country has to offer, has substantial sway over the “party in the electorate.”

As of mid-April, the extent to which institutions and politics have constrained President Trump remains an open question. While a number of political scientists have characterized Trump’s White House as weak, he has still used the executive branch, especially the Department of Homeland Security, to enact a set of policies that have affected millions of lives.

Administration critics have expressed fear about a “purge” at DHS and the unchecked power that potentially lies in that department, which was created in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. And while the administration has suffered a number of setbacks in court, particularly around its changes to immigration and asylum practices, there’s nothing keeping Trump from tweeting about these issues and riling his supporters — or, apparently, from telling border agents to ignore the courts. It remains to be seen how the situation will unfold, and whether restraints are in place or we are in truly lawless territory.

The government structure created by the Constitution allows the president a great deal of power and flexibility. The text does very little to describe the nature of this power or its limits, leaving presidents free to do what they can get away with politically much of the time. In our current political environment, we may be just seeing the beginning of what this means. 

The crowded Democratic field offers a lot of questions about policy, “electability,” experience, and ideology. But one thing is pretty clear: The candidates are comfortable presenting themselves as clear alternatives to Trump and promising that their leadership would make a clean break from the style and policies of his administration.

Party polarization makes this unsurprising, but it’s also a sign of what’s referred to Stephen Skowronek’s theory of political time as “reconstructive politics.” Presidents who come in with freedom to completely reject the ideas, commitments, and influential figures of the past have a lot of opportunities to reshape their own parties, to remake political institutions, and to set the tone for politics for decades to come.

The scholarship on reconstructive politics in the Reagan era has focused a great deal on how difficult it is to remake governing institutions — it’s difficult to get rid of parts of the federal government, as those institutions tend to be popular with the constituencies they serve and the people who work there.

As time has gone on, it’s become much harder to fundamentally change institutions of governance. But Reagan certainly shaped the rhetoric of politics and the priorities of his own party. Talk of Trump’s disjunctive potential has sometimes been accompanied by ideas about an impending period of repudiation and renewal, presumably under a new Democratic administration.

Now that there’s a group of candidates vying to head that administration, we can start to see how a reconstructive period might unfold, especially in the area of party politics.

Reconstructive politics often involves new issue priorities, and that looks to be an especially prominent theme for the Democrats heading into 2020. Immigration and the environment, which have rarely been leading issues for either party, are poised to influence the conversation and define Democratic positions. It’s also clear that at least some of the Democratic candidates have economic ideas for addressing inequality, the corporate environment, and social supports like child care.

Reconstructive leaders — think Franklin Roosevelt or Abraham Lincoln — often come from the center of their parties, not the most extreme or transformative faction. But they are informed by those actors and ideas. Because of the priorities and constituencies of the Democratic Party, it’s possible that a broad and deep policy reconstruction will be part of the next administration — at least in rhetoric.

Demands for transformation within the Democratic Party may not be limited to policy, though. The way we practice party politics has been in flux … well, forever, but the 2016 election highlighted dissatisfaction with political parties and their role in presidential nominations. The fissure between elites and party primary voters that 2016 hinted at already seems like it might be more prominent in 2020.

It’s very early, but Kamala Harris and Cory Booker seem to be dominating the “endorsement primary” while Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders, and Beto O’Rourke are the top candidates in recent polls. (Harris was fourth in the poll linked.) It’s possible that elite preferences will catch up to public opinion, or that polls will shift dramatically as some of the other candidates gain name recognition — Biden hasn’t even said whether he’s running yet!

But the strength of some of the candidates — O’Rourke and Sanders in particular, as well as the “moment” that Pete Buttigieg seems to be enjoying — showcases a particular kind of politics that emphasizes the ability to communicate on social media and rally a crowd.

The last two reconstructive presidencies — FDR and Reagan — chipped away at the foundations of party politics without dislodging core structures. Reagan was a successful party-builder, as Dan Galvin has pointed out, and Lara Brown has written about how FDR’s nomination showed how much he was a creature of his party. But FDR sought to work outside usual party channels and tried to redefine the Democratic Party as a New Deal party, with some success.

Reagan capitalized on insurgent rhetoric and on new nominating procedures that gave advantages to charismatic individual candidates. The coming Democratic reconstruction may take these anti-party ideas even further, reminding us that as reconstructive presidents alter the agenda and build up institutions, they also sometimes destroy them.

Accomplishing an ambitious policy agenda without a robust party might be harder than people think, and a successful reconstructive leader will think about how to build institutions that perform the functions of parties in ways that their constituents will find legitimate.

The current Democratic field stands out both for its historic diversity and for its number of candidates without traditional qualifications. Buttigieg is the mayor of a fairly small city. O’Rourke just lost a statewide campaign. Sanders has been in Congress for a long time, but has long identified formally as an independent, not a Democrat. These kinds of appeals and credentials seem to be important to at least some segment of the Democratic electorate.

This style of politics seems to go along with the ability to appear, if not ideologically pure, then removed from a problematic or compromised record. Yet the Democratic electorate is also heavily populated by women and people of color, and candidates from these demographics may have a harder time skipping over the traditional pathways like serving as senator or governor, or building fundraising and party ties. (Though it’s worth noting here that Buttigieg would be the first openly gay nominee or president, and Sanders would be the first Jewish presidential nominee or president. There’s a lot going on demographically in this cycle.)

This dynamic — more than serious policy differences among party factions — seems like a structural problem that is likely to provide the foundation for a conflict in the party that’s both difficult to resolve and possibly risky to talk about.

A struggling disjunctive presidency might make reconstruction look easy. The transition between two eras of party dominance opens up opportunities to change institutions, policy, and the terms of the political debate. But these opportunities only go so far, and constructive change takes real work. And maybe this is an instance in which studying history and social science can be useful as well as informative.

Reconstructive moments often contain the core elements of the eventual disjunction. If members of a new coalition can see some of these pitfalls coming, maybe a new set of leaders can choose to make politics with these challenges in mind.

A few weeks after the longest government shutdown in history, projected to have cost $3 billion in lost GDP, it looks as though we won’t have another one right away. Over the objections of leaders in his own party, Trump has announced that he will declare a national emergency in order to construct a wall along the US southern border. Welcome to the politics of disjunction.

What does this mean? According to Stephen Skowronek’s theory of presidents and parties in cyclical “political time,” disjunctive presidents are the ones who go down in history as the worst. These presidents have some commonalities across historical eras, but a few things stand out: they come at the end of a “regime” started 40 to 60 years prior where a president of the same party set the terms of debate. But those terms, and the coalition that united behind them, have gone stale and no longer meet the demands of the era.

We can understand how disjunctive politics is shaping the Trump administration, the shutdown, and even what’s going on to some extent on the Democratic side, by thinking about three gaps.

The gap between Trump’s base and the rest of the country

During the 35-day shutdown, a poll by Pew said that 29 percent of Americans favored substantially expanding the border wall and found a budget deal without wall funding an unacceptable option. This number is a bit lower than what experts have estimated is Trump’s public opinion “floor,” so it probably reflects his absolute core supporters who are either diehard Republicans or simply devotees of the president and his ideas (or both). What’s more, this number is similar to the average polls on support for a national emergency.

One way to look at this is to say, well, 30 percent is far from a majority. The correct — or at least most representative — course of action should be obvious. In the context of disjunctive politics, it poses a trickier situation. One of the key features of disjunction is that presidents in this position can’t reconcile the imperatives of their party with the broader national conversation.

For Franklin Pierce back in the 1850s, this was reconciling the fact that the Democratic Party had built its political operation on balance across regions and compromise over slavery. As the conflict over expansion and the institution itself grew in intensity, the two political logics couldn’t coexist.

In the case of Herbert Hoover, the important ideas and players in the Republican Party weren’t compatible with making fundamental adjustments in the political economy to address the Great Depression.

For Trump, it’s a set of ideas that provided the justification for his presidential candidacy but have proven to be out of step with the country overall. It’s not just a matter of ignoring public opinion, but of the impossibility of bridging this particular gap. And the difference doesn’t seem to be shrinking: Americans tend to favor more “welcoming” immigration policies, in the words of Tufts University political scientist Deborah Schildkraut.

The gap between politics and policy

When politics and policy are aligned, politicians can run on slogans and ideas that garner political support for policies that are workable and reasonably popular. No policy is seamless in its implementation or unanimous in its reception. But sometimes leaders do manage to run on an idea that can translate into a policy change that achieves some of what it promises: new government programs, tax cuts, better health coverage, etc.

The way this seems to have manifested in contemporary politics is in debates that are long on symbolism and short on policy specifics. The wall is a good example of this; experts suggest that it would make no difference in stopping drugs or human trafficking, and his depiction of a disaster in places like El Paso doesn’t seem to resonate with either immigration experts or residents.

Symbolism also plays a role for Democrats. The proposed Green New Deal has drawn some criticism for being aspirational rather than a practical plan (it’s also been praised for the same thing). Being skilled at messaging (especially, but maybe not only on Twitter) turns out to be useful for politicians across the ideological spectrum, but it’s still an open question whether that helps change policy.

The long shutdown had a lot of negative effects, but it may have helped narrow the gap between politics and policy. Republican legislators clearly grew weary of paying the political costs of a prolonged shutdown. Americans got to see all of the areas where government performs an important function and policy matters: air travel, national parks, weather forecasting.

The emergency declaration, on the other hand, once again widens the gap between politics and policy, reinforcing a sense that rhetoric is separate from either tangible problems or pragmatic solutions. A Facebook meme has emerged where you can mark yourself “safe from Trump’s bullshit emergency.”

We might be used to a politics in which we expect a lot of symbolism and not a lot of concrete policy acton. But that doesn’t make it okay. A widening gap between politics and policy is a concerning development. In a democracy, words have meaning. Trump has declared an emergency, but even many members of Trump’s own party don’t buy the emergency characterization. A situation in which a president calls something an emergency in order to go around Congress not only undermines basic transparency and honesty, it also contributes to a general cynicism about politics that is often a feature of a disjunctive presidency.

The gap between Trump’s formal and informal power

I noted in my piece about the lessons of 2018 that we should think about Trump’s presidency not purely in terms of weakness and strength. Instead, we should consider the different kinds of formal and informal power that individual presidents can wield. Trump lacked the ability to make the border wall popular, but his formal capacities to veto bills informed Congress’ response to him anyway. And despite the president’s lack of any kind of formal control over his party, Mitch McConnell’s reaction to the shutdown illustrated that Trump is still in meaningful ways the leader of the Republican Party.

The emergency declaration has made this gap even more evident. The law allows Trump to declare an emergency (at least until courts say otherwise or Congress passes a joint resolution ending it). Nevertheless, the president’s political capital, informal authority, and influence, whatever you want to call it, is likely to fall as a result of the shaky justification for invoking a state of emergency. In classic disjunctive form, Trump can do it, because the presidency is powerful no matter where we are in the cycle. Defining and justifying it will be a lot harder. 

People have been tweeting about how long 2018 seemed, but it didn’t really hit me until I listened to “2018 in sound” on the New York Times podcast The Daily. The 30-minute episode is heavy on the midterms, family separations at the US-Mexico border, and the incidents of gun violence in Parkland, Florida; Thousand Oaks, California; Pittsburgh, and Annapolis, to name a few.

So what did we learn about American politics in a year that was unsparing in its violence and unrelenting in its display of political rifts?

2018 was the year Trump finally became president

Okay, I’m just using this cliché to troll you all. What I mean is that Donald Trump’s year in office really highlighted the complex relationship between the formal and informal aspects of the presidency.

I’m not sure there’s a better illustration of this complexity than the combination of Trump’s announcement that he would withdraw US troops from Syria, and the letter that Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis sent announcing his resignation. Trump has the power to change the course of American foreign policy. But he often doesn’t have the influence to keep talented people in his Cabinet, or to persuade others of his approach in this realm.

Several political scientists (including me) have already pointed out that Trump is weak in the sense that Richard Neustadt associated with the modern presidency. Neustadt called it the power to persuade; another way to think about it is influence. Many of Trump’s mistakes are straight out of the classic Neustadt text: He reverses himself, putting potential allies in a difficult position. He’s resistant to acquiring information or hiring experts, thus relinquishing another form of leverage.

But while Neustadt’s argument was that resorting to the formal powers of the presidency — what he called “cases of command” — showed weakness, those actions still have important consequences for politics and policy. (Later work on the presidency takes up this issue.)

Policy changes out of the executive branch don’t always come directly from the president, and the changes that this administration announces don’t always go into effect. But the Trump administration, directed by the president himself and by members of the administration like former Attorney General Jeff Sessions, has been consistent in its approach to immigration.

As a result, the enactment of the family separation and zero-tolerance policies at the border this summer forced further divisions with the GOP, helped make “abolish ICE” a fairly mainstream stance in the Democratic Party, and, most importantly, affected thousands of lives. A weak president still occupies a powerful office.

2018 was the year partisan politics became all about power

But hasn’t partisan politics always been all about power? This is kind of a trick question. After the midterm elections, Republicans in Michigan and Wisconsin altered the rules to, among other things, limit the formal powers of incoming Democratic governors. This has caused serious concern about respect for fundamental democratic values: accepting the results of elections, acknowledging the legitimacy of the opposition, not changing the rules in the middle of the game.

This piece by Vox’s Zack Beauchamp illustrates the general tone of the coverage of these post-election changes, which suggests that they go beyond politicians’ normal jockeying for power. If the power-consolidating moves by state politicians are different not just in degree but in kind from the usual ebb and flow of power, then we need to start thinking about takes that go beyond outrage and into explanations.

Why now? Is this a Trump effect? Is it, as George Packer suggests in the Atlantic, the end result of decades of ideological developments in the GOP? The possibility that one of the two parties has developed a set of ideas that are incompatible with legitimate opposition is one that deserves scrutiny and possible alarm. But it isn’t the only potential explanation.

I remain open but skeptical of explanations that suggest politics are simply worse than in the eras where leaders — and I use the term loosely — took pains to preserve slavery and Jim Crow, excluded women, and used offensive stereotypes to justify imperial adventures. (Not that any of these problems have been entirely solved.)

Other explanations might include the possibility that politicians have always sought as much power as they can get away with, but when politics is aligned and sorted, the costs of consolidation go down. In other words, if you don’t share much in the way of networks, priorities, or constituencies with the other party, there’s no incentive not to screw them as hard as you can.

Many pieces about the post-election legislation pointed out that these moves seem to be a mainly Republican play, though Democrats’ power consolidation moves in New Jersey attracted some attention. There are some interesting questions here about asymmetry (also a 2017 year-end theme).

In addition to the parties’ different motivating ideologies, there’s also the hypothesis that Republicans have opted for this strategy because of their dwindling electoral numbers. But if Democrats adopt similar approaches, that kind of points to other factors. It also raises questions about whether electoral competition will diminish party asymmetry as the two parties respond to similar pressures to motivate their bases and construct narrow wins.

In 2019, we’ll see political division from a different angle

Well, who the hell knows? Don’t look to me for predictions. But we know that we’re going into the year with a GOP president and Senate and a Democratically controlled House of Representatives. We haven’t seen Trump deal with a divided government, and split control of the two chambers of Congress is relatively rare in the modern era.

What we do know is that we’re divided, and that mostly the consensus is that this isn’t ideal for governance, maybe approaching unsustainable for democracy. Since the 2016 election — and maybe even before that — a number of political takes seem to boil down to one fair question: Can democracy last when the two parties can barely acknowledge the other’s legitimacy and point of view? Can a political system divided by race, religion, lifestyle and class reasonably represent anything resembling the will of the people? Or is a system like this doomed to end in incivility, gridlock, or even violence?

At the end of 2018, the prospects seem grim. As I write this, the government partially shut down in a conflict over funding for Trump’s border wall. The 2018 elections were to some degree an exercise in further sorting the country, with red-state Democrats Claire McCaskill, Joe Donnelly, and Heidi Heitkamp defeated, suburban areas trending blue, and pronounced divides in gender, race, and education. This level of sorting is generally received as bad news for American democracy.

But the thing is, we don’t know for sure. Historically, the issues that have deeply divided the polity — mostly race, but also issues of political economy — have run through the parties rather than between them. As a result, those conflicts were contained up to breaking points, like the Civil War, the Great Depression, and violent civil rights clashes.

Where racial injustice was involved, the solutions often contained elements of the original problem: progress met with backlash, half-measures and implementation problems, and new hierarchies and discriminatory policies. Notably, two of the prominent issues of 2018, gun control and immigration, have until recently been the source of at least some division within each party, though this is changing as Democrats have embraced gun control as a signature issue and party positions on immigration have solidified.

It’s possible that the different structure of deeply felt conflict, between parties rather than within them, will produce something different. Solutions may be more elusive, but the eventual compromises might also be fairer and less morally, well, compromised.

It looks like there will be a wider range of voices at the table than in the past. The difficult conversations about who we are and where we’re going might actually happen; they won’t be fun, but they won’t be off the table.

I don’t know exactly how things might proceed differently with parties that are sorted to this level, and I remain concerned about party weakness in a period of strong partisanship. But after thinking a great deal about the number of complicated, difficult issues that grab headlines and divide the parties in obvious and prominent ways, I feel cautiously optimistic that our recent painful politics will not be in vain. It’s exhausting to fight about everything. The alternative is far worse.

The narrative from the 2018 midterms is that there is no narrative. We’ve known for some time that this was likely to happen: Democrats were favored to win the House and Republicans to hold the Senate.

Despite Republican victories in Florida in the Senate and governor’s race (as far as we can tell) and the defeat of incumbent Claire McCaskill in Missouri, these states approved progressive ballot measures. Some commentators have fired up takes about how the blue wave failed to materialize. Others have suggested that the national popular vote for the House, which looks like it will bear a solid margin for Democrats best measures the mood of the country.

Beneath these more obvious contradictions, there were many more complex factors. Charismatic candidates who drew national media attention, like Beto O’Rourke in Texas and Andrew Gillum in Florida, lost, while quieter figures like Wisconsin’s Tony Evers and Nevada’s Jacky Rosen won.

The election was fought over lots of different issues as well as candidate personalities, and a mix of local and national factors. Perhaps most importantly, the rules about who gets to vote, where, and how, and under what conditions vary by state and even by county or city. Did you get to vote by mail, or does your town have only one voting location? Do you live in an affluent suburb or a Native American reservation? Did your county hire enough poll workers? These questions, not just campaigns and candidates, inform election outcomes.

The night also revealed, in case anyone didn’t know, that the country is deeply divided on race, ethnicity, and religion. As political scientist Cas Mudde points out, President Donald Trump’s brand of Republicanism did well at the ballot box in some places, allowing Trump-style Republicans to replace more conventional ones in some places.

Iowa Rep. Steve King, who lost support from the National Republican Congressional Committee and local media over his offensive comments about immigration and diversity, narrowly won reelection in his Iowa district.

At the same time, the House is set to become more diverse, with Muslim, Native American, black and Latina women breaking new ground for their respective states. LGBTQ representation is improving, slowly. Victories for both equality and white supremacy are part of the 2018 story, and demonstrate the complexity of a changing country. They also show the power of its legacy of exclusion.

Although American politics in 2018 may be especially pulled in multiple directions and filled with division and backlash, ambiguous election results are hardly new. In 1972, voters returned President Richard Nixon to the White House (overwhelmingly) and Democrats kept control of Congress. Four years later, Democrats kept the Congress and won the White House, but with light gains in the former and a very narrow margin in the latter. The 2000 election brought similarly narrow results.

Sometimes elections carry a mixed or unclear message, or no message at all. Beneath these seemingly equivocal results, though, were hundreds of individual political campaigns, each with their own ideas, ambitions, successes, and failures.

Even elections that delivered more decisive victories to one party or the other were not automatically translated into clear stories. As I’ve pointed out before, one of the election narratives bouncing around after Franklin Delano Roosevelt won the 1932 election was about alcohol and prohibition, not the Great Depression.

Ronald Reagan effectively persuaded people that the 1980 election was a mandate for conservative policies, but the election could just as easily have been about rejecting Jimmy Carter. (In fact, evidence suggests this latter narrative is more persuasive.)

The proliferation of different arguments about the meaning of the election results that we’re seeing this week is pretty standard for the first few days after an election.

So elections are complicated, with many individual stories and moving parts. Narratives compress these distinct pieces into a simple national story. But, paradoxically, the opposite is also true: Elections are simple. Narratives are complicated.

Despite all the factors that go into a national election, most of the time they follow established patterns. Fundamental factors like the economy and presidential approval matter. Partisanship is a big deal. The president’s party usually loses seats in a midterm.

Election narratives are as much about what we collectively need from politics as they are about anything that really happened. As I argue in my book about presidential mandate-claiming, election interpretation becomes a more popular sport when legitimacy is in question. I think that’s a pretty fair description of where we are right now.

Under normal and mundane circumstances, we can probably accept that elections are sometimes close and break certain ways because of chance or interpretations of the fundamentals or whatever. In a situation in which everything feels like a crisis, the demand for stories about what the electorate wants and how the government will respond seems to rise.

Election narratives highlight the issues that defined the election, sometimes more by what happened later than by anything said during the campaign. These narratives can also hold up a kind of mirror to the electorate, telling it what values it displayed by voting for certain candidates or parties.

Choices, for example, to highlight the diverse backgrounds of candidates like Rashida Tlaib or Jared Polis (the first Muslim-American woman elected to Congress and the first openly gay man elected governor, respectively) are ideological and political decisions, and they tell us about where we’ve fallen short in the past and who we — many of us, anyway — wish to be.

The need for narrative is understandable, but it’s not necessarily healthy. Not only does it indicate flagging legitimacy, but it also asks elections to do too much. This week’s midterms, in particular, were framed as a referendum on and a lifetime for American democracy. That’s a lot to put on a process that’s simultaneously mundane and idiosyncratic.

And elections have concrete as well as symbolic consequences. Last night will probably mark the beginning of the national career of a politician who will change the nation or define an era. But we may not know who or how for years to come.

Elections are important. But the search for narrative means that we’re looking to them not just to legitimately confer power or hold officials accountable. We’re looking to them to tell us who we are, politically.

And we don’t need them to do that. The past few years of American politics have been characterized by rallies, marches, policy fights, and political organizing — all over the political spectrum. If nothing else, this should tell us that our political stories can’t all be captured in one night’s election returns.

Julia Azari and Seth Masket recently read Bob Woodward’s Fear (or, at least, they listened to the audiobook while jogging or knitting or driving). There was a lot to discuss about the book, so rather than write a blog post, they had a conversation about it, the transcript of which is below:

Julia Azari: What did you want to get out of this book? What, in general, did you get out of it?

Seth Masket: In some ways, I didn’t learn a ton that was new. It added some details to an impression that I think most of us already had about this White House.

But one of the things I wanted to understand was how senior staffers think about their own role in this White House. Do they think Trump is good at this? Do they think he’s bad and are just trying to keep him from going off the rails? I think the book was good on this front.

You’ve read a lot more presidential biographies than I have. What was your overall impression of this?

JA: I taught a whole course on political biographies once. Well, a one-credit course. And I started that course with David Foster Wallace’s essay on John McCain’s 2000 presidential bid. This is obviously a very different thing on multiple dimensions, though it’s a piece I’ve been thinking about some lately. It’s not really about staff, but it delves deeply into outsiderdom and political authenticity as themes. Woodward doesn’t necessarily frame the book this way, but those are important elements here as well.

Who is Trump, really, behind the scenes, and how did his political outsider status factor into various parts of how things work in the White House?

DFW sort of concludes that authenticity is a performance, even with someone whose character, like McCain’s, is demonstrable in other things we know about him.

Obviously Trump is a much different person, but one thing that struck me was the lack of performance in a certain way. Like, Trump’s public and private personas aren’t that different.

SM: I agree. I came away from Fear thinking that Trump’s behavior is less performative than most politicians’ behavior. That is, he sounded in his private conversations a lot like he does at his rallies, or during TV interviews, or in debates. Scattered, distracted, emphatic, etc.

JA: Yeah. Has anyone written anything about Zaller’s work on public opinion and Trump? He’s very top-of-the-head.

He’ll be like, “I think this thing.” Then someone brings up a different consideration, and he takes up that opinion: “Wait, I think the other thing too!”

It’s a pretty common conversation to have with someone who doesn’t follow politics much.

SM: I’ve seen some Twitter/Facebook conversations, although I don’t know if anyone’s written up something serious. But it seems like the right read. Pretty much everything public opinion scholars have been saying about the average American voter for the past five decades is a great description of Trump.

JA: The outsiderdom thing seems worth talking about here too. Most politicians who try to depict themselves as outsiders are asking us to forget their long political careers (McCain, Bernie Sanders). Trump is really an outsider, and, per your comment about average voters, that really comes out in Fear.

SM: Yes. Not just because he doesn’t have a lot of ties in DC or a very polished DC manner. But also he seems… how to say this politely… almost completely innocent of political instinct or knowledge. And he’s determined not to learn anything new on this front.

JA: Yeah. The book makes a point to emphasize his lack of knowledge of how the treasury works or how national security works.

SM: I’ve written in the past that Trump is kind of a real-life version of “Dave,” and he’s showing the downsides of what’s basically a comedy conceit. It turns out it is possible to get someone in office who truly knows nothing about how government works. In the movie, Dave is able to do a considerable number of things (like balance the federal budget!) in part because he’s not bogged down by political knowledge and alliances. But there are important institutional limits, as well.

Anyway, this brings me to one of the questions we’d discussed beforehand: How does Fear portray power in the White House? Who’s in charge here?

JA: This question is destined for a presidency final exam, and it gets to one of the ideas that Richard Neustadt wrote about in his classic Presidential Power and the Modern Presidents. Even presidential orders are not exactly self-executing. He can give them but someone needs to physically carry them out. And those people are the ones who have power in the White House depicted in the book. Rob Porter in particular.

SM: Yes. The book opens with an example of senior staff basically disappearing some material from Trump’s desk to keep his wishes from becoming policy.

This is, to some extent, not great for democracy, right? A president runs on an agenda and then tries to implement it but is thwarted by advisors. This isn’t even inter-branch checks-and-balances. These are loyal Trump appointees who nonetheless believe that enacting his agenda would be dangerous for the world. How are we supposed to process this?

JA: Yeah, and there was a lot of discussion of that following the publication of the book and then the infamous New York Times op-ed.

The thing is, this is actually not that new a question. This seems to happen frequently with Republican administrations, but there’s this question about who’s really in charge.

Here the comparison with a couple other inside the administration books is useful. One is Fred Greenstein’s book The Hidden-Hand Presidency, which took advantage of newly opened files in the Eisenhower archives to see if Ike was really as hands-off as people thought. He wasn’t.

He was better versed in policy, more immersed in details, and more politically calculating than many people had thought.

SM: This is a good point. We’ve understood for a long time that elections don’t just pick a president, but a presidential team, who are easily as important. But somehow this seems more urgent in a Trump administration. Perhaps because his own preferences appear so chaotic.

JA: With Fear, we get the opposite: a sense that people who are really, for the most part, outside of the public eye and Senate confirmation process and any semblance of accountability are, well, the deciders.

SM: And yet Trump has a tool Ike lacked: Twitter. We saw a few examples in the book where Trump clearly wanted something, whether it was a change in military policies on transgendered soldiers, or a more aggressive stance toward North Korea, or undermining trade pacts, etc., and his staff was trying to rein him in. Except that sometimes he would just tweet his preferences and form policy that way.

JA: The other point of contrast is Scott McClellan’s book What Happened. McClellan was press secretary in the Bush White House, and one of the things that’s really striking in his book about that White House is how top-down it was.

SM: I haven’t read that one, but this sounds right.

JA: Yeah. So Trump couldn’t make his staff end trade relations with South Korea — they could scuttle that by taking paper off his desk — but he could make them respond by tweeting things. This is the thing with Trump. Matt Glassman and Jonathan Bernstein have written quite a bit about his weakness in a Neustadtian sense, but everyone is always responding to him.

SM: That was Giuliani’s definition of leadership, right? He acts, and everyone else reacts.

JA: in the book? or in general?

SM: Both, I suppose. But that’s a fairly broad, and irresponsible, conception of leadership. It would also apply to a terrorist or a colicky baby.

JA: Oh yeah, in no way do I think that constitutes leadership. Influence yes.

I want to get to one of our other questions: Does anyone come off well in this book? Is anyone moral or principled?

SM: So clearly one of the figures that gave the most time to Woodward was [former Trump economics adviser] Gary Cohn. I was so puzzled by him. He really does seem to take a lot of time to try to explain to Trump how federal economic policies work and, indeed, how the economy works. But there was a moment after [white nationalist protests and violence in] Charlottesville, Virginia — which plays a large role in this book — where Cohn was so irate about Trump’s “good people on both sides” comments that he apparently considered a principled resignation and went to Trump with it.

And somehow Trump convinced him to stay on board. But then Cohn resigns later over a process dispute over tariffs.

I certainly felt I understood Cohn’s frustrations in that moment. But it seems like he lost a lot of moral standing by staying when he did and leaving when he did.

There’s a similar moment with former Trump lawyer John Dowd. Dowd comes off giving strong legal advice toward the end of the book trying to talk Trump out of meeting with Mueller. But he never says to Trump his main reason motivating the advice: He is certain that Trump will lie under oath.

I was really struck by the lack of principled resignations. I suppose anyone really bothered by Trump’s day-to-day behavior or the casual bigotry wouldn’t have gone to work for him in the first place. But to a remarkable degree, Trump’s team has stayed in place even when they suggest they’re dealing with significant moral quandaries.

JA: Didn’t he tell Trump not to testify because he “wasn’t a good witness”?

SM: Yes, but it was couched in, “The presidency is really a lot of mental work, and you might forget stuff and look bad,” rather than, “You have a tendency to lie a lot.”

JA: Do you think Charlottesville is the biggest moral quandary in the book?

SM: It seemed to me that there were two major moral quandaries. One was Charlottesville. I had forgotten how many prominent Republicans had distanced themselves from Trump on that one. The other was the Access Hollywood tape, which was of course during the campaign. And again with that one, a lot of GOP leaders backed away from Trump. 

JA: “Backed away/distanced” is good language to use. Not separated in any meaningful sense.

SM: What’s interesting in the book’s account is that people in the inner circle in the campaign, including, I think, Reince Priebus, basically said Trump had to quit after the Access Hollywood tape came out. They saw House Speaker Paul Ryan and others pulling their support, and they said, “It’s over,” and said Trump had to drop out. Allegedly, Mike Pence was already on board to head the ticket and tap Condi Rice as VP!

It amazes me how many things are just assumed to be “what has to happen now.” And it turns out if the candidate refuses to do it, it needn’t happen. Trump simply refused to drop out. The polls didn’t move much, and most of the GOP came back to him.

JA: Between this and Donna Brazile’s book, maybe we should empower parties to do more in the event of late-breaking crises (when she talks about thinking about replacing Hillary Clinton after her health issues in September 2016).

SM: Yeah, but we also saw the constraints on her. If Priebus had somehow had the power to simply remove the presidential nominee and replace him with someone else in October 2016, is there any way he actually does it? I really doubt it.

Did anyone else come off as principled to you? I’m curious what you thought of Bannon.

JA: Let me preface by saying I think the things Bannon stands for are truly repugnant. But he comes off as weirdly refreshing in this book — like he’s the person who calls out the bullshit and tries to articulate some kind of consistent political project. The way this is presented, alongside the Charlottesville story, kind of highlights — perhaps unintentionally — how unequipped mainstream politics and mainstream journalism are to deal with the likes of Bannon, the alt-right/neo-Nazis, etc.

SM: I agree with this.

JA: I think Bannon asking David Bossie “president of what country” upon hearing the news that Trump wants to run, is my favorite line of the whole book and that really makes me feel some kind of way.

SM: He comes off as the closest in this book to the person who “makes” the president, the person who spots a potential political talent several years out and thinks his message can resonate with the anti-immigration crowd. I think Kellyanne Conway played a similar role but she’s kind of related to the background in this book.

JA: Also, what is coming out of this discussion is that the people who dislike racism aren’t really willing to stand up for principles, but the people who embrace it are.

SM: Yes, that is a very good summation.

JA: There are not very many women in this book. Hope Hicks and Kellyanne Conway and Melania and Ivanka are all pretty marginal.

SM: I mean, there are not very many women in this White House. But more than show up in the book! That could be a function of who gave interviews and who didn’t, or narrative choices by Woodward, or something else.

JA: We haven’t really gotten into this, which probably reveals our own bias toward what we know (communications, party politics), but a lot of the book is military and security strategy.

SM: Yes.

JA: Where there aren’t very many women. There are a lot of people who express deep skepticism about Trump, even while working for him (most of whom have denied it publicly).

SM: I suppose White House Chief of Staff John Kelly is a pretty important figure in this regard. We see Trump’s instinctive deference to anyone in a military uniform. But also Kelly’s pretty obvious frustrations with someone who’s willing to throw away alliances and important military advantages simply because he has an idea that America’s allies are “taking advantage” of the US.

JA: Yes, that pretty much sums up the contradiction.

But we need to wrap up. Final thoughts?

SM: Whether we’re talking about military or economic policy, we see a lot of the same dynamic. Trump has a worldview shared by almost no one in DC: Trade is bad, allies are moochers, the US economy is all about manufacturing, etc. And his advisers try at great length to disabuse him of these notions, and he refuses to learn. So they undermine him.

Does that sound right?

JA: It does, but I’m not sure how to articulate my final thought.

SM: I’ll ask a final question. Should we feel reassured that there’s an unelected group of advisors trying to protect the president, and us, from his most dangerous instincts?

JA: I guess that’s better than unchecked dangerous instincts. But I don’t think the book is supposed to be reassuring.

The structure of the executive branch only makes sense if the person at the top has both judgment and respect from those who work there. One of those is sometimes missing, to be sure, but not both consistently, I don’t think.