Donald Trump the Populist President (re-post)

(This article is a re-post of an article that was published in the Jack News in March of 2017.)

Our nation has grown so used to the notion of the ideological president that it has become impossible for some segments of the American people to see that, in fact, Donald Trump might not fit that mold.

The two most recent occupants of the Oval Office, Barack Obama, and George W. Bush, were both very ideological. Whether viewed as too arrogant or too ignorant (or both!), these men seemed to embody the most strident stands within their parties.

Bill Clinton’s textured “triangulation” has become a legendary code word for a president’s ability to parse small political difference for strategic advantage. But today he’s seen — appropriately so — as the ideological fox who put rose-colored glasses over the nation during each of his major convention and stump speeches. This has been so whether in the service of his wife, or of President Obama.

Hence 24 years of past presidential history of more can indeed seem like forever.

But we don’t need to go far back beyond these imperious and ideological presidents before we unearth a pragmatism that is, in truth, the more natural model for our nation’s chief executive.

Take Richard Nixon, who ran on war (in Vietnam) on peace (with China) and on a host of domestic policy issues where he implemented Democrat-style policies. Or John F. Kennedy, a cold war Democrat if there ever was one, and who wanted nothing if not to be seen as at the “center” of the nation’s politics and sense of service.

Even Ronald Reagan, the paragon on purity for American conservatives, governed through a realpolitik, particularly in managing domestic budget issues and economics crises.

His West Wing style of management implemented a real-life conflict between the “troika” of a true believer like Ed Meese, moderate establishment Republicans like James Baker, and political operative like Michael Deaver.

In the presidency of Donald Trump, we watchers are left wondering whether the White House is operating more like a piece of precision German engineering, or like the customer service arm of a Comcast phone tree.

But one thing is certain: If you don’t like his presidency, wait a day and see what happens tomorrow!

It’s too early to tell, and will remain so for some time yet, how President Trump governs. But he’s already set the stage for an unfiltered, and hence populist, agenda.

The mainstream media is so unnerved by his bombastic style that much of it can’t see straight. They cannot abide metaphor, even though this insight was well-captured by The Atlantic’s Salena Zito, when discussing Trump’s attitude toward black unemployment in September 2016:

“‘Fifty-eight percent of black youth cannot get a job, cannot work,’ Trump says. ‘Fifty-eight percent. If you are not going to bring jobs back, it is just going to continue to get worse and worse.’

“It’s a claim that drives fact-checkers to distraction. The Bureau of Labor Statistics puts the unemployment rate for blacks between the ages of 16 and 24 at 20.6 percent. Trump prefers to use its employment-population ratio, a figure that shows only 41.5 percent of blacks in that age bracket are working. But that means he includes full time high-school and college students among the jobless. Statistics, statistics. 

“It’s a familiar split. When he makes claims like this, the press take him literally, but not seriously; his supporters take him seriously, but not literally.“

When Donald Trump called a news conference last month to talk to the American people in the presence of the press, he knew exactly how his remarks would be characterized by the press as ranting and raving. He delivered this pre-newscast calmly. It’s the manner that all Americans now have come to recognize as his form of “truthful hyperbole.”

Or as he wrote of his own term in The Art of the Deal, “It’s an innocent form of exaggeration — and a very effective form of promotion.”

It’s time for American commentators and journalists to move past the stylistic disconnect between late-night liberal talk shows and the president, who has found a way to genuinely talk to and connect with the American people.

All the online discussion and commentary spent looking for signs of purported ideological conformity to nationalism in the White House is time that is not spent analyzing the issues, the facts and the on-the-ground realities of life in the Trump presidency.

Let’s stop parsing Trump’s words and start assessing the real-life impacts — good and bad — of the actions that his policies are putting into place.