Facing the Reality of a Trump Presidency

              All right.  It’s been over a month now since that shocking election, and if time doesn’t heal all wounds, at least it should reduce some of the pain.

              So, let’s talk about the impending start of the Donald Trump presidency because there’s no getting around it.  Whether you voted for him never thinking he would win or voted for Hillary because you hated the thought of him as president, he will become our president in a little over a month, and like it or not, he will be making some changes.

              Let’s consider what some of those changes might be, how drastically different the country and world might look as a result, and whether the fear some still have that things will be far worse as a result is a fair assessment of what might result from a Trump administration. 

              First, however, I must clarify a few things.  I was and am no fan of the man or of his campaign.  I felt, and continue to feel, that he is wholly unqualified for the office, being temperamentally unfit and intellectually lazy.  I consider his background and experience to be inadequate and his credentials (such as they are) to be problematic.  I also viewed his campaign as racist, misogynistic, and xenophobic. 

              So you can count me as one of the pained and shocked Hillary supporters who has spent part of the last month trying to convince himself this has all just been a bad dream and the rest of that time thinking that the world as I know it has just changed forever and for the worst.  And so, with that bias, here’s what my slightly more optimistic, half-glass-full view of the future shows me.

              I expect that Trump will work at being a “good president” as he defines that term.  Mostly, he will rely on his closest advisers for the knotty aspects of the job.  In that regard, he’ll be something of a cross between Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, the former being a big-picture guy who had a clear and rigidly conservative ideological perspective but little substantive expertise, the latter being a general-direction guy who had a casual conservative perspective and little energy for the details of the office.  I consider both to have been failed presidencies, so making that comparison is hardly a ringing endorsement.

              Trump’s advisers will largely control his presidency and at this point they appear to be headed by Mike Pence, Steve Bannon and Trump’s son-in-law.  That’s not a closest-advisers circle to be overjoyed with.  In Pence he has a religious zealot, in Bannon an alt-lite (something less severe than alt-right, if we take the man at his word) neo-nationalist, and in his son-in-law a guy who married well. 

              So the policy direction in the early days of the administration will likely be to the right, far to the right of where we are now, and Trump’s cabinet and sub-cabinet appointments to date bear out that supposition.  Remember, however, that how far to the right a Trump administration takes the country might depend more on the will of Congress to move with Trump than on what Trump himself wants. 

              And there’s another aspect to Donald Trump that might offer a little more hope (and, again, I’m looking at this from a rose-colored glass-half-full perspective).  Trump has a pragmatic side that might well be more influential than any ideological bent he has shown so far.  That pragmatism is, presumably, what has gained him success in his business ventures.  In other words, he does what works and shuns what doesn’t work or isn’t working.  In his campaign, much of his demagoguery can be attributed to this aspect of his character.  He ran on issues that he thought would win him votes, and, in the end (with a big assist from James Comey) they did.

              And so if something like, say, a wall across the U.S.-Mexico border no longer makes sense pragmatically, Trump will drop it.  (In fact, all evidence since his election suggests that he has.)  And if repealing the Affordable Care Act turns out to create more problems than it solves, he may just give up on that pledge as well (notwithstanding the current rhetoric).  In other words, Trump may end up being less scary and less radical than his campaign “promises” and his Twitter rants have suggested, primarily because the realities of the world as he comes to understand them will require different approaches and different solutions. 

              Now I’m not suggesting that Trump is going to become anything close to a closet liberal or that progressives are going to feel great about where he tries to take the country, but I am hoping that this read of him indicates that he won’t be as disastrous as either Reagan or Dubya were.  He may be more like a Richard Nixon, if you want to think of a comparable Republican (comparable in terms of political instincts if not in terms of background and intellect; Nixon, though he turned out to be mendacity exemplified, was fully qualified to be president and had the brains for the job).  And if you think about the Nixon presidency in its best light, you have to acknowledge that he signed and supported the original clean air and clean water bills, nominated Henry Blackmun (author of Roe v. Wade) to the Supreme Court, initiated détente with the Soviet Union and opened the door to China.  Nixon was so pragmatic that he at one point imposed wage and price controls on most of the economy (an ill-considered and ineffectual effort to control runaway inflation), a move that was absolute heresy to conservatives at the time.

              Trump may not be willing to support left-of-center policies or to engage in occasional left-leaning tactics, but he also might not feel as comfortable steering the country far to the right as he may have sounded during the campaign.  He probably didn’t expect to win and certainly wasn’t prepared to govern.  But once he actually becomes the nation’s president, the real Donald Trump may turn out to be far different from the one we thought we knew.