CLEVELAND — In normal times, this week’s reports that Donald Trump wants John Kasich to be the real president would generate more interest.
According to Kasich’s aides, the Trump campaign desperately wanted the Ohio governor to be his running mate. Kasich, out of concern for his eternal soul or his political future, opposed the idea. But the Trump campaign pushed harder. At one point, Donald Trump Jr. approached him with an incredible offer, according to the New York Times: How would Kasich like to become the most powerful vice president in American history? If elected, Trump would put Kasich in charge of two broad policy areas.
Now, if a normal person were asked to guess which two, they might hazard a guess, “Counterterrorism and healthcare” or “Defense and taxes.” But that’s thinking compact. And Donald Trump doesn’t think compact.
Donald Trump Jr. has offered Kasich both foreign policy and domestic policy.
“What the hell would Trump do?” an assistant reportedly asked the younger Trump.
“He will make America great again,” Trump Jr. replied casually, according to an article in the Columbus Dispatch.
When I first read this, I couldn’t assist but think of the scene in “The Blues Brothers” where Dan Aykroyd asks the manager of a honky-tonk what kind of music they play there. The manager replies, “Oh, we have both. We have country and western.”
There is no love lost between the Kasich and Trump camps, so it is fair to be skeptical of this story. The only thing is that there are a lot of rumors circulating among Republican politicians and staffers that support it. Trump is not interested in politics. He is not averse to outsourcing it to congressional Republicans and his cabinet secretaries. Trump wants to do chilly stuff. He wants to make chilly speeches and fly a nicer plane. He wants the respect that comes with being president. He does not want to do the strenuous stuff.
For those who care to see, there has been ample evidence of this throughout. He said he would not begin to learn about politics until he was elected. That Trump neither knows nor cares about public policy is obvious to virtually anyone who knows anything about public policy. You could fill books with examples of him talking about articles of the Constitution that do not exist, events that never happened, and proposals that make no sense.
According to GQ, Trump’s daily news coverage is nothing more than a printout of Google News articles that mention “Donald J. Trump.”
That’s how he runs his business. He’s a marketer and brand expert. Other businessmen and subcontractors do the strenuous work.
Woodrow Wilson was the first to see the president as a sort of monarchical cheerleader. He was the first commander-in-chief to insist that the president impose a “vision” on the country; Wilson believed that this task belonged to the propagandist-in-chief.
Richard Neustadt, a titan of presidential studies, reiterated this in his groundbreaking book, Presidential Power. Because state-of-the-art presidents are expected to do so much more than their constitutional powers allow, they must shape public opinion. “Presidential power,” Neustadt famously wrote, “is the power to persuade.”
It’s unlikely Trump knows anything about it, but that doesn’t mean he isn’t onto something about the presidency. Barack Obama, after all, spent much of his presidency trying to build a grassroots movement to force change in Washington that he couldn’t achieve from the White House.
Many Republicans I’ve spoken to find Trump’s willingness to hand over actual policymaking to Mike Pence or Paul Ryan reassuring. And in a way, it is.
But he misses the point. Because the president’s words carry so much power, the president’s words matter. Just this week, the GOP candidate suggested that he would not honor our NATO commitments if Russia attacked our allies in the Baltics. Those are perilous words coming from a candidate. They would be disastrous coming from a president.
A president who has a sensitive verbal tongue — one who doesn’t know what not to say — can trigger a financial crisis or a war.
If Trump could be trusted to simply play a ceremonial role, serving as a kind of corporate motivational speaker for the country, I might get on the Trump train. But can anyone say with certainty that Trump has the discipline to do something like that?
