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Feb. 1, 2017
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No. 254
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By Jonathan V. Last
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COLD OPEN

There’s a lot of important Trump news this week—the SCOTUS pick, his executive order on visas and refugees—but I’m going to deliberately ignore it because these are fast-moving stories.

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Instead, I want to focus on a couple of high-altitude views of the administration’s early days.

First, Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen have a perceptive analysis over at their new startup, Axios. One of the big questions about Trump has been whether or not he would ultimately decide to co-exist with the Republican establishment, whatever superficial noise he might make during his presidency.

That’s certainly what the Republican establishment thought would happen—remember, at the critical moment in the primaries, the establishment rallied to Trump rather than Cruz, because they thought they’d be able to co-opt Trump more easily.

But it now seems that, like the mafia dons in The Dark Knight, Republicans may have turned, in their desperation, to a man they didn’t fully understand. Trump’s first two weeks were marked by several media crises, but under their cover his administration was ambitiously productive on the policy front: He withdrew from the TPP, re-started the two major pipeline projects, began reforming a host of federal regulations, met with the British prime minister, named a Supreme Court justice, and started making the first tentative moves on the Great Wall of Trumpia. And those are just the highlights. (Or lowlights, depending on your perspective.)

And in the process, congressional Republicans are caving to Trump on every front. This was utterly foreseeable. The people who argued during the campaign that the Republican Congress would hold Trump accountable to conservative ideals and Constitutional norms were always deluding themselves. Our politics is too polarized for our parties to police their own. And in any event, the presidency has grown too imperial to be tamed when it is held by someone who wants to use the office expansively and unilaterally. And whatever you want to say about Trump, it’s clear that he has a genius for understanding and using power. (That was Obama’s great talent too, by the way.)

Now, maybe you’re alarmed by all of this. Or maybe you think it’s all to the good. I’m not offering any value judgments at the moment. I’m merely suggesting that on the question of whether Trump wants to be transformative, or to just be popular and go along with the status quo, the answer now seems to be the former.

Politically speaking, I wouldn’t be surprised if Trump’s initiatives work. For one thing, they’re provoking the best possible kind of opposition (from Trump’s perspective, that is).

See, for instance Matt Continetti’s excellent piece about what Trump has done to the Democrats already: He’s turned them insane. There are serious and effective ways to oppose a president from the opposite party. The Democrats are not interested in any of them. Go have a look at this clip-job from the DNC’s candidate forum. No, really. Go watch it. I’ll wait.

Those people are not running for the chairmanship of a major, national political party. They’re running for student council president at Smith College.

I know I said I was going to ignore Trump’s refugee and visa order, but for a moment, consider the politics of it: Whatever you think about the merits, it almost seems like it was designed to bring out the very worst, and most ineffective, kind of opposition from the Democrats. It looks like pretty good ground for Trump to fight on.

Which brings me to my last two observations: Ross Douthat wrote an especially astute column over the weekend taking stock of the degree to which Trump uses the fog of strategic ambiguity to his advantage. I can’t recommend this piece highly enough. You should read it.

And you should especially read the conclusion. Because strategic ambiguity is an incredibly valuable asset for a leader. But it comes with a cost. Every time you deploy it, you’re drawing down on your reserve of reputational capital, which you need in order to enforce beneficial aspects of the status quo, especially in a crisis. As Douthat says, “For legislators, too much fog is paralyzing. For voters, it’s a recipe for nervous exhaustion. For allies, it’s confusing; for enemies, it looks like an opportunity.”

In other words, while it’s clever to argue that Trump’s domestic opponents make the mistake of taking him literally when they should be taking him seriously (or vice versa, as the situation demands), you cannot automatically assume that when foreign leaders make such misreadings, it will be to America’s benefit.

One final point: I’ve criticized Trump a lot over the last year, but I am not reflexively anti-Trump. (Really, I’m not. I think I’m the only person at the magazine to have been publicly praised by Trump for something I wrote about him.) All of this is wind up to say that he did something last week which was unequivocally great and in a perfect world would re-orient the Republican party in a genuine and lasting way: He met with a group of union leaders for an hour and half. “The president treated us with respect, not only our organization but our members,” Laborers’ International Union president Terry O’Sullivan told Peggy Noonan.

The union question has been a hobbyhorse of mine for a while now. Why shouldn’t Republicans be on the side of private-sector unions? Now public-sector unions are a totally different animal. But when it comes to the private sector, the “I built that” Republican worship of capital and the management class is outmoded. If anything, capital is more powerful now than it was a half century ago. And that’s just as an economic matter: The destruction of America’s social capital over the last 50 years has made both everyday life and economic mobility much harder for the lower-middle class.

And as a matter of politics, Republicans ought to understand that the big-money private sector management and ownership classes aren’t their supporters anymore. Those folks are Democrats. Think about it this way: Whose side should Republicans be on? The founders of Google and Facebook and Uber out in Silicon Valley? Who have created virtually nothing of real value, yet control enormous piles of capital, and reflexively support Democrats and the entire liberal agenda all while wanting to bend government to their purposes? Or the guys who assemble cars and pour concrete for a living and just want a fair shake?

If Trump can convince Republicans to embrace private-sector unions, then there will be at least one good thing to emerge from his presidency.

LOOKING BACK

While much of America is sleepily rubbing its belly and burping with satisfaction, may we take just a moment to point out that the state of the Union is actually quite bad?

—David Tell, “The Real State of the Union,” from our February 1, 1999 issue.

Remember you get full access to THE WEEKLY STANDARD archive when you subscribe.
 
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THE READING LIST

You cannot fan-edit The Hobbit into a good movie. This is why.

**

Derek Murphy: The man who catches runners who cheat on their marathons.

**

Cameron Harris: Anatomy of a fake-newsman.

INSTANT CLASSIC

When society loses a healthy founding myth, it descends into chaos.

-Antonio García Martínez on the rising fire, January 30, 2017

THE LAST WORD

My colleague Jim Swift, who’s part of the team that makes this email happen every week, sent me a great story from his home town of Cleveland: A fellow there named Ethan Roberts recently died (that’s not the great part) and he left behind one of the largest collections of comic books and comic book art in America.

The tale of how Roberts built his collection is wonderful. He was nuts for them as a kid—he was part of the small group of teenagers that organized the first comic book convention in New York City in 1964. Over the years he moved on from collecting comic books to collecting the original artists’ pages and his collection now includes pages from every major artist to ever do pen and ink work in comics.

In addition to everything else, Roberts was also the original owner of one of the most sought-after copies of Action Comics #1. (Which is the Holy Grail of comics, because it’s the first appearance of Superman. He sold his copy in 1986 for $14,000, which became the down payment on his house. The Roberts copy—lots of important books have chains of custody attached to them—recently sold for $3.2 million. And he seems not to have been embittered by this in the least.

It’s a beautiful story. And if you’re interested, you can poke around the first installment of art to be auctioned off from his collection here.

And with that I’ll wrap it up by giving you a preview of this week’s Substandard podcast, which comes out tomorrow. (You’ll be able to find it here.) We talk a little bit about the Super Bowl, my uncharacteristic admiration of the New England Patriots, and about great character actors.

We were prompted to do a show on character actors because of the passing of Miguel Ferrer and John Hurt—two very different, but wonderful screen presences. In the course of the discussion we dilate on Philip Seymour Hoffman, Michael Gambon, Peter Dinklage, and more.

As always, you can subscribe on iTunes here or Google Play here. Just do it already. You know you want to.

Best,

JVL

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