| 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. 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. | 