- The breaking news out of Washington just doesn't let up.
A "Closer Look" now with our next guest, who calls it turmoil
in the Trump administration.
Turmoil, he says, that is unprecedented.
He should know.
UW-Madison political science professor Ken Mayer is an expert
on presidential powers, executive orders and war powers.
He joins us now.
Thanks very much for being here.
- Good to be with you.
- You called this turmoil.
What stands out?
- What stands out to me is from what we can observe of this
White House is that it deviates so profoundly from the
established practices and what we think we understand about the
types of things that presidents need to do that I think it
raises questions about whether we have a functioning White
House.
And the evidence of that comes from a variety of different
directions, and it's not just the leaks, which the president
is deeply unhappy about.
I think the leaks are a symptom of the problem rather than the
cause of the problem because it's not clear who's in charge.
It's not clear who has the authority to make decisions, and
you have the different stakeholders internally all
working to try to protect what they perceive as their own
positions.
- And this on your part is not just a partisan, liberal,
academic persuasion?
- No, it's not.
You can see, even for someone who's a Trump supporter, there
are consequences to this.
To give one example, one of the reasons federal judges put the
temporary restraining order on the immigration order is that it
was so sloppily drafted and so chaotically rolled out that even
the Justice Department lawyers when they were arguing before
the federal judge of the 9th Circuit, they couldn't really
tell the judges what the language meant or how it applied
and it was just a function of a casual process.
And I think that's one of the reasons why they lost.
And so it's actively causing the Trump administration to trip
over its own shoelaces.
- And yet in his press conference yesterday President
Trump described his administration as a fine-tuned
machine and described the roll-out of the travel ban as
very smooth and perfect.
- And that's what you would expect a White House to do to
defend itself, although I don't quite see what the disadvantage
would have been to say that they've hit some bumps in the
road and they're fixing it.
But at some point it calls to mind the old Groucho Marx line,
"Who are you going to believe? Me or your lying eyes?"
The indications are so clear that I think I find it hard to
believe that someone who isn't fully invested in this takes
that seriously.
- Couldn't this just be kind of chalked up to President Trump's
outsider status?
He came to Washington to shake things up, right?
And that's what his voters wanted.
- Well, in a sense, that's true, because one of the reasons
he got elected and one of the things his voters want is for
Trump to go in and start breaking things and to be
disruptive and to not show due respect for what they perceive
are ossified or even corrupt political relationships.
But one of the things we know from history is that presidents
going all the way back to Washington have been very aware
of the fact what they do and what they say matters.
And even the presidents that we regard as disruptive or
transformative - Andrew Jackson, Abraham Lincoln, Franklin
Roosevelt, Ronald Reagan - these are people who came in and did
institute significant change.
Even they understood that the presidency really ought not to
be -- ought not to function like almost a random walk or improv
exercise, because when presidents get that wrong, it
has implications for what they want to do later in their
administration.
- We were talking about what this might mean, this style of
governance, if you could call it that, to establishment
conservatives or Republicans like Paul Ryan.
- Right, so one of the issues here
and this has nothing to do with partisanship or policy.
I tell my students, one of the most important elements of any
political relationships is credibility, in part because
there's no way to enforce a political agreement.
It's not like a binding contract.
And people who are striking deals or are reaching agreement
need to be able to have confidence that the person at
the other side of the deal is going to uphold their end of the
bargain and do what they say they're going to do.
And take Paul Ryan, for example.
There are a number of things that he wants to do that are
controversial, whether we're talking Medicare reform,
repealing and replacing the Affordable Care Act.
These are risky things.
And if he's going to stick his neck out on his behalf and on
behalf of his Republican caucus to pass legislation to institute
these kinds of changes, there's significant political risk to
that.
And if he can't be confident that a President Trump is
actually going to do what he said he's going to do and if he
is thinking that the president may reverse himself or do
something unpredictable, it's going to interfere with his
willingness to do the things that he and other Republicans
want to do and at some point -- and you're already seeing some
indications of that in the senate, where some members of
the Republican Caucus are starting to express some
bewilderment or some opposition to what the president is doing.
If there are enough Republicans who start wondering whether this
is worth supporting the president, then he's got a real
problem.
Because the reason why people are getting along so far is that
the interests of Congressional Republicans they think are
aligned with the interests of the president.
But if they can't be certain of that, there are going to be some
bumps in the road.
- All right.
We leave it there.
Ken Mayer, thanks very much.
- My pleasure.