Here & Now

Closer Look: UW Professor On Trump Administration Turmoil

Frederica Freyberg:

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.

Ken Mayer:

Good to be with you.

Frederica Freyberg:

You called this turmoil. What stands out?

Ken Mayer:

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.

Frederica Freyberg:

And this on your part is not just a partisan, liberal, academic persuasion?

Ken Mayer:

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.

Frederica Freyberg:

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.

Ken Mayer:

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.

Frederica Freyberg:

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.

Ken Mayer:

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.

Frederica Freyberg:

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.

Ken Mayer:

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.

Frederica Freyberg:

All right. We leave it there. Ken Mayer, thanks very much.

Ken Mayer:

My pleasure.