Donald Trump sounds more presidential, yet stays a populist

By Lexington | WASHINGTON, DC

EVEN in the midst of great solemnity, while giving the most presidential-sounding speech of his career, Donald Trump could not quite shake his fascination with ratings. The moment came during an address to a joint session of Congress on February 28th. Mr Trump had just praised the heroism of a Navy SEAL, Senior Chief William “Ryan” Owens, killed in Yemen on a counter-terrorism mission in the first days of the Trump administration. Now television screens across America filled with close-ups of the commando’s wife, as she wept in her VIP guest’s seat high above the House chamber. Impressed by the length of the standing ovation accorded Mrs Owens, the president departed from his prepared script: “And Ryan is looking down right now, you know that, and he’s very happy because I think he just broke a record,” he beamed at the young widow.

As so often with Mr Trump, the moment revealed a divided America. His tribute to the Navy SEAL was called beautiful and sincere by Trump-admirers. It was deemed crassly cynical by his critics, who saw it as an attempt to cow reporters and political opponents asking sharp questions about a dangerous mission in Yemen that went badly wrong.

Actually, there is a logic to Mr Trump’s intense focus on applause and acclaim—a logic that underpins his presidency. He is an unconventional outsider-politician with an unusually personal mandate, a Republican helped to victory by millions of Americans who either do not always vote or who voted Democratic in earlier elections, but who saw in him a champion. As long as the cheering and the ovations endure, that personal following gives Mr Trump great power, even when his policy positions offend against Republican Party orthodoxy.

For that reason the single most important line in the address to Congress was one that came rather early on, as Mr Trump enumerated his achievements in just over a month as president. “Above all else,” he told his audience: “we will keep our promises to the American people.”

The Trump administration is still very new. The president has few concrete achievements to his name, beyond repealing rules on mine waste, or on some gun sales, and giving immigration agents new licence to deport foreigners who have committed even minor crimes, putting millions of people, potentially, at risk of expulsion. Other executive orders and actions of which he boasts are mostly elaborate calls for Congress or agencies to do things—when the time is right. Some of his showiest proposals, such as a draft framework for the federal budget unveiled on February 27th that would add tens of billions in defence spending, to be paid for by eviscerating funds for the State Department, overseas aid and such bodies as the Environmental Protection Agency, have been declared “dead on arrival” by senior Republican senators.

But still very large numbers of Trump voters tell pollsters that they approve of their president, because he is doing what he says he would do—marking what many call a welcome change from other politicians they have known. Trump fans do not care about newspaper headlines calling the new White House chaotic, nor wince in embarrassment when they hear that the president has not got round to naming anyone to fill hundreds of the most important jobs in Washington. They are sure that he is keeping his promises to them, and that is what counts.

Mr Trump gets this. It is why his solemn address—the equivalent, for a new president, of a State of the Union Address—spent so much time making a case to his core supporters that he inherited a mess, but had made huge progress already in fixing it.

Fact-checkers and political opponents grumbled mightily about Mr Trump leaving out vital bits of context as he listed promises kept or on the way to being fulfilled. They griped about his description of America as a country wracked by “lawless chaos” linked to “open” borders, bringing violent crime, drug smuggling and terrorism. Critics argued that violent crime has risen in the past two years in some big cities but after many years of steep declines.

They noted that about three-quarters of immigrants are in the country legally and that first-generation migrants commit crimes at lower rates than natives. They scoffed at Mr Trump’s flat declaration that his “great, great wall” on the southern border with Mexico “will be started ahead of schedule and, when finished, it will be a very effective weapon against drugs and crime” (with no mention, this time, of who will pay for it).

Mr Trump pitched strict curbs on illegal immigration as being a panacea, saying: “By finally enforcing our immigration laws, we will raise wages, help the unemployed, save billions of dollars, and make our communities safer for everyone.”

For all that his tone was unusually sober, Mr Trump continued to promote the avowedly nationalist agenda of his close political aides, Stephen Bannon and Stephen Miller, including their stated desire to limit legal immigration. The president talked of legal immigrants to America lowering wages for the poor, and called for the country to shift to a points-based system similar to those found in Canada or Australia.

A day ahead of a planned roll-out of a revised travel ban on citizens of certain countries associated with terrorism, Mr Trump spoke of his duty to ensure that whole groups of refugees or would-be residents should be subjected to loyalty tests. His rhetoric reflected his bleak views of Europe, revealed when he recently claimed that “Paris is no longer Paris” and lamented unspecified events involving immigrants in Sweden.

The president said: “It is not compassionate, but reckless, to allow uncontrolled entry from places where proper vetting cannot occur. Those given the high honour of admission to the United States should support this country and love its people and its values. We cannot allow a beachhead of terrorism to form inside America—we cannot allow our nation to become a sanctuary for extremists.”

Liberals, libertarians and small-government conservatives alike were given cause to wince by Mr Trump’s approach to criminal justice, which seemed to imply that rising crime and deep distrust between the police and some communities could be simply solved by offering unwavering support to the police and to victims of crime. Mr Trump announced a new government office devoted to publicising crimes committed by immigrants. To be known as “Victims of Immigration Crime Engagement” or VOICE, the new office will form part of the Department of Homeland Security and will provide a platform “to those who have been ignored by our media, and silenced by special interests”, Mr Trump said. To make his point more vividly, he invited his listeners to applaud some family members of Americans “viciously” murdered by illegal immigrants, whom he had invited to watch his address in the House chamber.

Many Republicans in Congress are anxious to see leadership from Mr Trump. They want to hear how he might resolve deep differences within the conservative movement about such issues as border-adjustment taxes that would make imports more expensive, or the best way to keep Mr Trump’s blithe promise to repeal Obamacare and replace it with health insurance that is cheaper, better and covers more people. They would like to hear him explain how he plans to pay for tax cuts and new spending on infrastructure and national security while leaving untouched Social Security pensions and the Medicare health-care system for the elderly, though such “entitlement” spending is on an unsustainable path. Alas, he left those hard questions unanswered. Instead he mostly offered empty bromides, at one point simply stating: “Everything that is broken in our country can be fixed. Every problem can be solved. And every hurting family can find healing, and hope.”

Still Trump supporters say that he is keeping their promises, and tell pollsters that they trust him more than Republican Party leaders in Congress. How does Mr Trump retain their trust, when it is so hard to see what he has been achieving in concrete terms, let alone what he really intends to do as president, and how?

The answer has something to do with Mr Trump’s attention to applause and ovations. Mr Trump can be hazy about “what” he is offering, by way of policies, because it is so clear “who” he is governing for. In recent years American conservatism became proudly doctrinaire, with Republicans boasting of their ideological purity and intransigence. Mr Trump took a different approach. He appeals to a visceral, tribal vision of politics. He is not very interested in abstractions about the size of government, or in constitutional niceties about due process. His promise is to look out for his sort of Americans: decent, law-abiding folk, working men and women, the “forgotten” middle classes who in his telling have been deliberately betrayed by elites who chose to send their jobs abroad for personal gain.

Mr Trump is keeping his promise to speak and behave as the champion of his people. The address to Congress, in common with everything else Mr Trump has said, depicted America as a great nation under siege from hostile forces: whether those might be criminal aliens, terrorists, radical Muslims, drug dealers, feckless allies or rival trading powers trying to cheat and take advantage of the country. All these menaces can be beaten, and “dying industries will come roaring back to life” once America puts “its own citizens first”, he declared.

Even after a few weeks, the president sometimes seems a bit fed up by the hard grind of governing, and of deciding what policies to try ushering through Congress. But he has an astonishingly precise and powerful sense of who he represents. Republican members of Congress are also realising that identity beats conservative principles in this new politics of the right. They may not stay quiescent forever. Certainly many dislike at least some of what Mr Trump wants to do. But they still hope that he will help them cut taxes and slash business regulations. And they cannot win without his voters. So for the moment, expect a lot more ovations.