The return of the drama queen
Remembering Trump's abnormality
One of my favorite comedy sketches is John Mulaney’s Horse in the Hospital where he compares Trump’s time in office to there being a horse loose in a hospital. I love how he captures the craziness of the time without even mentioning Trump’s name or even specific actions. If you haven’t seen it, enjoy the clip here:
I bring this up because I sense we have forgotten the daily drama of Trump as president. As Mulaney puts it in the clip,
When a horse is loose in a hospital, you got to stay updated. So all day long you walk around, “What’d the horse do?” The updates, they’re not always bad. Sometimes they’re just odd. It’ll be like, “The horse used the elevator?” I didn’t know he knew how to do that. The creepiest days are when you don’t hear from the horse at all. You’re down in the operating room like, “Hey, has anyone…Has anyone heard–” [imitates clopping hooves]. Those are those quiet days when people are like, “It looks like the horse has finally calmed down.” And then ten seconds later the horse is like, “I’m gonna run towards the baby incubators and smash ’em with my hooves. I’ve got nice hooves and a long tail, I’m a horse!” That’s what I thought you’d say, you dumb fucking horse.
My hope for the current election has long been that Americans will remember this constant drama and choose to avoid it. The tech bros who support Trump seem to have convinced themselves that Trump will rationally pursue some sort of beneficial policies in office (or maybe that they can simply buy favorable treatment from him) rather than play drama queen every day.
Again, I am tempted to quote Mulaney’s response to them:
But sometimes I ask people. I go, “Hey, how come you opened the door for the horse?” And they go, “Well, the hospital was inefficient!” Or sometimes they go, “If you’re so mad at the horse, how come you weren’t mad when the last guy did this three and a half years ago? You’re beating up on the horse when the last guy essentially did the same thing five years ago.” First off, get out of here with your facts. You’re like the kid at the sleepover who, after midnight, is like, “It’s tomorrow now!” Get the fuck out of here with your technicalities…
But when people say, “How come you were never mad at the last guy?” I say, “Because I wasn’t paying attention.” I used to pay less attention before it was a horse. Also, I thought the last guy was pretty smart, and he seemed good at his job, and I’m lazy by nature. I’m lazy by nature, too. So I don’t check up on people when they seem okay at their job. You may think that’s an ignorant answer, but it’s not, it’s a great answer.
These arguments don’t seem to be working, so maybe something more systematic will. To remind us all of what things were like, the level of daily drama, I turned again to my favorite Bright Line Watch surveys (BLW). Over the course of Trump’s term, the organizers of these surveys frequently asked scholars whether they thought specific actions of Trump were normal or abnormal. While they were not specifically trying to be comprehensive, they did cover a lot of ground and asked about 248 actions. I downloaded these questions and focused on ones where Trump or his henchmen were the key actors and that were rated as more abnormal than not (an average of greater than 3 on a 5-point scale).
This gave me 143 actions by Trump that were viewed by political scientists as mostly abnormal. That seems to me an awful lot and BLW made no effort to be comprehensive here. Their surveys were conducted every few months and they simply picked some prominent actions for each one. The surveys have continued since Biden took over and I can find exactly no actions by him that were viewed as mostly abnormal. My initial aim in writing this post was simply to document the sheer amount of abnormality that characterized Trump’s term.
If you want some of the highlights, consider these happy memories:
President Trump and his aides discussing highly sensitive papers in public at Mar-a-Lago
President Trump threatens to ‘regulate’ or ‘close down’ social media platforms after Twitter added a fact-check to one of his tweets
Trump pressures Georgia official to ‘find’ enough votes to overturn state election results
Trump suggests supporters should try to vote twice
President Trump promotes Goya food products from the Oval Office
President Trump tweeting that he has the absolute right to pardon himself
The President’s lawyer Alan Dershowitz argues “If a president did something that he believes will help him get elected - in the public interest - that cannot be the kind of quid pro quo that results in impeachment”
President Trump pressuring Ukraine to investigate Joe Biden
The Justice Department moves to drop charges against former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn after he had already pled guilty to them in court
President Trump calls for Goodyear boycott after company bans MAGA attire
President Trump repeatedly calling the press an ‘enemy of the people’
President Trump posts a tweet decrying protests against police in Minneapolis that includes the phrase ‘when the looting starts, the shooting starts’
President Trump criticizing Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau as ‘dishonest and weak’
President Trump publicly criticizing the FBI
President Trump abruptly ending a ‘60 Minutes’ interview with Lesley Stahl
President Trump refusing to disavow Qanon
President Trump retweets a video of a supporter yelling ‘white power’
President Trump praising a Montana congressman’s physical attack on a reporter
President Trump accuses former President Barack Obama of treason
President Trump telling four Democratic congresswomen to go back to their country
The Department of Homeland Security separating children from parents who enter the United State illegally
President Trump creating the 1776 Committee to promote ‘patriotic education’
Trump pardons Roger Stone, Paul Manafort, Steve Bannon, and Charles Kushner
President Trump congratulating Vladimir Putin on his election victory
You can peruse the whole list here (I’ll get it uploaded soon). Fun times, right?
Feel free to stop reading here. My main goal was to remind people about the daily craziness and John Mulaney probably did it better. Nevertheless, as a political scientist, I feel compelled to dig a little deeper.
Types of abnormality
I first decided to classify the abnormal actions into different types. It seemed to me that they fell into three categories from most serious to least.
First were abuses of power, meaning that the actions arguably violated a law or constitutional provision. This category constituted 33 actions (mean abnormality 4.46 on a scale of 1-5).
Second were violations of norms, in short informal rules about how presidents should act. This was the most prominent but perhaps controversial category with 75 actions (mean abnormality 4.33).
Finally were actions that I simply called bad policy. They were viewed as abnormal but seemed to me to fall into the types of actions which presidents often undertake. I classified 31 actions this way (mean abnormality 3.95).
And as I noted these categorizations do correspond with political scientists’ ratings of abnormality. Abuses of power were viewed as slightly more abnormal than violations of norms which were viewed as more abnormal as bad policies.
I’ll now delve into the categories a bit more and break down even these larger categories.
Abuses of power
Abuses of power tended to receive the highest abnormality scores and included a number of types of abuses.
The most abnormal among them concerned attacks on democratic institutions, particularly the 2020 election. These revolved around Trump denying that he lost, refusing to transfer power, and pressuring others to find votes for him. He also encouraged supporters to vote twice. These abuses are obviously the most severe that a president might commit outside of murdering and imprisoning political opponents.
At a similar level were several acts where Trump used or attempted to use government powers to persecute opponents by calling for investigations of Hillary Clinton or encouraging Ukraine to investigate Joe Biden. He similarly threatened to suspend the civil rights of ordinary people including suspected illegal immigrants, social media, and educational institutions.
Obstruction of justice was a key part of the impeachment case against Trump and featured relatively high abnormality scores. These actions include Trump promising to pardon himself, using the DOJ to defend himself in a civil trial, and refusing to cooperate with subpoenas. Their seriousness rests in their attack on the rule of law.
Corruption has long been a part of Trump’s modus operandi and features here with profiting from foreign stays at his properties (the famous emoluments clause), advertising for Goya from the Oval Office, and featuring as a co-conspirator with Michael Cohen.
Maybe more controversial as abuses of power would be interventions into administrative rules like army promotions, airing top secret material in public, stripping civil service protections from bureaucrats, and changing census procedures to deter participation. Perhaps these would be better classified as violations of norms or even bad policy, but they seemed to me to involve interventions into established procedures rather than simply norm violations.
Violations of Norms
Violations of norms might be the most interesting category because I am not aware that we have a clear compilation of informal norms concerning the presidency or any institution. Julia Azari and others have written about some of them.
Rather than list all of the violations here, I instead provide a sense of the norms that were violated by Trump. Again, the actual actions can be found here (to be posted soon).
Do not order the assassination of foreign officials
Do not directly intervene in DOJ prosecutions
Do not publicly reveal secret information
Do not revoke security clearances of former officials
Do not punish whistleblowers
Do not threaten American businesses for their political positions
Do not use dehumanizing language
Do not challenge the patriotism of the mainstream press
Do not revoke press credentials as punishment for negative coverage
Do not challenge the patriotism of protestors
Do not condone violence against the press
Do not encourage violence against protestors
Do not spread misinformation
Do concede elections after they have been called by the media
Do attend successor’s inauguration
Do attend scheduled debates
Do not criticize foreign allies
Do not criticize SCOTUS justices for their partisanship
Do not use official powers for campaign purposes
Do not use cabinet members for campaigning
Do release tax returns
Do not publicly criticize one’s own appointees and the executive branch
Do not act uncivilly at debates
Do not act uncivilly during interviews
Do not express support for extremists
Do not accuse political opponents of treason
Do not pressure agencies to alter their analysis
Do not praise one’s own mental abilities
I sense that many of these norms have not been explicitly mentioned before because few could imagine them being violated. But norms they remain and it is worth stating them clearly to limit violations in the future.
Bad policy
The final category I labeled bad policy simply because they did not seem to me to violate a law or clear norm, but were still considered abnormal, perhaps more in the horse in a hospital sense. Actions by other presidents sometimes fall in the same category as these actions even if they were rarely as severe as Trump.
I’ll again do this as a list of types of actions rather than specific ones. They include:
Appointing unqualified individuals
Using gratuitous force against protestors
Allowing and threatening long government shutdowns
Separating children from illegal immigrant parents
Endangering public health at rallies
Spreading misinformation through so-called patriotic education
Giving pardons to political allies
Expressing support for dictators
Imposing tariffs on allies (?)
We would no doubt be better off without Trump doing these things, but critics could say, following Mulaney, that “the last guy essentially did the same thing”, at least for some of them. There was so much abnormality in the Trump presidency that one could almost (I say almost) forgive this last category.
Conclusion
Again, my initial aim here was simply to document the daily drama and abnormality of the Trump presidency and I presume the next one would be worse as the adults have all exited Trump’s orbit. Like Mulaney, I’d prefer not to have to follow a horse’s antics again, not to mention the cruelty that will be unleashed on the most vulnerable among us.
I suppose someone could make a case for abnormality - that our ossified system needs some form of disruption. Trump’s Silicon Valley supporters seem to be taking this tack. Here is Tyler Cowen making this case back in the day, though to be sure he was not a supporter of Trump.
Where it goes wrong is in thinking that this horse is the one to do it. Neither Cowen’s nor others’ predictions that Trump would use his power for good were fulfilled the first time around with the possible exception of Operation Warp Speed. (Here is Casey Mulligan arguing the opposite.)
What unites just about all of the actions above is that they were done in the name of the personal power, wealth, or whim of DJT himself rather than any larger or rational vision of America. And by all accounts, there will be fewer restrictions on either his hunger for power and wealth or his whims this time around. I’m not sure how Mulaney will be able to make comedy out of those.