The Trump White House may be Bedlam on the Potomac, but the power of the presidency to draw cameras—where the president goes, cameras follow—and move headlines is enormous. Trump’s team understands this, and they will use the power of the government as a rapid-response tool to keep Trump in the news, to make news, and to step on Democratic events.
As a showman, Trump has a gut-level understanding that the audience is always hungry, and they will eat up the things he does that are outside the usual spectrum of presidential behavior. During an otherwise painful G20 Summit in Japan, Donald Trump called an audible and decided he wanted to spend some quality time with his BFF Kim Jong-un. In a hot scramble, the Secret Service and the Air Force spun up the jets, set the scene at the border between the two Koreas, and voilà, instant media roadblock.
Trump’s meeting with Kim, and his symbolic crossing into North Korea, were just that—symbolic.5 It meant nothing. It didn’t move the ball on denuclearizing a nation led by the last remaining Stalinist on earth. It didn’t further U.S. interests. Oh, it helped Kim dramatically, further legitimizing him in the eyes of his starving people as he made the leader of the free world come to him, but that wasn’t the point.
The point was that Trump wanted a picture, and he got it. He got it on short notice, and he got it regardless of the costs. Expect this in 2020 in foreign and domestic scenes when Trump uses the tools of the presidency—White House advance teams, the Secret Service, Air Force One, and government facilities around the country and the world—to do “government” events. These events will cost the campaign nothing because they’re, um, cough cough, official business.
Both the White House itself and Air Force One are powerful visual campaign props, and presidents of both parties have used them for their political ends. As we’re painfully aware, Donald Trump lacks the genes for shame, modesty, and discretion, so expect the AF 28000 and AF 29000 to get a lot of air miles clocked in service to his campaign. Expect to see one of the two Air Force One planes parked behind him during speech after speech at airport hangar rallies around the country.
Most presidents would instantly draw a sharp, clean line between campaign operations and the use of military force. This is the proverbial “wag the dog” scenario where a president in trouble seeks to bomb his way out of it by hitting a target overseas. With no adult supervision in the Pentagon—just who is the acting, provisional, temporary, staffing-agency, drop-in SECDEF this week?—no one should put it past Trump to escalate conflicts with China, Iran, or elsewhere when some part of his lizard brain tells him that some boom-boom will goose his polling numbers.
Some of my former GOP colleagues will whisper, “How dare you accuse the American president of ever using the military for…” and then drop the subject, because no matter how deep they are in the Trump hole, they know who this man is and what he’ll do. Trump proves time and again that morals, laws, norms, traditions, rules, guidelines, recommendations, and tearful pleading from his staff mean nothing when he gets a power boner and decides he’s going to do something stupid. President Hold My Beer comes from the Modern Unitary Executive Power theory, where there are no limits, no laws, and no right and wrong. I’m not saying it’s a matter of if Trump will wag the dog in 2020. I’m saying that anyone who thinks he wouldn’t is a damn fool.
One other powerful weapon in Trump’s incumbency arsenal is his addiction to executive orders and unilateral executive action from the White House. Sure, it’ll be mostly a nonsensical mass of unconstitutional, incoherent piffle, but it will be directed at swing states.
You should certainly expect him to fill the air with executive orders that feed the base—“All immigrants must have a PhD!” “Ivanka will now be addressed as HRH Ivanka!” “Eric will be my viceroy for Greenland!”
You should also expect counterintuitive plays like suddenly declaring an interest in the Flint water system, or disaster relief in the Florida Panhandle. Watch for Kellyanne Conway to talk him into doing orders on feel-good but substanceless items like childcare, job training, cat adoption, and literacy.
Incumbency is always powerful, but in Trump’s case it is even more imposing as a political asset. His ability to utterly dominate the political discourse for his first term isn’t always a positive for him, but he knows the showbiz rule: All PR is good PR. He is the best-known brand on the planet, a singular character in a nation where people often kinda sorta maybe know their elected representatives. (We test this frequently in focus groups, and the number of people who know their congressional representative and U.S. senator is disheartening, to say the least. The number who know their state reps and senators is even lower. Everyone knows Donald Trump.)
Other presidents felt bounded in their behavior, obligated to respect the office of the presidency even if it meant forsaking political advantage. If you think that’s Trump, I have some prime swamp-front lots to sell you in the Everglades.