CONCLUSION

Will We All Live Happily Ever After?

Through your child, you will experience new heights of joy, love, pride, and excitement. You probably also will experience anxiety, anger and frustration. . . . The challenge is for you to accept and appreciate all the feelings with which your child expresses himself and arouses in you, and to use them in giving him steady guidance.

American Academy of Pediatrics, Caring for Your Baby and Young Child

Until recently, to understand America’s political system, citizens would read classics like Democracy in America, The American Political Tradition, and Profiles in Courage. Then Donald J. Trump was elected President. Now Americans are reading On Tyranny, How Democracies Die, and the Mueller report. We are learning exactly how strong the country’s institutions are in response to a President who displays the emotional maturity of a toddler. Unfortunately the answer appears to be, not very.

There is an abundance of evidence that Donald Trump, the 45th President of the United States, has the emotional and intellectual range of a misbehaving toddler. Outside observers, family members, and Trump biographers have all reached this conclusion. The primary data sources backing the claims made in this book have been the thousand-plus documented instances in which Trump’s staff, subordinates, and loyal allies have described him in the press in ways that could be characterized as toddler-like. Across a range of behavioral and cognitive traits—temper tantrums, attention span, impulse control, oppositional behavior, and knowledge deficits—Trump has much more in common with small children than with the 43 men who preceded him. The reason his staff turnover is so high is the same reason turnover is so high at a daycare center: the pay is meager compared to what is demanded of employees.

If nothing else, readers of this book must conclude that the notion of Trump as a master political strategist is absurd. When Trump was running for President, and in his first few months in office, some observers argued that Trump’s toddler traits were acts of cunning strategy. For example, in the first weeks of Trump’s presidency, Paloma Sotelo argued in the Huffington Post that his toddler-like behavior was intentional: “Trump is not a child, [he] is an adult, who is—more or less—aware of his actions and their consequences. Even when sometimes it is hard to believe, behind each decision, declaration and tweet of the new Commander in Chief there is a political strategy. He is looking for a specific reaction among his supporters and detractors. What he does is a deliberated action, whether we like it or not.”1 Similarly, numerous pundits suggested that Trump’s transgressive tweets were cleverly designed to distract the media from other negative stories.2 His surprise 2016 victory convinced many pundits that Trump knew some core political truths that experts did not.

Those arguments have worn thin. One former Trump administration official told BuzzFeed that it is silly to think the 45th President is playing “three-dimensional chess.” The official concluded, “More often than not he’s just eating the pieces.”3 Mark Krikorian, one of Trump’s staunchest supporters on immigration, said, “There are both supporters and detractors of his who imagine he’s playing 40-dimensional string theory chess, when in fact he’s just operating from his gut.”4 This book’s simple thesis is that Donald Trump’s behavior demonstrates the opposite of strategy. He acts more like the Toddler in Chief than the Commander in Chief. And most of the guardrails designed to protect the country from an out-of-control President have been worn down to the nub.

In these concluding pages, I first defend the Toddler in Chief thesis against counterarguments. Second, I consider the implications of having a President who thinks and acts like a toddler—in particular, the paradox of a President who some political scientists view as autocratic and others view as spectacularly weak. Finally, I consider where the country might go from here. How should the United States handle the rest of its days living with a Toddler in Chief? Can the guardrails that have been destroyed be rebuilt? How will our long national nightmare of poorly run political daycare come to an end?

In the process of curating the #ToddlerinChief thread on Twitter, I have encountered two principal objections to it. The first is that comparing Trump to a toddler is totally unfair to toddlers. The second is that the toddler analogy does not work as well as other analogies. Let’s consider each objection in turn.

Even as the connection was being made between Trump’s behavior and that of small children, some observers pushed back against the Trump-as-toddler analogy. There are two variants to this objection. The first is that comparing Trump to a small child strips the President of his moral agency. Chicago Tribune columnist Heidi Stevens argued that referring to Trump as the Toddler in Chief “implies a level of innocence and curiosity that’s altogether absent from this president. It implies a work in progress. It’s insulting to toddlers.”5

At the same time, experts in child psychology make a slightly different argument: analogizing Trump to a small child underestimates the cognitive abilities of the latter. Psychology professor Alison Gopnik, for example, took to the pages of the New York Times to explain that four-year-olds do not act like Trump. According to her research, average four-year-olds “care deeply about the truth” and “can pay attention,” possess “a strong moral sense,” and “are sensitive to social norms.”6 Since Trump demonstrates none of these traits, he is clearly more cognitively impaired than a four-year-old.

The easiest response to Gopnik is to concede her point: Trump compares poorly to a four-year-old on every dimension that she listed. Indeed, the literature in developmental psychology has demonstrated that a neurotypical four-year-old possesses far more cognitive complexity and curiosity than is commonly understood.7 However, the standard definition of a toddler is younger than age four. Indeed, the word “toddler” is a portmanteau of the Scottish words todder and waddle, referring to the awkward way in which a baby will first stand up and then stumble around.8 In reviewing the American Academy of Pediatrics’ guide for child care, the sections describing a two-year-old tracked far more closely to Trump’s behavior than the sections for ages three, four, or older.9

What of the charge that comparing Trump to a toddler strips him of his moral agency? This objection seems a bit overwrought. To repeat myself from the introduction, this book’s thesis is not that Trump is a toddler. Legally, he remains a mature man in full possession of his faculties. I am arguing that Trump’s psychological makeup approximates a toddler and that this analogy is the best one to explain his behavior. To put it another way: even though Attorney General William Barr excused the President’s attempts to obstruct justice during the Russia probe because he was “frustrated and angered,”10 Trump’s actual lawyers will be hard-pressed to rely on the toddler defense should he face prosecution for that or other crimes.

Perhaps this objection to the analogy has less to do with the Toddler in Chief and more to do with toddlers. No one interested in the toddler “brand” would want to be associated with Donald Trump. The toddler traits I have discussed in this book are all negative. Focusing on these dimensions gives this age demographic a bad rap. Toddlers are also intensely inquisitive human beings with boundless capacity for joy and love.

It should be noted that on occasion one can observe Trump displaying positive aspects of toddler behavior. His tendency to ask rapid-fire questions speaks to the occasional instances when he shares a positive toddler trait. His curiosity about space, space exploration, and a Space Force appear to be genuine and childlike.11 Those moments, however, are far rarer than the episodes that wind up on the #ToddlerinChief thread. It is not just that Trump seems to act like a small boy; it is that he seems to act like an entitled, short-tempered small boy. It is little wonder that his older sister Maryanne told one biographer that Trump was “a brat” from the start, or that one of his elementary school teachers described him as “a little shit” to a different biographer.12

Finally, it should be acknowledged that analogizing Trump in this way omits the most important toddler trait of all: toddlers grow up. Trump clearly will not. In my #ToddlerinChief thread on Twitter, I write some variation of “I’ll believe that Trump is growing into the presidency when his staff stops talking about him like a toddler.”13 After more than three years in office, Trump, unlike most preschoolers, shows no signs of maturing. By the time you read this, an infant who was born on Trump’s inauguration day will demonstrate more emotionally maturity than the President of the United States.

Most of the sources cited in this book do not explicitly call Trump a toddler. Rather, they reference specific behavioral traits, such as a short attention span or a proclivity for temper tantrums. To make the case for the Toddler-in-Chief thesis, I have argued that because so many dimensions of Trump’s behavior as President also appear in a toddler’s developmental stage, the analogy is apt. To be fair, however, one could argue that these traits are present not only in small children. Teenagers could teach a masterclass in oppositional behavior. Adolescents are quite capable of developing an addiction to screens, as are other age demographics.

Many observers have argued that the 45th President more closely resembles a teenager than a toddler. Former GOP Senator Bob Corker explicitly compared Trump to a toddler, but he also compared him to a teenager. In September 2018 he told CNN, “Whining is pretty unbecoming of a 13 year-old. But it’s very unbecoming of a 71 or 72 year-old.”14 In Fear, Bob Woodward writes, “Grievance was a big part of Trump’s core, very much like a 14-year-old boy who felt he was being picked on unfairly. You couldn’t talk to him in adult logic. Teenage logic was necessary.”15 Secretary of Defense James Mattis told colleagues that the President acted like a “fifth or sixth grader”—with the comprehension to match.16 Masha Gessen, one of the more acute social observers of America in the Age of Trump, was even more explicit in making the teenager comparison:

[Trump] has often been compared to a toddler, but this comparison—as others have noted—seems unfair to toddlers, who generally recognize the authority of grownups to set rules and limits, and instinctively understand the need for them. Teenagers, on the other hand, sincerely don’t see the point of grownups, even as they assert their right to act in a world created by them.17

Other observers have suggested that the way to think about Trump is as an entitled old man set in his ways. Former New Jersey governor Chris Christie, one of the earlier endorsers of Trump in the 2016 GOP primary, suggested on ABC News Sunday that one should think of Trump as that older, obdurate relative who comes for the holidays. “I want to ask everybody who’s out in the audience today if they have a 72-year-old relative whose behavior they’re attempting to change,” he said, adding, “When people get older they become more and more convinced of the fact that what they’re doing is the right thing, and it becomes harder to convince them otherwise.”18

Some critics have gone further, suggesting that Trump is suffering from the cognitive decline that comes with old age. Psychology research does suggest that across several dimensions, the aging human brain reverts to a stage akin to small children.19 MSNBC host Joe Scarborough, who has known Trump for quite some time, has suggested that the President is suffering from dementia.20 Similarly, disgruntled White House staffers have made this accusation. Omarosa Maningault Newman has claimed the White House staff has kept Trump’s deteriorating mental status a secret: “They continue to deceive this nation by how mentally declined he is. How difficult it is for him to process complex information. How he is not engaged in some of the most important decisions that impact our country.”21 Anthony Scaramucci told a reporter, “I think the guy is losing it, mentally. He has declining mental faculties; he’s becoming more petulant; he’s becoming more impetuous.”22 One peer-reviewed study concurred that Trump’s impromptu speech showed signs of “linguistic decline.”23

These counterarguments have some validity. Each can explain portions of Trump’s behavior discussed in this book, but they cannot explain all of it as well as the toddler thesis. Adolescents and dotards usually possess some theory of mind. Toddlers do not. As developmental psychologists Stephanie Carlson and Louis Moses explain, “Younger preschoolers frequently state that beliefs and appearances always match reality, and that there can only be a single (realist) perspective on any state of affairs. Yet, by the time they are 5 years old, children have an appreciation of these matters that in core respects is recognizably adult-like.”24 Teenagers and old men might act like narcissists at times, but they normally possess the metacognition necessary to recognize it. Trump does not. As former US Representative Mark Sanford (R-SC) explained in 2018, “The tragedy of the Trump presidency is that he thinks it’s about him. The president has taken those earnest beliefs by so many people across the country and has unfortunately fallen prey to thinking it’s about him.”25 Trump’s near-total lack of impulse control constrains his executive functioning far more severely than it would for an ordinary teenager or senior citizen.

Similarly, Trump’s massive knowledge deficits make him closer to a toddler than a teenager or senior citizen. Both senior citizens and teenagers have developed some awareness of basic facts about how the world works. As chapter 5 demonstrates, however, Trump’s acute ignorance of the world makes him function more like a toddler. Actually, it makes him worse than a toddler. Young children learn quickly to ask adults when they do not know something. Trump, on the other hand, loudly assumes that he knows everything.

Every behavioral trait discussed in this book is also discussed in the vast literature on parenting small children. Reasonable people can disagree about whether Trump acts more like a spoiled toddler, a moody teenager, or an old man returning soup at a deli. This might be the defining debate in the vast psychology literature that the Trump presidency will inevitably generate. How to adjudicate among these options is a question best left for future scholarship.26 To paraphrase the Mueller report, if I had confidence after this thorough investigation of Donald Trump’s behavior that the President clearly does not act like a toddler, I would so state. While this book does not conclude that the President behaves only like a toddler, it also does not exonerate him of that behavior.

In the introduction, I argued that Trump being a toddler was dangerous because of the deterioration of the guardrails that constrain the raw power of the presidency. But Trump’s first few years in office raise an important question: can a Toddler in Chief really do that much damage?

Many political scientists argue that Trump is a fundamentally weak President, and they have a compelling case to make.27 By conventional American politics standards, Trump’s policy accomplishments have been meager. Despite having GOP control over both houses of Congress during the first two years of his presidency, he was only able to secure the passage of one significant piece of legislation: the tax bill. He failed in his efforts to get Congress to repeal Obamacare or provide appreciable funding for his border wall. Federal bureaucrats have resisted the President’s ethically dubious orders through leaks, delays, memos, dissent channels, and official whistleblower complaints.28 Even on policies where the Trump administration has been perceived as doing something, it has been feckless. His administration’s push to shore up the coal industry, for example, has failed miserably.29 Trump’s deregulatory moves have frequently been halted in the courts due to violations of the Administrative Procedure Act. Most administrations win appeals against their regulatory changes 70 percent of the time. In the first two years of the Trump administration, its success rate was only 6 percent because the administration was so incompetent.30

In foreign affairs, Trump’s biggest success has been the defeat of ISIS in Syria, but that was merely a continuation of a strategy mapped out in the Obama administration. Looking beyond that, Trump has failed to convert US leverage into appreciable gains in trade deals or arms control agreements. His trade wars have cost the US economy billions of dollars per month and have done nothing to fulfill his promise to shrink the US trade deficit—not that the trade deficit is a useful measure of anything.31 None of his administration’s “maximum pressure” campaigns have yielded any concessions to date.32 His hardline policies on immigration have not stemmed the tide of Central American families seeking asylum by crossing the southern border. His one truly disruptive initiative, a series of summits with North Korea Leader Kim Jong Un, produced more symbolism than security. Given this record, it is unsurprising that the United Nations General Assembly laughed at Trump’s 2018 suggestion that his administration had accomplished more than almost any prior administration.33

Trump’s political instincts have also proven to be badly off the mark. He campaigned hard for Judge Roy Moore despite allegations of statutory rape, only to see a Democrat win a US Senate seat in Alabama for the first time in a quarter-century. His party lost control of the House of Representatives in the midterm elections despite a booming economy in no small part because Trump chose to make the midterms all about the polarizing issue of immigration.34 The President triggered the longest government shutdown in American history and in the end acquiesced to a deal worse than what was offered to him before it started. Despite an economy that by most standards looks rather robust throughout his tenure in office, he has had a historically high disapproval rating. After emerging from the Mueller probe without significant congressional reaction, the 45th president attempted to extort Ukraine’s government for domestic political gain, triggering impeachment. Trump could be the first President in the history of Gallup polling to not have an approval rating of 50 percent or better at any time in his presidency.35

Trump has also failed to persuade the American people of the rightness of his policies. Polling about Trump’s most high-profile policy moves confirm their unpopularity. Despite amped-up rhetoric from the administration about the threat posed by unchecked immigration, Gallup found “a record-high 75 percent of Americans, including majorities of all party groups, think immigration is a good thing for the US.”36 Despite the President’s protectionist rhetoric, Gallup found public support for free trade at 74 percent in 2019, the highest level in the past 25 years.37 Either pluralities or majorities oppose the tariffs implemented in 2018. Majorities disagree with Trump’s tweeted claim that “trade wars are good, and easy to win.”38 CNN found that Americans preferred maintaining good relations with allies over imposing tariffs by 63 percent to 25 percent. And 65 percent of Americans believed that other world leaders do not respect Trump.39 Opposition to Trump’s policy of separating children of illegal immigrants from their families was even stronger. Despite Trump’s prolific use of social media as a bully pulpit, he has alienated far more people than he has persuaded about the virtues of his approach to just about anything. If Richard Neustadt is correct than the chief power of the presidency is the ability to persuade, then Donald Trump has been a weak, ineffectual President.40

If one thinks of Trump as an overgrown two-year-old, his political performance begins to make more sense. An ongoing theme as his presidency has progressed is that fewer people fear him. As early as June 2017, the Washington Post reported that congressional Republicans were tuning out Donald Trump: “They have come to regard some of his threats as empty, concluding that crossing the president poses little danger.”41 Similarly, in March 2019 the New York Times reported that US-based companies had learned that Trump’s threats were empty: “The president’s scattershot attention span has diminished his power to persuade the business world to bend to his will. . . . Once fearsome tweetstorms have devolved into ephemeral annoyances.”42 Foreign diplomats have had the same reaction to Trump’s threatening tweets; the best thing to do is ignore them because they do not amount to much.43

All of this is consistent with perceiving Trump as the Toddler in Chief. The President’s myriad toddler traits have rendered him incapable of credibly committing to any bargaining position. This, in turn, has hampered his ability to negotiate with everyone ranging from Nancy Pelosi to Mitch McConnell to Angela Merkel to Xi Jinping. Threats of coercion are only effective if they are credible. Deals to settle disputes are unobtainable unless the President of the United States can follow through on pledges. Because other actors perceive Trump as possessing the constancy of a toddler, they see little reason to comply with his dictates.

Trump’s own staffers have enabled this perception by overindulging him. The pomp and circumstance of Trump’s executive orders have been amplified, including Trump giving pens to key officials and attendees after the signing ceremony. But the executive orders reveal few significant policy shifts. One analysis concluded, “Generally the orders created committees or task forces, demanded reports or pressed for enforcement of existing laws.”44 It is almost as if Trump’s staffers are pumping up the ceremonial aspect of these events to make the Toddler in Chief feel like he’s actually governing, like a pretend President.

At the same time, however, this perspective underestimates the Toddler in Chief’s damage to the United States polity in five important ways. The first is the carnage suffered by American foreign policy, the arena where the powers of the other government branches have receded the most. The President has used his authority to withdraw from a panoply of international treaties, ranging from the Trans-Pacific Partnership to the Iranian nuclear deal to the Intermediate Nuclear Forces treaty. He has threatened sanctions to coerce foreign governments such as Ukraine and China into investigating his domestic political opponents. On trade, the President has used his legal authorities to impose significant tariffs on a wide range of allies and adversaries. These tariffs—and the retaliatory moves by foreign countries—have exacted an escalating cost on the US economy.45 His administration imposed an abhorrent travel ban from several Muslim-majority countries, an action that advanced neither American interests nor values. His administration has overhauled a welter of immigration and refugee policies to make them more restrictionist.46 This included a policy to separate the children and parents of migrant families seeking asylum in the United States. He declared a ban on transgender people serving in the military. In each of these cases, Congress has been unable to restrain the President, and the Supreme Court has sided with the Trump administration.

The immediate consequences of Trump’s “America First” foreign policy have not been positive. Trump’s toddler-like behavior has had significant effects on the global stage. At the end of his first year in office, Susan Glasser noted, “Seasoned diplomats who have seen Trump up close throw around words like ‘catastrophic,’ ‘terrifying,’ ‘incompetent’ and ‘dangerous.’” She continued, “I listened to a group of sober policy wonks debate whether Trump was merely a ‘laughingstock’ or something more dangerous. Virtually all of those from whom I’ve heard this kind of ranting are leaders from close allies and partners of the United States.”47 Henry Kissinger, who praised Trump immediately after the 2016 election, was scathing in his assessment a few years later: “The entire foreign policy is based on a single unstable individual’s reaction to perceptions of slights or flattery. If someone says something nice about him, they are our friend; if they say something unkind, if they don’t kiss the ring, they are our enemy.”48 Unsurprisingly, whatever soft power the United States possessed at the end of the Obama era has evaporated under the Toddler in Chief.49

The Toddler in Chief’s damage to America’s standing in the world will last longer than is commonly appreciated. Presidents have the right to enact their foreign policies, but in absence of congressional buy-in, their only recourse is to do so through executive action. The current political polarization has eroded the notion that Presidents need to govern from the center. The combination of worn-down guardrails and Presidents emerging from the ends of the political spectrum could whipsaw US foreign policy between ultraconservative and ultraliberal approaches. In such a political climate, credible US commitments cease to matter. Sustainable grand strategy becomes impossible.50

Second, Trump has essentially dared the courts to stop his executive power grabs, and in many cases the courts have blinked. In response to Democratic control of one of the chambers of Congress, Trump has reacted much as a toddler would to new forms of discipline—outright rejection. The slew of Congressional demands—particularly the House Ways and Means Committee request for Trump’s tax returns—infuriated Trump. He has resisted congressional oversight on every level, repeatedly ordering executive agencies to rebuff legislative requests for documents and testimony.51 Trump told ABC News that “Article II allows me to do whatever I want”; a few weeks later he told reporters, “Nobody ever mentions Article II. It gives me all of these rights at a level that nobody has ever seen before.”52 He is enamored of declaring a state of emergency because it affords him greater authority.53 He did so along the southern border to justify an unprecedented reallocation of Defense Department funds to pay for construction of a wall. He even told a reporter that he was contemplating an executive order to end birthright citizenship.54

Trump has not followed through on that last idea, probably because the Supreme Court would declare it unconstitutional. Nonetheless, Trump was correct to view the judiciary as a weak constraint on an empowered presidency. It is unsurprising that the Trump administration has been so willing to go to court to defend its power grabs; their odds of success are decent. In these efforts, Trump has been aided by conservative lawyers who have advanced a strong version of unitary executive theory.55 This theory argues that Presidents have the inherent constitutional authority to run all elements of the executive branch as they see fit. Particularly strong versions of unitary executive theory argue that the legislative and judicial branches have limited ability to interfere with presidential actions within the executive branch. Supreme Court rulings affirming the Trump administration on the travel ban and the transgender ban buttress this interpretation of the judiciary as a weak constraint.

Third, the Toddler in Chief has partially succeeded in deconstructing the federal bureaucracy, and those organizations will be hard to rebuild. In some agencies, Trump’s political appointments have been so incompetent that they proved incapable of hampering the bureaucracy.56 In other agencies, however, the neglect has been more malign. Trump’s appointees at the Department of Agriculture, for example, had little respect for the scientific research performed by the department’s scientists.57 In 2018 Trump’s Secretary of Agriculture centralized control over USDA researchers in an effort to limit the publication of any research critical of administration policies.58 As a result the Department of Agriculture’s best and brightest began to exit government service. By 2019, nonretirement departures from USDA research agencies had more than doubled compared to the previous three-year average.59 A planned move of one research agency has caused more than two-thirds of its personnel to leave government service, which will lead to significant delays in the publication of vital research reports.60 Similarly, the Department of Homeland Security has been battered from the President’s obsession with slowing down migration across the southern border. With recalcitrant officials disinclined to violate the law to enact Trump’s restrictionist policies, the result by mid-2019 was a constant upheaval of political appointees and low morale among the civil service. One former DHS official described the department as “gutted at all levels, from component heads to assistant secretaries to senior staff to counselors.”61

The State Department is the cabinet agency that has suffered the most, however. The attacks on the Foreign Service have been unrelenting. In the first week of the Trump administration, the “Muslim travel ban” triggered a State Department dissent channel memo that garnered more than one thousand signatures. The dissent channel was established precisely to protect diplomats making an argument contrary to existing US foreign policy. Nonetheless, in response to this particular use, White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer said, “These career bureaucrats have a problem with it? I think they should either get with the program or they can go.”62 The White House quickly forced several senior career ambassadors out of their positions, a move that journalist Ronan Farrow labeled the “Mahogany Row massacre.”63

One diplomat was told that a Trump appointee would oppose any Foreign Service Officers for leadership positions unless they passed the “Breitbart test,” in reference to the online outlet that espouses populist nationalism.64 The State Department’s Inspector General has reported on political appointees taking punitive actions toward Foreign Service Officers deemed insufficiently loyal to Trump.65 One stratagem was to assign suspect senior diplomats mundane tasks, such as the processing of routine Freedom of Information Act declassification requests.66 One diplomat, resigning in protest in August 2019, poured cold water on the idea that bureaucrats were resisting the Toddler in Chief: “I have met neither the unsung hero nor the cunning villain of Deep State lore. If the resistance does exist, it should be clear by this point that it has failed.”67 Nancy McEldowney, the director of the Foreign Service Institute, stepped down in June 2017 despite her pre-Trump plan to stay in that position indefinitely. She described the State Department under Trump appointees as “a toxic, troubled environment and organization.”68 I have heard first-person accounts from high-ranking career officials at the Treasury Department and the Defense Department and within the intelligence community make similar characterizations of their own departments in the Age of Trump.

The effect of these attacks has been to erode the influence of career professionals in the Foreign Service.69 In the first eight months of the Trump administration, approximately 12 percent of Foreign Affairs Officers left the State Department, an unusual drop in the first year of an administration. That reduction was concentrated in the upper tiers of the Foreign Service: the departures included 60 percent of Career Ambassadors (the diplomatic equivalent of a four-star general), 42 percent of Career Ministers (three-star general), and 17 percent of Minister Counselors (two-star general).70 The self-imposed hiring freeze dropped the intake of new Foreign Service members from 366 in 2016 to approximately 100 in 2017. Applications to join the Foreign Service also plummeted by 26 percent in the first year of the Trump administration.71 Given budget and staffing constraints, it is unsurprising that dissatisfaction among the diplomatic corps surged. The State Department dropped from fourth place in 2016 to eighth among 18 large agencies in the 2017 Partnership for Public Service survey of federal employees.72 Even Trump appointees at State were forced to publicly acknowledge low staff morale.73 However, when asked in the fall of 2017 about the dearth of State Department officials, Trump replied, “Let me tell you, the one that matters is me. I’m the only one that matters, because when it comes to it, that’s what the policy is going to be.”74 L’état, c’est Toddler in Chief.

Fourth, Trump’s rhetoric and actions have shredded norms that had previously regulated American political behavior. He fired James Comey despite a tradition of FBI Directors staying on from one administration to the next. He declined to reappoint Janet Yellen as Federal Reserve Chair and subsequently bashed his handpicked replacement for not lowering interest rates. He ordered the Department of Justice to investigate the origins of the FBI investigation into his 2016 campaign and continued to call for the prosecution of his political opponents.

On his first full day in office, Trump delivered what amounted to a campaign speech at CIA headquarters. He has repeatedly used uniformed military servicemen as political props. In his first week he issued an executive order without consulting any of the relevant cabinet departments. He fired his first Chief of Staff and Secretary of State via tweet. Trump has shown no compunction whatsoever with using social media to attack and insult Democrats, Republicans, athletes, and journalists. The formal press conference and daily White House briefings have been effectively discontinued; daily briefings at key cabinet departments have also been curtailed. He has refused to punish White House Counselor Kellyanne Conway for multiple violations of the Hatch Act despite a US Office of Special Counsel recommendation that she be fired.75 Trump lies so frequently about so many things that the political class has become inured to his misstatements, racial slurs, and conspiracy theories.

Trump’s defenders often like to say that what matters are Trump’s actions, not his words.76 This defense demonstrates a shallow grasp of the presidency as an institution. In both international relations and domestic politics, words matter greatly. A President’s agenda-setting power comes as much from rhetoric as from executive action. President Trump’s ability to set the political agenda has not waned; indeed, he has succeeded in dominating the political conversation since he was inaugurated in a way that exceeded his predecessors. The nature of his discourse—divisive, angry, infantile—has exacerbated pre-existing divisions within the country.77 As political theorist Jacob T. Levy concludes, “Trump’s speech, his especially outrageous and transparent lies, are words that have shaped the world: demonstrations of power, attempts to undermine the existence of shared belief in truth and facts.”78 Trump’s rhetoric has not only eviscerated existing norms about political discourse, it has salted the earth. Attempts to discredit any outlet that criticizes Trump as the “enemy of the people” makes it that much harder for citizens across the political aisle to agree on basic facts.

The bully pulpit is one of the vital “informal institutions” that make up the modern presidency.79 During moments of crisis, the expectation has always been that the President will employ rhetoric to unify rather than divide. Trump has shattered this norm. Most of Trump’s rhetoric, untethered to anything resembling a structured speech, is at the mercy of his impulses. As President, he has declared the entire mainstream media to be the “enemy of the people” and labeled his political opponents as “treasonous” on multiple occasions. As Peter Baker concluded in the New York Times, “The old-fashioned idea that a president, once reaching office, should at least pretend to be the leader of all the people these days seems so, well, old-fashioned. Mr. Trump does not bother with the pretense. He is speaking to his people, not the people.”80 Levy notes that Trump’s rhetoric is devoid of any sense of higher purpose:

Trump’s apologists are now reduced to saying that his speech has been worse than his actions so far, the reverse of this usual pattern. The effect is the reverse, too. When he tells us that there are “very fine people on both sides” as between the Klan and their critics, he turns the moral compass of American public discourse upside-down. . . . A norm that was built up through speech, persuasion, and belief can be undermined the same way. Trump’s own racism, his embrace of white nationalist discourse, and his encouragement of the alt-right over the past two years have, through words, made a start on that transformation.81

As President, Trump has paid almost no political price for these breaches of political decorum. Indeed, as Vox’s Ezra Klein pointed out during the 2016 campaign, Trump’s lack of shame was a political asset: “He has the reality television star’s ability to operate entirely without shame, and that permits him to operate entirely without restraint. It is the single scariest facet of his personality. It is the one that allows him to go where others won’t, to say what others can’t, to do what others wouldn’t.”82 US Representative Justin Amash said the exact same thing after Trump was inaugurated: “Most people feel shame when they do or say something wrong, especially when it’s so public. The president feels comfortable saying two things that are completely contradictory in one sentence. . . . It gives him this superpower that other people don’t have.”83 In other words, Trump’s toddler traits have helped him to act in an unconstrained manner.

Fifth, the reason Trump has paid such a small political price for his multiple transgressions, is that he maintains the rabid support of GOP partisans. In a polarized age, Donald Trump’s immaturity has barely affected his standing with Republicans; indeed, his toddler-like style of tantrums and unchecked impulses is now embraced by Republicans as simply “unorthodox.” He has consistently polled close to 90 percent approval among Republican voters. One March 2019 survey revealed that 78 percent of Fox News viewers believed that Trump has been the most successful President in American history.84 The midterm elections forced out many of the moderate GOP members of Congress, such as US Representatives Mark Sanford and Mike Coffman, who were willing to speak out against him. Others, such as Senators Bob Corker and Jeff Flake, declined to run again. Approximately 40 percent of the GOP members of Congress in office at the time of Trump’s inauguration will be leaving through a combination of retirements and electoral defeats by the start of 2020.85 What remains is the Trump rump. In preparing for 2020, Trump has fused the Republican National Committee within his own reelection campaign to an unprecedented degree.86

Other pillars of GOP power have fallen in line behind the Toddler in Chief. Fox News has adjusted its guest commentators to avoid individuals who would upset the 45th President.87 Self-proclaimed “institutionalists” such as Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, went along with Trump’s March 2019 decision to declare a state of emergency at the southern border—even though that move undercut the authority of the legislative branch. As Politico reporter Tim Alberta concluded, “If the first year of Donald Trump’s term witnessed a president adapting to the philosophies of his party, the second year saw a party bending to the will, and the whims, of its president.”88 As the impeachment votes demonstrated, for as long as he is President, the GOP is Trump’s party. And as long as the GOP remains under Trump’s thumb, he will be able to act like a toddler with little fear of serious political retribution.

Even though Trump’s actions to date have not triggered global catastrophes, he has exasperated his staff to the point where his current advisors have all adopted the “Let Trump Be Trump” mantra. One of his stoutest defenders, former White House legislative director Marc Short, acknowledged in 2018 that Trump “does function as his own chief of staff in a lot of ways. He may not even know what all [his current staffers] do.”89 In this environment, his staff no longer serves as a significant constraint. Instead, they are enablers, reverse engineering policies and justifications for Trump’s worst impulses. Trump’s Acting Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney justified a White House advance staffer’s request to keep the USS John McCain hidden from Trump’s view during a May 2019 visit to Japan as “not an unreasonable ask” given how Trump “feels” about McCain.90 Indeed, as previously noted, Trump’s staffers and supporters have subtly shifted their defense of Trump. In his first year in office, they would note that he was an unorthodox President learning on the job. Now they merely say that he is an unorthodox President. To paraphrase former White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the President’s behavior speaks for itself.

In some ways, Trump’s presidency helps to explain the debate among American politics scholars about the relative power of the presidency. His inability to get much done through traditional means bolsters the traditional argument for the presidency as a weak institution that relies primarily on persuasion. On the other hand, Trump’s foreign policy tantrums, power grabs, destruction of government organizations, evisceration of political norms, and cowing of the GOP establishment illuminate the awesome scope of the modern President’s powers. If the goal is to destroy rather than create, then even a Toddler in Chief exercises considerable power.

The degradation of Trump’s presidency does not just distort America’s moral compass; it also puts the country at risk. Precisely because Trump seems to act and talk like a toddler, it is easy to not take him seriously. As early as the first week of Trump’s presidency, foreign leaders were discounting his tantrums as something the Toddler in Chief needed to get out of his system.91 Every time Trump issues an empty threat, his political rivals learn to discount his words even further.

Trump does follow through on his pledges on occasion, however. He has launched trade wars. He shut the government down, even though it made no logical sense. A vital part of international relations is the ability to credibly signal intent to others. If Trump’s threats and promises are not taken seriously, his ability to deter and coerce become compromised. Gérard Araud, the former French ambassador to the United States, told the Washington Post that under Trump, “The chain of command, of information up and down, is basically broken. So it’s quite difficult to pick up information or transmit messages” from the administration.92 The likelihood of the United States stumbling accidentally into a conflict increases considerably. This is particularly true given the ultrahawkish nature of Trump’s national security team.93

The country is at the mercy of Trump’s impulses and those have not been promising to date. In one briefing, he wanted to expand the nuclear arsenal tenfold.94 In a meeting with Latin American leaders, he expressed interest in invading Venezuela. In response to a sarin gas attack in Syria, Trump told his Secretary of Defense to assassinate Syrian dictator Bashar Al-Assad. He has inquired about using nuclear weapons to stop hurricanes from reaching the United States.95 He told his staff that along the Southern border he wanted an electrified wall “with spikes on top that could pierce human flesh” along with a moat “stocked with snakes or alligators.” He also wanted soldiers to “shoot migrants in the legs to slow them down.”96

In each of these instances, his staff talked him out of taking such rash actions. The problem is not what the Toddler in Chief has done to date. His actions, while disturbing, have not been catastrophic. The problem is that he is untethered and unsupervised. Before he departed, former Chief of Staff John Kelly warned Trump that if he only appointed yes men to his staff, he would be impeached. When news of Kelly’s warning came out, the White House Press Secretary claimed that the former Chief of Staff “was totally unequipped to handle the genius of our current President.”97

In many ways Trump has been a remarkably lucky President; he has not faced an acute foreign policy emergency while in office. His handling of smaller crises does not inspire confidence, however. His policies have exacerbated conditions along the southern border, and he had no real response to the Saudi murder of a US permanent resident and Washington Post columnist in Turkey. In his brinksmanship with North Korea and Iran, Trump has followed a pattern of issuing hyperbolic threats only to back down at the last moment. Indeed, like a scared child, he has gone so far as to pretend that genuinely provocative actions by both of those countries have not happened. Based on Trump’s behavior as cataloged in this book, the idea of Trump coping with a true crisis—a terrorist attack, a global pandemic, a great power clash with China—is truly frightening.

The history of modern states being ruled by actual toddlers is scant and scary. The most obvious case is Emperor Pu Yi of China’s Manchu Dynasty. He ascended to the throne in 1908 at the age of two. According to his autobiography, Pu Yi responded to his ascension by throwing a temper tantrum and refusing to go to the Forbidden City for his coronation. In the end, he only agreed to go if his wet nurse carried him. During the ceremony, he threw candy at the Empress Dowager. His father, attempting to placate him, cooed, “It will soon be over.”98 For the courtiers in the Forbidden City, this was a bad omen. As it turned out their foreboding was prescient. Pu Yi acknowledged that while Emperor he was “without any real awareness of the political situation.” He was the last Emperor of China, abdicating from his post at the age of five “with a similar lack of comprehension of the true situation.”99

Other modern leaders have possessed traits akin to the Toddler in Chief. Kaiser Wilhelm II resembles Donald Trump on several dimensions. Born into privilege, Wilhelm also believed in the power of personal diplomacy and took care to cater to his country’s nationalist right wing.100 The parallels to the Toddler in Chief are even stronger than that, however. German admiral Alfred von Tirpitz quickly surmised that the Kaiser did not “live in the real world” and learned how to rile him up sufficiently to secure backing for Germany’s naval expansion.101 Negotiations with the Kaiser were difficult because he was constantly changing his mind and misinterpreted what his interlocutors told him. The Kaiser was also a speechmaker who could not stick to his prepared text. Wilhelm’s entourage treated him in ways akin to Trump’s White House staff. According to one mentor, the Kaiser did little but read news reports about himself.102 He exasperated even the most obsequious of his aides. One of them, Bernhard von Bülow, praised Wilhelm constantly, but also complained to a friend, “You cannot have the faintest idea what I have prevented, and how much of my time I must devote to restoring order where our All Highest Master has created chaos.”103 Wilhelm’s record of achievement also sets a concerning example. He let an alliance with Russia expire in 1890 because he believed he could extract a better deal. He could not. Misreading the situation badly, the Kaiser unwittingly enabled the formation of the Triple Entente. Oh, and he subsequently helped Europe blunder into the First World War.

The end of a centuries-old dynasty and start of a world war are not encouraging as predictors for Trump’s legacy. Looking to the future, how should the United States handle the current Toddler in Chief? Are there ways to prevent future Toddlers in Chief from being a constant source of chaos muppets in our lives?104

The rise of the Toddler in Chief serves as an important cautionary tale for citizens and political scientists alike. For far too long, Americans took our institutions for granted and underestimated the importance of political leadership. To be fair, this error is not confined to ordinary Americans. The dirty secret about much of political science is that individual leaders are not presumed to matter. Political scientists have long privileged structural and institutional factors over the importance of individual leaders. Most international relations theories argue that the international system imposes powerful structural constraints on the behavior of individual foreign policy leaders.105 At the dawn of the century, the structural grip on international relations scholarship was so strong that scholars lamented the deficit of work on individual decision makers.106

This has been equally true for the study of American politics. Ezra Klein correctly observed a few years ago, “Political scientists traffic in structural explanations for American politics.”107 The discipline forgot that individual leaders can make a huge difference in governance outcomes. As Arthur Schlesinger observed, historically “each President’s distinctive temperament and character, his values, standards, style, his habits, expectations, idiosyncrasies, compulsions, phobias recast the White House and pervaded the entire government.”108 Presidents are not just dependent variables; they are significant independent variables as well. This is consistent with a growing literature on the importance of individual leaders.109 A President’s psychological makeup matters more than ever.

The most important thing to do is also the most difficult: stop defining the presidency down. The original claim from Trump’s supporters that he would mature into the presidency has been replaced by the explanation that he is an unorthodox President. According to this line of argument, he has redefined the meaning of “presidential.” Or, as Trump put it to his staffers, his behavior is “modern-day presidential.”110 Some observers have seized upon Trump’s transgressions to argue that the modern presidency was an impractical institution that needs to be overhauled.111

Others have resisted the notion that this time is different and have seized on the flimsiest of signs to argue that everything is fine. They argue that the guardrails have not worn down that much. To do this, they have had to define “adults in the room” down. John Kelly was perceived to be one, even though his political judgment and volcanic temper are almost as bad as Trump’s.112 The situation among his staff deteriorated so sadly that, according to a Politico profile of John Bolton, “a man once seen by Washington’s foreign policy elites as a dangerous enabler of the President’s worse impulses had taken on a surprising new identity: the adult in the room.”113 Claiming that John Bolton represented an anchor of maturity in the West Wing was grasping at the thinnest of reeds. Trump explicitly stated that he constrained Bolton far more than the reverse. For other observers, it took only the slightest hint of maturity from Trump for them to persuade themselves that, this time, he is really going to grow into the office.114

The desire to normalize Trump’s behavior is strong, even among his critics. That is because living through the chaos of the Toddler in Chief has turned most Americans into the mental equivalent of exhausted parents. According to Gallup, in 2018 more Americans were stressed, worried, and angry than at any point in the past 12 years.115 That is extraordinary when you consider what transpired during that stretch. American stress levels are among the highest in the world, matching or exceeding stress levels of Iranians, Rwandans, and Venezuelans. One could attribute this stress to the Toddler in Chief. Pew, for example, asked to describe how Trump’s comments and statements made them feel. The top seven responses were: concerned, confused, embarrassed, exhausted, angry, insulted, and frightened.116 Those track closely to the emotional state of the parents of toddlers behaving badly in public.

Given the state of national exhaustion, it is understandable that many Americans, particularly those who pay close attention to politics, ache for normalcy. Rationalizing Trump is one way to respond. Even among political scientists, there is a tendency to commit what Georgetown professor Daniel Nexon has called “analytical normalization”: the act of explaining and assessing Trump’s presidency as if one were considering a typical President and a typical administration.117 As this book has hopefully demonstrated, this impulse should be resisted. Some limited comparisons can be made between Trump’s traits and those of his predecessors. Andrew Jackson and Andrew Johnson shared Trump’s temper. Johnson and Warren Harding also demonstrated knowledge deficits. Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon were inveterate TV-watchers. None of Trump’s predecessors, however, shared all these traits. In that sense, we are in terra incognita.118 Donald Trump is unlike all other Presidents; far more than his predecessors, Trump acts like more like the Toddler in Chief than the Commander in Chief. As long as he is President, his staff, the courts, Congress, and the rest of the country should treat him the way they would treat a spoiled toddler in need of discipline. The Toddler in Chief needs to be swaddled with constraints before he harms himself and those around him.

The American presidency needs to be child-proofed. This means rebuilding as many guardrails as possible. This will not necessarily be the popular thing to do. Child-proofing sounds great right up until the moment one is faced with opening a child-proofed bottle of aspirin while nursing a hangover. To their credit, leading 2020 Democrats have called for greater checks on the presidency.119 Parties out of power advocate for presidential constraints until the moment they control the Oval Office, however. Champions of the strong version of unitary executive theory will blanch at checks on the presidency. Asking staffers or career professionals to do their job, however, is garden-variety bureaucratic politics.120 They are, furthermore, the kind of constraints than an experienced leader can easily surmount.121

To properly rebuild the guardrails, Congress will have to play a greater role, and therein lies the rub. As noted in the introduction, the legislative branch ceded power to the executive due to the paralysis of polarization. This does not mean that Congress lacks the tools to constrain the Toddler in Chief, however. As political scientist Josh Chafetz has argued, the legislative branch has powerful tools at its disposal, including the power of the purse, the contempt power, and freedom of speech and debate.122 True institutionalists will have a bipartisan interest in ensuring Congress plays a greater public role in checking and balancing against presidential prerogatives.

In the end, the most important check on the Toddler in Chief will have to come from the American people. The United States is a comparatively young country, but political theorists and political leaders have been calling on Americans to grow the hell up for quite some time. Max Weber, in his famous 1919 “Politics as a Vocation” lecture, warned, “America cannot continue to be ruled by amateurs.”123 In his first inaugural address, Barack Obama said, “We remain a young nation. But in the words of Scripture, the time has come to set aside childish things.”

Those who agree with Weber and Obama are likely disappointed by the state of the American body politic. Multiple conservative commentators have acknowledged that Trump’s ability to capture the GOP nomination reflected the dumbing down of Republican party politics into empty slogans aimed at the base.124 US Representative Tom Reed epitomized this trend when he told The Hill, “The power of President Trump is that he’s a disrupter. . . . And I’m a big fan of a disrupter in this town.”125 Only in the United States could the word “disrupter” morph from a description of badly behaved toddlers into a favorable description of business titans and political leaders. Historian Jeremi Suri correctly notes, “Disruption . . . is not a long-term strategy. It is an anti-strategy.”126 There is a very fine line between a disrupter and a powerful man simply having tantrum after tantrum. As Alan Wolfe noted recently in The Politics of Petulance, Trump has tapped into a “deep strain of political immaturity in American political life.”127

Wolfe asks in his conclusion if “the American people will become ready to act like adults.”128 Based on public opinion surveys, the tentative answer is, yes. Despite a booming economy, President Trump’s approval percentage continues to bounce between the high 30s and low 40s. Furthermore, a majority of the American people seem to share the opinion that Trump possesses many toddler-like traits. According to the Pew Research Center, an overwhelming majority of Americans believe that Trump has a bad temper. Just 28 percent of Americans believed that Trump was even-tempered. Even a plurality of Republican respondents agreed that Trump’s temper was a problem. Similarly, 61 percent of Americans believe that Trump is “too impulsive” in making decisions.129 In other words, a solid majority of Americans believe that Trump possesses toddler-like traits.

Whether that majority will translate into a rejection of the Toddler in Chief remains an open question. Trump did not receive a plurality of votes in 2016, so it is difficult to blame the American people for his Electoral College victory. That excuse will be harder to maintain if he wins reelection in 2020. And there are decent reasons to believe that he is favored to win. Trump is the incumbent, and the economy as of this writing is in solid shape. Political polarization has helped to lock in support from multinational corporations and high net-worth individuals, giving the 45th President a decided financial advantage.130 Most Republicans who are still Republicans appear to be willing to live with Trump’s immaturity in return for tax cuts, conservative judges, and owning the libs.

Donald Trump is never going to grow up. Expecting him to mature is indulging in make-believe. It will be up to the American people, and not the Toddler in Chief, to set aside childish things. If voters re-elect Trump in 2020, then he is no longer the most immature American. The American electorate would be just as developmentally delayed as the 45th President. The true Toddlers in Chief would be us.