Darrell Delamaide's Political Capital
Opinion: Where are all the great deals Trump promised his voters?
Published: Feb. 28, 2017 at 5:11 p.m. ET
Darrell Delamaide
Top aide Bannon wants a generation of crisis, but Trump needs results now
President Donald Trump congratulates Steve Bannon after his swearing in as senior counselor.
MANDEL NGAN/AFP/Getty Images
WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) — In President Donald Trump's first few weeks in office, Trump the petulant narcissist has been constantly on display, but Trump the ace dealmaker? Not so much.
During his improbably successful campaign to win the presidency, Trump succeeded in keeping things admirably simple. "Make America great again" was a simple, remarkably effective slogan.
And his argument that he could and would make better "deals" for the American people was compelling enough to win over voters fed up with their do-nothing politicians.
What to Watch For in Trump's Speech to Congress
But the problem with winning on simple slogans is that you have to produce simple results — and you have to produce them fast.
So far, there is zero evidence of any dealmaking skill on the part of the president. He has bullied a few corporations into saying they will provide more jobs in the U.S. For key promises like renegotiating trade deals or renewing American infrastructure — the hopeful pledges with a real chance for creating jobs — there has been nothing but bluster or silence.
Instead, the worst fears of his critics and the deepest reservations of his supporters have been realized as Trump has given us displays of whiny self-pity instead of forceful leadership.
"So far, there is zero evidence of any dealmaking skill on the part of the president."
Trump once boasted he could achieve corporate tax reform by getting lawmakers into a room for a half hour to agree on the urgent measure of reducing the tax rate on company profits and closing loopholes. The latest word that we can now expect tax reform only by August is a far cry from that pledge.
As for the "immediate" repeal of Barack Obama's health-care reform law, there's not any evidence that Trump's even able to strike a deal with Republican lawmakers, let alone Democrats.
Trump has spent his time instead playing to his base with an ill-considered attempt to ban immigration from certain countries. The failure of that effort not only hurt him with his base, but alienated many of those moderates and independents who gave him the benefit of the doubt. And it threw oil on the fire of what was already a raging resistance.
The president's speech to Congress this week is not officially a State of the Union address, but it does present him with an opportunity to be, finally, statesmanlike. He could abandon the apocalyptic rhetoric from the Republican convention and his inaugural address — he doesn't need to keep firing up his base — and instead reach out with a message of unity and hope.
Also read:How you should trade Trump's speech to Congress
According to press spokesman Sean Spicer, that is what Trump intends to do. "The president will lay out an optimistic vision for the country, crossing traditional lines of party, race, socioeconomic status," Spicer said ahead of the speech.
Opinion Journal: What Is the Trump Agenda?
But the speech predictably will include exaggerated claims about what Trump has achieved in his first weeks in office, and inevitably some swipes at the press and sounding of his apocalyptic themes.
Numerous commentators have tracked these gloomy themes back to chief White House strategist Steve Bannon and his belief in a cyclical theory of history that has the U.S., and the world, entering into a generational period of crisis.
Bannon, for one, is ready to embrace this crisis, even if it means, as he apparently thinks, that it will involve a major military conflict.
Writing in the Washington Post this week, Neil Howe, one of the authors of "The Fourth Turning: An American Prophecy" laying out that cyclical theory of history, rejected much of the reporting on it as "absurdly apocalyptic."
Nonetheless, he goes on to say that after a generational turning of "High" — the postwar years under Truman, Eisenhower and Kennedy — we have gone through an "Awakening" (late '60s, '70s) and an "Unraveling" to enter a period of "Crisis" starting in 2008 and not ending much before 2030.
This new crisis, Howe says in his op-ed, bears a strong resemblance to the crisis of the 1930s, as liberal democracy is weakening in a volatile era.
Opinion Journal: A Murder in Kansas
"Get ready for the creative destruction of public institutions, something every society periodically requires to clear out what is obsolete, ossified and dysfunctional — and to tilt the playing field of wealth and power away from the old and back to the young," Howe wrote in the Post. "Forests need periodic fires; rivers need periodic floods. Societies, too. That's the price we must pay for a new golden age."
Bannon echoed this theme at the Conservative Political Action Committee conference last week when he called for the "deconstruction of the administrative state" as one of the central tasks facing the Trump administration.
It's easy to spot the problem here. Bannon is ready to spend a generation cleaning out all the accumulated obstacles to social nirvana, while Trump needs to make people feel a lot better by 2020 if he wants to run for re-election.
At some point, the president is going to have to leave Bannon, or at least some of his ideas, behind and get on with the business of actually doing something for the voters who put him in office.
Senators complain Biden administration is blocking access to mishandled documents
Senators reacted with swift, bipartisan anger after a classified meeting with National Intelligence Director Avril Haines, insisting they need to see for themselves what documents the three men were holding.
U.S. economy doesn't look as good as GDP suggests
Biden has a case for seeking re-election in 2024 — except for this one unavoidable fact
Jane Fonda says climate crisis can be blamed on racism: 'Where would they put the s—? Not Bel Air'
MarketWatch Contributor Network
Darrell Delamaide writes "Political Capital," a weekly column from Washington, D.C. on politics that affect financial markets. A former foreign correspondent and recipient of an Overseas Press Club award, he has written for Barron's, Dow Jones, Institutional Investor, Bloomberg and others. He is an Atlantik Bruecke Fellow and took part in a 2009 study trip to Germany. He is the author of nonfiction books on the debt crisis and post-Cold War Europe as well as a financial thriller.