Understanding a New Presidency in the Age of Trump. Joseph A. Pika

      

Understanding a New Presidency in the Age of Trump

      Sara Miller McCune founded SAGE Publishing in 1965 to support the dissemination of usable knowledge and educate a global community. SAGE publishes more than 1000 journals and over 800 new books each year, spanning a wide range of subject areas. Our growing selection of library products includes archives, data, case studies and video. SAGE remains majority owned by our founder and after her lifetime will become owned by a charitable trust that secures the company’s continued independence.

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      Understanding a New Presidency in the Age of Trump

       Joseph A. Pika

       University of Delaware

       John Anthony Maltese

       University of Georgia

       Andrew Rudalevige

       Bowdoin College

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       London

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      Copyright © 2018 by CQ Press, an Imprint of SAGE Publications, Inc. CQ Press is a registered trademark of Congressional Quarterly Inc.

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      Printed in the United States of America

      Names: Pika, Joseph August, 1947- author. | Maltese, John Anthony, author. | Rudalevige, Andrew, 1968- author.

      Title: Understanding a new presidency in the age of Trump / Joseph A. Pika, John Anthony Maltese, Andrew Rudalevige.

      Description: Thousand Oaks, California : CQ Press, An Imprint of SAGE Publications, Inc., 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

      Identifiers: LCCN 2017048006 | ISBN 9781544308210 (saddle stitch : alk. paper)

      Subjects: LCSH: Presidents—United States. | Executive power—United States. | Trump, Donald, 1946- | United States—Politics and government—2017-

      Classification: LCC JK516 .P535 2018 | DDC 352.230973—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017048006

      This book is printed on acid-free paper.

      Contents

      1 I The Transition

      2 II The Inauguration

      3 III The First Hundred DaysThe Legislative PresidencyThe Administrative PresidencyThe Public Presidency

      4 IV The Next Hundred Days and BeyondThe Russia Investigations: A White House under SiegeThe Agenda Stalls as the White House ChurnsAttempting to Reboot

      5 V Foreign Policy

      6 VI President Trump: A Natural ExperimentDiscussion Questions

      7 Notes

      8  About the Authors

      Understanding a New Presidency in the Age of Trump

      Photo 1 London’s Evening Standard expresses the surprise shared by many around the world—including Trump himself—after his upset electoral victory on November 8, 2016.

      DANIEL LEAL-OLIVAS/AFP/Getty Images

      Donald J. Trump’s election on November 8, 2016, has been described as “one of the most stunning upsets in American political history.”¹ Although Trump and his rival, Hillary Rodham Clinton, both went into Election Day with historically high “unfavorable” ratings,² conventional wisdom held that Clinton would win. That is what projection models and most veteran observers predicted. Even the Republican National Committee’s own internal calculations showed Trump coming up short of the 270 electoral votes needed to secure victory.³ On the day of the election, Nate Silver’s widely reported election forecast gave Clinton a 71 percent chance of winning the White House, and exit polls showed Clinton winning four crucial swing states that ended up going to Trump.⁴ Based on the polls, Trump later confessed that he went to his wife on Election Day and said, “Baby, I tell you what. We’re not going to win tonight.”⁵

      But win he did, breaking through the Democrats’ vaunted “blue wall” of the upper Midwest to carve out a majority in the Electoral College. And with the win came the monumental task of transitioning to power. On Election Night, the president-elect promised he would stress national unity after the hugely divisive campaign:

      [T]o all Republicans and Democrats and independents across this nation I say it is time for us to come together as one united people. It’s time. I pledge to every citizen of our land that I will be president for all of Americans, and this is so important to me.⁶

      Even under the best of circumstances, the presidential transition from one administration to another and from campaigning to governing is a formidable challenge. The Trump experience has been particularly bumpy. In order to help us understand this new presidency, the following discussion traces how Trump adjusted to his role as president—and how America adjusted to President Trump. We begin in Section I by recounting the transition, between Election Day and Trump’s swearing-in