Volume 15, Issue 3

We conduct a preliminary analysis of the first 200 days of the Donald Trump presidency, to determine who his principal allies in the US House have been. We build our analysis around three groups of Republicans, based on caucus affiliations: members of the Republican Main Street Partnership (RMSP), the Republican Study Committee (RSC), and the House Freedom Caucus (HFC). We find that House Republicans, regardless off caucus membership, broadly support President Trump and largely shared in the his electoral success. Yet, we also uncover suggestive evidence that the HFC is maneuvering into a position of influence with President Trump. Freedom Caucus members are more closely tied to his electoral performance than members of other conservative groups, and they appear to receive more time with the President relative to a comparable group of House Republicans. While these results are interesting, they are also initial and more time is needed to assess how President Trump builds a winning coalition with Republican House members.

John McCain’s dramatic early-morning “no” vote may have been the immediate cause of the Republican failure to repeal and replace Obamacare. However, Republicans undertook this endeavor from a weak political vantage point. The 2016 elections gave Republicans very little margin for error in Congress – a margin threatened by Trump’s inexperience and lack of political capital. Longer-term trends, including the polarization of the two congressional parties against the backdrop of increasingly nationalized elections, exacerbated this situation by leaving Trump and Republicans little choice but to legislate through their own party caucus – or to not legislate at all.

Donald Trump entered office with aspirations for transformational policy change, much of which would have to be approved by Congress. So far, he and his supporters have been disappointed. Despite the president’s many unique characteristics, we can employ the framework of the president’s strategic position to explain the president’s lack of success. The president’s opportunity structure was mixed. Lacking a mandate but fortunate to serve in a unified government, Trump overestimated his public support, which was low, and Republican cohesion, which was imperfect. He also underestimated the impact of partisan polarization and Democratic opposition, which was strong. Moreover, the president lacked a strategic plan of his own, had few substantive proposals, and demonstrated little skill in garnering support.

This essay highlights the challenges faced by the Trump Administration during the first 8 months of his presidency despite unified Republican control of both chambers of Congress. It begins by focusing briefly on the lead-up to the 2016 election before turning to the struggles the administration has faced in enacting policies since inauguration. The essay concludes with a look ahead at the 2018 midterm elections and the implications for the remainder of the Trump presidency.

To what extent have Republicans in Congress unified to work with President Trump, and what are the prospects for unity going forward? These questions are not as straightforward as they may seem given that the President is not deeply engaged in the policymaking process, he often reverses his positions, and he is prone to criticizing his most important partners in governing – Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and House Speaker Paul Ryan – eroding trust among members of his own party and diminishing Republicans’ prospects for passing their legislative priorities. In this analysis, I assess President Trump’s relationship with Republicans in the House and Senate; internal unity and divisions among Republicans; Republicans’ lack of success in enacting significant policy priorities prior to the August recess; the limited (but potentially growing) prospects for bipartisan cooperation; and the outlook for the remainder of the 115th Congress.

Modern presidencies are characterized by the coherent White House staff that seamlessly move from the campaign into the White House to implement the new president’s agenda. Campaign staff built the policy agenda during the months-long if not years-long campaign, revised it to meet political demands at every juncture, and entered their White House offices with a clear view of how to achieve the campaign’s goals. In contrast, few members of the Trump White House staff moved from the campaign into the White House which soon became plagued by multiple power centers and limited agreement on the president’s broad agenda. In general, the Trump staff were unknown to each other and held quite different world visions, varying from extreme nationalists to globalists. This research examines the multiple power centers, the power voids, and the tools of power exercised in the White House. By the end of the first 7 months, the decision process had moved from groupthink to multiple advocacy to the coalition presidency.

Eight months into his presidency, most depict the Trump administration as being mired in chaos and frenzy. Such a perspective, however, overlooks the aggressive pursuit of Trump’s campaign agenda through unilateral administrative action. Far from “deconstructing the administrative state” as promised, Trump has embraced the levers of presidential discretion and power inherent within the modern executive office. Although Trump cannot lay claim to any major legislative achievement early in his presidency, we argue that there is plenty he can take credit – or blame – for in fulfilling his campaign promises. Moreover, far from using administrative power to simply roll back his predecessor’s programmatic goals, the new president has sought to redeploy state resources in ways that will further entrench traditional commitments of the Republican Party, while simultaneously redefining them to mirror the president’s personal policy objectives. This is not a new development. Rather it is the culmination of a decades-long reorientation within both major parties: the rise of an executive centered party-system. As such, Trump – despite his seeming idiosyncrasies – might further reinforce the centrality of executive actions as a way to overcome both parties’ institutional weakness and ideological polarization.