Trump’s many campaign promises are colliding

The obvious interpretation of President Trump’s Dreamer deal with Democratic leaders is that he’s breaking promises to his supporters, especially in his suddenly diminished ambitions for the border wall. But what were those promises, precisely? And which ones matter the most to his presidency?
The answer may be found in the work of political scientist Richard Fenno, whose formulation of the process of representation (see here or here) defines “promises” not simply as specific policy commitments but also about who they will respond to, how they will govern, and even who they will be.
So what promises did Trump really make during his campaign that might apply here? Certainly there were policy promises about immigration, which he appears to be violating. Yet his core promise to build a wall and have Mexico pay for it is perhaps the most instructive.
To anyone who understood the first thing about the sheer size of the proposal and the politics of the border, it was clear Trump had no chance at all of fulfilling the central policy promise of his campaign. So maybe the wall was, as some people argue, meant to be heard only symbolically as a marker for a general anti-immigration policy.
If that’s the case, then Trump may believe that he has considerable room to trade off any particular policy element for an overall tough-on-immigrants outcome, with a trade of DACA (or even the wall) for more spending on border enforcement will within the scope of his promise.
But that’s all policy. What if, in addition to or even instead of any particular policy, the wall and his “Make America Great Again” slogan, as many have suggested, indicated that Trump would really be president for white people? That’s plausible, but it requires more refinement.
It could mean that Trump was promising to act on behalf of the interests of white people. Or it could mean that Trump was promising to speak for the frustrations of white people, regardless of whatever actions he might take. Or yet another variation would be that he meant to promise he would erase the legacy of Barack Obama in every policy domain.
And then there are another set of promises Trump made. One was action-oriented: The problem with the United States was that previous politicians had been bad at making deals, which Trump was (supposedly) an expert at. In this version, at least as Trump sometimes expressed it, there was nothing wrong at all with the intentions or the policy goals of previous presidents, even Obama, but they were all just so bad at bargaining that the United States was being undone.
Or perhaps that promise wasn’t even to strike deals—it was that he would be, as president, the authoritative, commanding figure he appeared to be on his reality television show. Indeed, Fenno found that it’s not uncommon at all for politicians to promise who they will be if elected, and in many cases that becomes the central promise in their representative relationship with their constituents.
What matters, however, isn’t how analysts like me or Trump’s constituents at large interpret the promises. What matters is how the politician himself or herself interprets the commitments he or she has made. Because, as Fenno learned, that’s what will constrain them.
John Glenn, as a politician, was always going to be an American hero—with both the advantages and limitations that the role implied, as Fenno wrote in his analysis of the late Ohio senator. As a “hero” there were some attacks that Glenn was never going to be able to make, because acting as a vicious partisan would undermine his entire political image.
On the other hand, it would be difficult to attack Glenn as if he was just a regular politician. Yet his interpretation of his implied promise to play the hero in politics was different than Arizona Senator John McCain’s. Their political actions were limited in different ways as a result.
If all that is correct, and if—and this is a big “if,” of course—Trump is like a normal politician and does want to keep his promises, then what may be happening here is simply a clash between his policy campaign commitments and his action and identity promises. On policy, Trump was going to be tough on immigration. But the “Apprentice” deal-making president would be, well, making deals—with anyone, in any area.
So far, Trump hasn’t had many occasions for performing high-profile bargaining.

—Bloomberg

Jonathan Bernstein is a Bloomberg View columnist. He taught political science at the University of Texas at San Antonio and DePauw University and wrote A Plain Blog About Politics