Return of the Mayberry Machiavellis

Kevin Drum discusses the Trump administration's aversion to policy details and the effect on governing on Mother Jones.

Consider the following three things that have happened in the past month:

• After years of promising to repeal Obamacare, Republicans finally have the power to do it. But they've suddenly discovered that it's going to be a lot harder than they thought.
• President Trump kept his campaign promise to institute "extreme vetting" of refugees and visitors to the US, but the rollout was bungled so horribly that he's losing support for it even among Republicans.
• Last week Trump approved his first military operation. It was a disaster. The evidence here is a bit murky, but it suggests that the raid was vetted less stringently than usual because of Trump's desire to cut through red tape and give the military more freedom to fight terrorism.

These are examples of what Barack Obama was talking about when he told Trump that "reality has a way of asserting itself." More generally, it's the result of a Republican Party that has been averse to policy for a very long time. They have principles and beliefs, but they don't spend much time thinking hard about how to implement those principles in the most efficient possible way.

They believe that Obamacare is a failure. They believe that immigration should be shut down. They believe the military should be unleashed. But these are just bumper stickers. They haven't spent much time developing serious policy responses on these topics because (a) that would give Democrats something concrete to attack, (b) their base likes bumper stickers, and (c) policy analysis has a habit of highlighting problems with ideological purity and pushing solutions toward the center.¹

George W. Bush had the same problem with policy. Remember what John Dilulio said in his famous "Mayberry Machiavellis" letter to Ron Suskind?

This problem is now a couple of decades old and shows no signs of abating. Quite the opposite: Donald Trump makes Bush look like an analytical genius. But even on their own terms, conservative rule is going to end disastrously if both Trump and congressional Republicans don't spend a little more time on policy analysis and implementation issues. There are only so many disasters that even their own base will put up with.