John Nichols - Horsemen of the Trumpocalypse: A Field Guide to the Most Dangerous People in America

On January , 2017 , Donald Trump the man became Donald Trump the presidency. This is a book on how to understand that presidency. It begins with a concept of governing that some in the chattering classes will struggle with, as their obsession with personalities often precludes them from discussing consequential matters. Presidents can often be inconsequentialor foolish, or erratic, or incomprehensible. But presidencies are never any of those things. They are powerful, overarching, definitional. They shape more than policies; they shape our sense of what the United States can be. Jeffersons presidency made America more expansive than even the most adventurous former colonists had dared to attempt, Lincolns made America freer than all but the most courageous of the founders dared imagine, Franklin Roosevelts made America fairer than Wall Street had ever been willing to permit, John Kennedys made a mature nation young again. And Donald Trumps presidency will make America something different than it has ever beensomething darker if his autocratic agendas prevail, something brighter if the resistance to those agendas coalesces into the welcoming, humane and aspirational America that Langston Hughes promised it could be.

The test of the Trump era is this: Will these United States go backward on a Make America Great Again journey that has everything to do with the word again and nothing to do with greatness? Or will they go forward with an honest and unencumbered recognition of the environmental, social and economic challenges of our time, and a bold and brave faith in our ability to meet them with the genius of science, the strength of humanity, the connectivity and liberating power of real democracy?

With his actions and his appointments, Trump has made it clear that he chooses to go backward. He intends for his to be the again presidency.

But it will not be Trump who makes the next America happen, just as it was not Jefferson or Lincoln or Roosevelt or Kennedy. Presidents can be exceptional men or awful men, and soon presidents will be women. But there is not enough greatness or horror in any man or woman to turn the page of a vast nation. This is why the intricate webs of individuals and policies and movements that make and unmake presidencies matter more than presidents.

Pundits may choose to focus on presidents. Citizens cannot afford that luxury. When a moment raises questions of liberty versus autocracy, prosperity versus poverty, war versus peace, life versus death, citizens must tune out the gossip of campaigning and tune in on the essential issues of governing. This is only possible if they consider the whole of a presidency. Only an understanding of the whole of a presidency will allow them to determine whether to embrace or resist the possibility of an administration.

This is the essential leapthe one that took America from reverence for FDR to an embrace of a New Deal, the one that extended from all the way with LBJ to a war on poverty and Medicare and Medicaid.

The men and women Trump chooses to surround himself with, and to empower, will determine the America that will emerge from his presidency. They will shape and implement the policies of this presidency. They will check and balance Trumps excesses, or they will steer this inexperienced and impulsive man toward precipices from which neither he, nor this nation, nor this world, can turn back. They will temper or incite Trump, fuel or still the cauldrons of racial and ethnic hatred and division. They will counsel against overreactions or they will make those overreactions inevitable, and incomprehensibly destructive.

But, for the most part, they will operate in the darkness of a media age when the major newspapers, broadcast networks and digital platforms are so absorbed with the pursuit of ratings and clicks that they refuse to put the spotlight on anyone but a strongman president.

Because the office of president has always been infused with a measure of majesty, and because it is afforded far more power than is enjoyed by the ceremonial presidents of most other lands, people in the United States and around the world have always struggled with the concept of an executive branch. They are attracted to the notion of an individualized, virtually monarchical executivea soldier king making every decision, commanding every army, doling out every favor, collecting every emolument.

George Washington, the revolutionary commander whose countrymen encouraged him to serve as a king, struggled mightily to discourage such thinking. He accepted a system of checks and balances, distributed power to others and surrendered the mantle of authority willingly at the end of a second four-year term. With his democratically inclined secretary of state, Jefferson, he discouraged notions of an imperial presidency and counseled Americans to recognize themselves as sovereigns and their presidents as servants. In the early days of their republican experiment, Washington and Jefferson and their compatriots realized their visions with presidencies so small that they could be loaded up in stagecoaches and moved from city to city as the country sorted out the question of where it would locate its capitol. When it was decided that the District of Columbia would be the nations center of government, the infrastructure of that government was so limited that Jefferson lodged in a rooming house on the night before his inauguration, walked on his own through muddy streets to the swearing-in ceremony, delivered a short unifying address and scrambled back to the rooming house in time for dinner.

Washington was an imperfect, yet serious man. Jefferson was an imperfect, yet visionary man. Trump is an imperfect man who is neither serious nor visionary.

Only those Americans with no knowledge or who are self-deluded celebrate the start of the presidency of Donald John Trump, the most unqualified man ever to be elected to our highest office, wrote former White House counsel John Dean, our great philosopher of presidencies gone right and wrong, on the day of Trumps inauguration. To wit: There is no evidence anywhere that Donald Trump has even a good newspaper or television news knowledge of the American presidency; nor is there any evidence he has ever read a single autobiography or biography of any of his forty-four predecessors in our highest elected office. To the contrary, the evidence suggests he does not have sufficient concentration power to read a book, or even listen to an audio edition, not to mention receive an exhaustive briefing of the duties of his job.