The Hardest Job in the World: The American Presidency

by John Dickerson

The answer is that the power of speechmaking depends on the circumstances and the topic. Presidential speeches can define a moment, give language to inchoate thoughts, and gather together a stunned country. They can also be brilliant in a losing cause, which wins them a place in the hearts of wordsmiths but not in the breasts of the citizenry.

When a president speaks, lobbyists and special interests hand out luxury earmuffs. Any issue important enough to require sustained presidential action that hasn’t already slipped into law will have lobbyists and special interests protecting the status quo. There are more lobbyists than ever before in Washington, and their ties to lawmakers are more robust. Many of them are former lawmakers who have special insight and ability to influence the process for private clients. Of the 106 members who exited their congressional offices in January 2019, 41 percent now work for a lobbying firm.52 Of the former members of the previous Congress, the number was 60 percent.53 Presidential rhetoric has to be so strong that the public pressure it creates is specific, and sustained enough to make lawmakers worry about their political future more than they worry about that future when they disappoint the lobbyists who are a crucial source of campaign cash that will help them get reelected.

Jefferson weighed action and restraint in response. He understood the country’s mood and made preparations for war (without asking congressional approval). On the other hand, he had philosophical objections to action. He believed that war encouraged the federal government to centralize power under the pretext of emergency, and that once enlarged, federal power would not shrink back, endangering liberty.16 Jefferson also had practical reservations. He knew the nation could not prepare fast enough to fight.

Bush’s campaign was considered to have set a new low-water mark for restraint-free campaigning. (Until the 2016 campaign reset the clock). The journalists Jack Germond and Jules Witcover made the subtitle of their book The Trivial Pursuit of the Presidency because they judged the 1988 race to be “perhaps the most mean-spirited and negative campaign in modern-day American political history.”33 Elizabeth Drew of The New Yorker wrote that the contest “did something new to our Presidential elections. A degradation occurred which we may have to live with a long time. The Bush campaign broke the mold of modern Presidential politics. Negative campaigning of a new order of magnitude has now come to Presidential politics. And it worked.”

To erase that image in the 1988 race, Bush embarked on a display of impetuosity. In theatrical outbursts choreographed by the media guru and image crafter Roger Ailes, Bush fought with reporters at a Des Moines Register forum, and then famously in a set-to on CBS News with Dan Rather. Before the Rather rumble, Ailes wound up Bush like a top. “You’ve either got to go in there and go toe to toe with this guy,” said Ailes to Bush, “or you’re going back to Kennebunkport.”41

A whole year we shall hear nothing else but abuse and scandal, enough to ruin and corrupt the minds and morals of the best people in the world.2 —ABIGAIL ADAMS, 1800

Federalists warned that Adams’s rival, Jefferson, would confiscate Bibles. They asked, “Are you prepared to see your dwellings in flames…female chastity violated, [your] children writhing on the pike?”19

TODAY’S HYPERDEMOCRACY HAD NOBLE BEGINNINGS. Jefferson believed a well-informed electorate was necessary for the country’s survival. James Madison expressed a similar view: “A people who mean to be their own governors, must arm themselves with the power knowledge gives.”21 The two were talking about more than just public familiarity with candidates’ position papers. To be vigilant citizens, Jefferson argued, voters had to study history in order to understand the corrupting influence of human weakness—like excessive ambition—that existed across time, so that they could be on the lookout for the warnings of their age:

It is every voter’s duty to study the issues and the men now before the country. Every Democrat should be as familiar with the Republican issues and leaders as with his own. Every Republican should be familiar with the Democratic claims and their champions. Every Socialist, Populist, Prohibitionist, Independent, and members of all political parties, should be familiar with the claims and the principles of the other parties. It is a privilege that every man should avail himself of as well as a duty that he owes to his country to study all the platforms and all the issues, otherwise he cannot be informed and do his duty as a patriot at the polls.23

Bill Clinton’s sunglasses moment raised the same question that met other campaign innovations: Will embracing a popular medium, and the sales techniques used to create appetites in people that they didn’t know they had, trivialize the process of selecting someone for such a serious job? Will the process encourage voters to pull the lever for superficial reasons? Will we look for the skills that move the goods off the shelves, instead of the skills needed for governing? And will the process train presidents to respond to vexing problems with those superficial sales instincts in office, instead of responding with wisdom and seeking durable solutions to the most pressing problems?

The information revolution has also increased transparency about the relationship between lawmakers and the $3.4 billion influence business of lobbying.45 First, it allows us to know who they are. You can look up who is a registered lobbyist. You can also identify the 281 lobbyists ProPublica identified who have worked in the Donald Trump administration46 and remind yourself that he promised to hire no lobbyists because they tend to promote the worldview of their former employers, which can conflict with the public good.

As Henry David Thoreau wrote in 1854, “We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas, but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate.”47

A SALESMAN TRYING TO SELL Great Issues door to door in today’s political living room must compete with partisan talk show hosts, shortened attention spans, and brains wired at the chemical level to be lured by the extreme, the flashy, and the immediate. Campaigns now take advantage of best practices from the consumer world, where experiences and purchases are tailored to fit our impulses with as little friction as possible.

Amusement and distraction are a click away, and we expect everything else to be, too—including our political opinions and information. “Virtually every consumer proposition today, from fast food and entertainment to social interactions, is deliberately crafted so that rewards are immediate while costs are deferred, and deferred so seamlessly that they almost disappear,” writes Paul Roberts in The Impulse Society. “Speed of gratification is now the standard against which all consumer experiences are judged.”

In the digital age, these techniques of delivering immediate gratification and stoking our appetites for it reach deep into the brain stem, the same neighborhood where we house the faculties of reason and critical thinking we’d like to think we apply to public issues. Dopamine is the binding agent that locks us to the consumption—it’s the little jolt of pleasure that humans associate with beneficial actions. The reward comes after each affirmation either in the form of a “like” on Facebook, a little heart on Instagram, or delivery of information that confirms our worldview when we turn to Twitter. Studies show we will chase the reward of that neurotransmitter dopamine with the passion of a gambling addict or smoker.

Sixty-eight percent of us get our news from social media.67 This turns our individual experience into a group one. “When we encounter opposing views in the age and context of social media, it’s not like reading them in a newspaper while sitting alone,” writes Zeynep Tufekci of the University of North Carolina, who studies the social impact of technology. “It’s like hearing them from the opposing team while sitting with our fellow fans in a football stadium. Online, we’re connected with our communities, and we seek approval from our like-minded peers. We bond with our team by yelling at the fans of the other one. In sociology terms, we strengthen our feeling of ‘in-group’ belonging by increasing our distance from and tension with the ‘out-group’—us versus them.”

“Populist movements,” they write, “rely on inflammatory rhetoric to create a tribal ‘us versus them’ condition—this type of environment instigates neural mechanisms from the evolutionary desire to be part of the group.” Social media exacerbates this effect by offering “more immediate, emotional, and personal forms of political communication” through which the gatherings can take place. The tactics are ancient, but the delivery mechanism makes them more powerful.

Those who form a heterodox thought hasten to conform. Studies show that after a big political event like a debate, partisans who form their own opinions independent of the tribe will change them and steer their views to line up with the consensus after being exposed to it.

Here’s how it works: When you or someone in your party is accused of falling short of a standard, mention a time that some member of the other party fell short of a standard. It doesn’t have to be the same standard or the same magnitude. It’s just important that someone in the other party did something wrong, since the goal is deflecting and confusing the issue.

Whataboutism is the state flower of negative partisanship, one of the strongest forces keeping political tribes together and reducing reflection on the immutable standards that are supposed to govern presidential and personal behavior. In the age of hyperpartisanship, the sins of the opposing party motivate voting more than do the positive aspects of a voter’s own party. As anyone who has ever received mail from a campaign knows, the mail pieces are usually about the dire threat posed by the blind ideologues on the other side or the opposition candidate. No one asks for money saying the other guy has a point.

In 2016, the Pew Research Foundation found that among Republicans, 68 percent said a major reason they identify with the GOP is that “the Democratic Party’s policies are harmful to the country.” Among Democrats, 62 percent said a major reason is that Republican policies harm the country.71

Among those highly engaged in politics—those who say they vote regularly and either volunteer for or donate to campaigns—fully 70 percent of Democrats and 62 percent of Republicans say they are afraid of the other party.73 When we think the other side is awful, we are fine with treating them that way. So a liberal gadfly gets acclaim for posting a video of Mitch McConnell stumbling on a stage (McConnell has difficulty walking due to childhood polio).74 Or President Trump wins cheers for promoting a wholly made-up claim that Bill Clinton was responsible for convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein’s death.75

Preemptive whataboutism is even more powerful than garden variety whataboutism. Instead of measuring a president against a standard, or against the qualifications of another candidate, a partisan compares their candidate to the worst caricature of an imagined candidate of the opposition. “The President may be nuts in his behavior,” wrote the conservative pundit Erick Erickson, “but I’ll take his crazy over the insanity the Democrats would unleash on the United States.”

When one side only of a story is heard and often repeated, the human mind becomes impressed with it insensibly.2 —GEORGE WASHINGTON

Social scientists at Berkeley’s Haas School of Business found that most people, whether they identified as moderate liberals or conservatives, viewed politically incorrect statements as more authentic, a quality voters like. The study further showed that candidates who use politically incorrect language are seen as less malleable, a second attribute voters like because voters think candidates who behave like that will be impervious to Washington’s compromises.

Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber argue in The Enigma of Reason that reasoning exists not to help us gain greater knowledge, but to make us better at producing justifications and arguments to convince others of conclusions we’ve come to by emotion or impulse. In that case, the evolutionary use of reason is to embrace Whataboutism, illogic, and the other tantalizing types of online argumentation.7

Studies show that even a single exposure to false information increases subsequent perceptions of its accuracy, something psychologists call the “illusory truth effect.”

One root of this phenomenon may be that old devil, pride. We retain our beliefs even in the face of learning we’re dead wrong because we don’t want to admit that we were wrong. Studies have shown that even when people are told, on good evidence, that the information they believe to be true was completely fabricated, they cling to their original understanding.

IN THE 2016 CAMPAIGN, THE Russian government took advantage of the obvious vulnerabilities of the American political conversation. According to a bipartisan Senate Intelligence committee report, the Russian Internet Research Agency’s disruptive efforts reached 126 million people on Facebook, posted 10.4 million tweets on Twitter, uploaded more than a thousand videos to YouTube, and reached more than 20 million users on Instagram.12

According to a research project by the University of Oxford provided to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, the Russian effort “demonstrates a sustained effort to manipulate the US public and undermine democracy….to target US voters and polarize US social media users. The Russian effort targeted many kinds of communities within the US, but particularly the most extreme conservatives and those with particular sensitivities to race and immigration.”13 The committee concludes that the Russian efforts were almost entirely devoted to helping Donald Trump. The only pro-Hillary group, “Muslims for Hillary,” was designed not to help her in that community, but to associate the Democratic nominee with a group her Republican rival demonized and wanted to ban from the United States.

By January 2020, about 1,095 days into his administration, the number of false or misleading claims made by President Trump reached 16,241, according to The Washington Post’s fact-checker database.

The framers of the Constitution, in search of a way to empower a president without inviting tyranny, found a solution in Washington’s character. His restraint in favor of republican government bolstered the country’s view of itself and its mission. He reaffirmed—and the protocol of his departure codified in official ceremony—that in America, no matter how powerful or famous one person might be, the republic and its values mattered more.14

It is a tough job, taking on the feelings, aspirations, and needs of people who didn’t vote for you, but when leaders don’t send a signal to all segments of the population, it creates the building blocks for upheaval. “Demand for recognition of one’s identity is a master concept that unifies much of what is going on in world politics today,” writes the Stanford political scientist Francis Fukuyama. Political leaders mobilize “followers around the perception that the group’s dignity had been affronted, disparaged, or otherwise disregarded. This resentment engenders demands for public recognition of the dignity of the group in question. A humiliated group seeking restitution of its dignity carries far more emotional weight than people simply pursuing their economic advantage.”23

Presidential character is an individual and group effort. If the chief executive can’t stay on the rails, aides nudge him back so that he doesn’t act so foolishly that voters, congressional rivals, and world leaders stop taking him seriously. A president can sap the confidence and authority needed for future national conversations or push negotiating partners into corners those adversaries can’t get out of without losing too much face. Understanding the power of speech and self-control over what you say is as important for CEOs as it is for presidents. When Marshall Goldsmith worked with the pharmaceutical CEO Jean-Pierre Garnier, he asked him what he had learned about leadership as the head of GlaxoSmithKline. “My suggestions become orders,” Garnier told him. “If they’re smart, they’re orders. If they’re stupid, they’re orders. If I don’t want them to be orders, they’re orders anyway.” He continued, “Before I speak, I breathe and ask myself, is this worth it?”27

The institutional filter between the president and the public is gone. This gives a president the ability to quickly change the narrative, but it also diminishes the brand.

“I like Trump on Twitter,” said a participant at a Face the Nation focus group, “because you know everything he posts is coming directly from Trump. It’s what he thinks himself, no one else.”30 Immediacy and authenticity are more valuable than substance.

With no guidelines in modern campaigns, voters refashion their standard for presidential behavior based on what they see immediately before them. “Having that celebrity personality and projecting an image in the media is more important than traditional qualifications,” Bob Tyson, a retired database consultant and Trump supporter, told The Washington Post’s Dan Balz. “It’s made me think differently about what it takes to be elected president. The traditional path of being a state governor or U.S. senator doesn’t seem to count as much. It’s being able to manage your image in the media and galvanizing your base.”

The presidency was once primarily an interior job. Presidents had any number of experiences the public never witnessed or even knew had occurred.

DONALD TRUMP HAS REWRITTEN THE fundamental rules of the presidency through modification of its basic tenets of character and honesty. His party, whose members believed in the necessity of maintaining the sturdiness of those tenets, has not penalized him but has rallied to his cause. Whether this represents a permanent change in the presidency depends on whether Democrats who identify each of Trump’s transgressions will use his techniques when they regain presidential power.

President Trump has not built a record of achievement in the traditional sense—marshaling public will and Congress to meet the biggest challenges of the day that can only be attacked through collective action. His record of legislative achievement is weak, particularly given that he controlled both houses of Congress in his first two years. What Trump has done is deliver for his base.

These achievements make it difficult for Trump’s critics within his party. Senators Jeff Flake, Bob Corker, and Mitt Romney all criticized Trump in strong rhetorical blasts, but that did not stop them from voting with him regularly. This ratifies the low opinion Trump supporters have of career politicians. They are all talk. Whatever complaints GOP critics might make, at the end of the day, they like winning too.

“I was a Republican in the Senate for twelve years and we cared about fiscal issues, world leadership, and free trade,” former Tennessee senator Bob Corker said in October 2019. “I look at the Republican Party now and we are isolationist, protectionist, and care nothing about keeping these institutions that have kept the world safe in many ways.”12

The Republican Party’s reversal on immigration policy offers the starkest shift. After the 2012 election, the Republican Party commissioned an “autopsy” to explain why it had lost the popular vote in five of the last six elections. Most of the report was vague, but that vagueness was pierced by one clear policy recommendation: “We must embrace and champion comprehensive immigration reform,” wrote the autopsy’s authors. “If we do not, our Party’s appeal will continue to shrink to its core constituencies only.”13 The Fox commentator Sean Hannity had a public revelation and supported comprehensive immigration reform. “You create a pathway for those people that are here—you don’t say you’ve got to go home,” he said. “And that is a position that I’ve evolved on. Because, you know what, it’s got to be resolved. The majority of people here, if some people have criminal records you can send them home, but if people are here, law-abiding, participating for years, their kids are born here, you know, it’s first secure the border, pathway to citizenship, done.”14

Trump’s commitment to restricting trade has been so thorough—in the name of rebalancing U.S. trade disadvantages with countries like China—he was willing to tolerate a slowdown in the economy. In October 2019, Trump’s trade policies led to the lowest level of manufacturing since the great recession in 2008. The conservative Tax Foundation found the Trump administration had so far imposed nearly $80 billion worth of new taxes on Americans by levying tariffs on thousands of products, which is equivalent to one of the largest tax increases in decades.16

The reversal on trade has led to a reversal on the GOP’s view toward government assistance. Conservatives have opposed bailouts of various kinds, most notably the Troubled Asset Relief Program after the mortgage-backed securities collapse, as well as assistance to the auto industry. By the fall of 2019, that historic opposition had been reversed. The GOP-backed bailouts to farmers harmed by Trump’s trade wars were twice the size of the auto bailout.17

Now the issue of debts and deficits has virtually disappeared from the Republican conversation. As President Trump’s director of the Office of Management and Budget, Mick Mulvaney, admitted, “My party is very interested in deficits when there is a Democrat in the White House. The worst thing in the whole world was deficits when Barack Obama was the president. Then Donald Trump became president, and we’re a lot less interested as a party.”19 Donald Trump’s policies, including his signature domestic achievement, the tax cut, have ballooned the deficit beyond even the most pessimistic estimates. Long-term entitlement costs continue to rise with no plan for reform in place or advocated by the president or leaders in Congress. At President Trump’s 2020 State of the Union, Republicans responded with a standing ovation when the president announced a new benefit of paid family leave, the kind of federal guarantee party leaders once used to rail against.

In a 2011 poll conducted by the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) and the Religion News Service, 60 percent of white evangelicals believed a public official who “commits an immoral act in their personal life” cannot “behave ethically and fulfill their duties in their public and professional life.”20 Five years later, an October 2016 poll by PRRI and the Brookings Institution—after the release of the infamous Access Hollywood tape—found that only 20 percent of evangelicals, responding to the same question, thought private immorality meant someone could not behave ethically in public.

Broader ideas of morality have also taken a hit. Between 1994 and 1999, 86 percent of Republicans thought it was important for the president to provide moral leadership.21 In 2018, 63 percent of Republicans agreed with that statement, a 23-point decrease.

Honesty isn’t what it used to be either. In 2007, an Associated Press / Yahoo! poll found 71 percent of Republicans saying it was “extremely important” for presidential candidates to be honest, similar to 70 percent of Democrats and 66 percent of independents.22 A 2018 Washington Post poll showed identical shares of Democrats and independents prioritizing honesty in presidential candidates, but the share of Republicans who said honesty was extremely important had fallen to 49 percent,23 22 points lower than in the AP / Yahoo! poll from the pre-Trump era.

A year later, reports surfaced that hundreds of migrant children were being detained at a Texas border facility in “perilous conditions.” Russell Moore, president of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, tweeted, “The reports of the conditions for migrant children at the border should shock all of our consciences. Those created in the image of God should be treated with dignity and compassion, especially those seeking refuge from violence back home. We can do better than this.”25 The plaintive cry received a klaxon blast in return from Jerry Falwell, Jr., the president of Liberty University. Falwell’s endorsement had helped Trump build support in the evangelical community during a crucial turn in the primaries. He asked: “Who are you @drmoore? Have you ever made a payroll? Have you ever built an organization of any type from scratch? What gives you authority to speak on any issue? I’m being serious. You’re nothing but an employee—a bureaucrat.”26 One did not need a seminary degree to recognize that this was a secular, not religious, denunciation. Moore is an ordained Southern Baptist minister who has been the head of a church. Falwell was trying to cancel Moore’s right to speak from a religious perspective because he lacked secular qualifications. “It has caused us to call evil good and good evil,” wrote the evangelical author Nancy French of the affection for Donald Trump. “Very quietly, the ‘lesser of two evils’ edict morphed from ‘op...