THE SHORTLIST
The Many Varieties of Donald Trump
By
DEFENDER IN CHIEF
Donald Trump’s Fight for Presidential Power
By John Yoo
320 pp. All Points. $29.99.
“Defender in Chief” lays out Yoo’s conservative case for an extraordinarily strong president, virtually unchecked by Congress. Readers familiar with Yoo (he served in the George W. Bush administration and has written extensively about presidential power) won’t be surprised by the arguments found in this book, except for the fact that here he depicts President Donald Trump as an ardent defender of his originalist vision of the Constitution. Yoo, who didn’t support Trump for president in 2016, now concludes that “Trump campaigns like a populist but governs like a constitutional conservative.”
This dense treatise makes clear how many actions can be justified by proponents of unitary executive power — a theory of constitutional law that claims presidents control the entire executive branch and have virtually unchecked powers in the realm of national security. With this analytical framework, Yoo can legitimize almost everything Trump has done. The president’s brazen use of foreign policy for his own self-interest with regard to Ukraine makes constitutional sense, as does the paper-thin firewall separating his global real estate company from his political authority. Somehow, Trump fits neatly into the original vision of founders who feared corrupt and centralized power.
Often, Yoo’s academic veneer falls away. At the same time that he lambastes Democratic opposition to the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, he breezes over Senator Mitch McConnell’s refusal to consider President Obama’s Supreme Court nominee Merrick Garland.
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Yoo is most convincing when he argues that Congress was complicit in expanding presidential power. It is true that partisan considerations have led congressional Republicans to support Trump’s flexing his muscle while Democrats have often been afraid to take tougher stands against this runaway administration.
Yoo makes clear that when one accepts a theory of presidential power as grandiose as his, almost anything — from the George W. Bush administration’s use of “enhanced interrogation” to Trump’s institution-breaking behavior — becomes permissible.
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WE SHOULD HAVE SEEN IT COMING
From Reagan to Trump — A Front-Row Seat
to a Political Revolution
By Gerald F. Seib
304 pp. Random House. $28.
In a well-written if familiar account, Seib, a veteran Wall Street Journal reporter, provides a history of the conservative movement from Ronald Reagan to Donald Trump. Seeking to make sense of Trumpism, he begins by conveying the atmosphere of the Reagan era, tracing the multifaceted political coalition that Reagan stitched together in 1980 as well as the ideology that guided his years in the White House.
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Seib argues that the Reagan coalition remained intact through the mid-1990s. Things started to shift when Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich introduced America to his blistering style of partisanship: “The face and tone of conservative leadership had shifted from the sunny, optimistic and gentle approach of Ronald Reagan to the much harsher, angrier and more pugilistic approach of Newt Gingrich.” But the real trouble, according to Seib, began when Reagan’s coalition was supplanted by nationalist, populist forces that capitalized on middle-class insecurities. The fringe seized control, starting with the vice-presidential nomination of the Alaska governor Sarah Palin in 2008 and moving to the Tea Party victories in the 2010 midterm elections.
Seib’s history echoes the outlook of the #NeverTrump movement. If the origins of conservatism were relatively pristine, then there can be a version of Republicanism that doesn’t tolerate a president tweeting out videos of a supporter yelling “white power!” at protesters.
But Seib plays down what was there all along. The decision to stir a white backlash dates back at least to Richard Nixon’s 1968 “law and order” campaign. The role of reactionary populism, including nativism and anti-Semitism, was always relevant, even if past politicians used dog whistles instead of bullhorns. Gingrich popularized his smashmouth partisan playbook in the 1980s right in front of the television cameras for all to see. In other words, Donald Trump makes sense because of the history of the Republican Party rather than in spite of it.
IT WAS ALL A LIE
How the Republican Party Became Donald Trump
By Stuart Stevens
256 pp. Knopf. $26.95.
In “It Was All a Lie,” Stevens, a political consultant, admits there is nothing new under the Republican sun. In his bare-knuckles account, Stevens confesses to the reader that the entire apparatus of his Republican Party is built on a pack of lies. President Trump isn’t a “freak product of the system,” he writes, but a “logical conclusion of what the Republican Party became over the last 50 or so years.”
This reckoning inspired Stevens to publish this blistering, tell-all history. Viciousness and hypocrisy are everywhere in his story. Stevens’s troubling chapter about racism shows clearly how party operatives have capitalized on white resentment for decades. When Lee Atwater admitted in 1981 that Republicans were just using code words to keep talking about race, he was finally being honest. The Republicans whom Stevens worked with championed “family values” while living Hustler magazine lifestyles. Fiscal conservatism? Republicans never cared about balanced budgets — unless a Democrat was in the White House. The one-time “party of Lincoln,” Stevens explains, is now beholden to a Fox News propaganda network and powerful interest groups. His power-hungry party, Stevens says, is willing to sacrifice the integrity of vital democratic institutions.
Although this book will be a hard read for any committed conservatives, they would do well to ponder it. We see how the modern Republican Party wasn’t “taken over” by Donald Trump. Rather, the party created him. And regardless of what happens in November, it won’t look very different unless there are fundamental changes to the coalition that brought conservatism into the halls of power in 1980.
Julian E. Zelizer, a political historian at Princeton University, is the author of “Burning Down the House: Newt Gingrich, The Fall of a Speaker, and the Rise of the New Republican Party.”
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