Sunday, January 5, 2020

Our Illiterate President


BRENDAN MCDERMID / REUTERS
Ironically, it was the publication of a book this week that crystallized the reality of just how little Donald Trump reads. While, like many of the tendencies described in Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury, Trump’s indifference to the printed word has been apparent for some time, the depth and implications of Trump’s strong preference for oral communication over the written word demand closer examination.
“He didn’t process information in any conventional sense,” Wolff writes. “He didn’t read. He didn’t really even skim. Some believed that for all practical purposes he was no more than semi-­literate.”
Wolff quotes economic adviser Gary Cohn writing in an email: “It’s worse than you can imagine … Trump won’t read anything—not one-page memos, not the brief policy papers, nothing. He gets up halfway through meetings with world leaders because he is bored.”
While Trump and his allies, as well as some mainstream journalists, have attacked the accuracy of Wolff’s book, Trump’s allergy to reading is among the most fully corroborated assertions Fire and Fury makes.
Ahead of the election, the editors of this magazine wrote that the Republican candidate “appears not to read.” Before the inauguration, Trump told Axios, “I like bullets or I like as little as possible. I don't need, you know, 200-page reports on something that can be handled on a page. That I can tell you.” In February, The New York Times reported that National Security Council members had been instructed to keep policy papers to a single page and include lots of graphics and maps. Mother Jones reviewed classified information indicating Trump’s briefings were a quarter as long as Barack Obama’s.
In March, Reuters reported that briefers had strategically placed the president’s name in as many paragraphs of briefing documents as possible so as to attract his fickle attention. In September, the Associated Press reported that top aides had decided the president needed a crash course on America’s role in the world and arranged a 90-minute, map-and-chart heavy lecture at the Pentagon. And amid the hype over Wolff’s book, MSNBC host Joe Scarborough wrote a column Friday saying that in September 2015, he confronted Trump over poor debate performances, saying, “Can you read?” Met with silence, Scarborough pressed again: “I’m serious, Donald. Do you read? If someone wrote you a one-page paper on a policy, could you read it?” Trump replied by brandishing a Bible from his mother and saying he read it all the time—probably a self-aware joke, given Trump’s proud impiety and displayed ignorance of the Bible.
The Scarborough anecdote is the strangest of these. This is not only because Scarborough held on to the story for nearly a year and a half, and continued to hype Trump’s candidacy on air and advise him privately. (As James Fallows notes, the real scandal of the Wolff book is that so many people have such grave misgivings about Trump but have kept their heads down.) It is also unfortunate because Trump is clearly, in strictly literal terms, literate. He displays his basic grasp of the language—if in sloppy, often typo-ridden ways—on Twitter on a roughly daily basis. Such stories, by dint of their hyperbole, offer a bit of a distraction from how serious the problem is.
Meanwhile, Trump’s defenders could fall back on semi-plausible excuses, such as arguing that his information consumption was typical of the business world from which he had come. The AP reported that Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and Secretary of Defense James Mattis used charts and maps in the briefing on America’s role because that was “a way the businessman-turned-politician would appreciate.”
There was some precedent for this. Bill Clinton famously loved long briefings, to the point that aides became frustrated with his tendency to focus too much attention on minutiae and lose the big picture. But although Barack Obama also liked briefings on the longer side—three-to-six page policy papers, and lengthy president’s daily brief—he asked aides to present memos demanding a decision to him with his options distilled in checkboxes at the end.
George W. Bush, who came from a business background—he attended Harvard Business School, and would eventually borrow biz-school jargon for the title of his memoir Decision Points—was closer still to Trump’s approach. Bush wanted an oral briefing to accompany the written PDB, and his PDB was slimmed down to no more than 10 pages, according to Philip Shenon. In another augur of Trump, Ron Suskind reported that aides observed that whatever was in the final verbal briefing Bush received usually became his view.
Yet the differences between this and Trump are significant, one of the many ways that Trump has made Bush’s critics feel nostalgic for him. Critics mocked or rent their garments over Bush’s abbreviated brief, but Trump’s preferred format is far shorter and more rudimentary. Besides, the Bush precedent is not comforting for anyone concerned about a steady hand on the wheel of the ship of state: The Iraq War remains the greatest blunder in American foreign policy since Vietnam, and Trump has expressed puzzlement about the seemingly unwinnable war in Afghanistan that Bush bequeathed him via Obama.
Unlike Trump, Bush also read for pleasure and edification. Late in Bush’s presidency, Karl Rove wrote a notable column in which he detailed the president’s reading habits. At the time, Richard Cohen described Bush’s list as too closed to critical ideas: “Bush has always been the captive of fixed ideas. His books just support that.” Such a critique of Trump is unthinkable, because the idea of him recommending any volume that is not either by him or a hagiography of him is unthinkable. One can deride the reading of Bush and Obama—who last week continued a tradition he began as president, posting his reading list for the year—as performative, but Trump, a consummate performer in so many other respects, cannot even be bothered to perform here.
There’s been plenty of attention paid to Trump’s excessive (and implausibly denied) television watching, but it’s really more of a piece with his broader orientation away from the written word and toward oral culture. The president likes verbal briefings, phone conversations, and television because they’re all conducted aloud, sans reading. Wolff writes:
If he was not having his 6:30 dinner with Steve Bannon, then, more to his liking, he was in bed by that time with a cheeseburger, watching his three screens and making phone calls—the phone was his true contact point with the world—to a small group of friends, who charted his rising and falling levels of agitation through the evening and then compared notes with one another.
Trump has always loved the telephone: Stories of him calling business associates and friends, or reporters, whether under his own name or pseudonyms, litter his business career. (There are limitations, Wolff suggests: Aides found that Trump “could not really converse, not in the sense of sharing information, or of a balanced back-and-forth conversation.”) His conversations with friends are a crucial source of information and pressure release. Shortly after taking office, per the Times, Trump told a friend, “I can invite anyone for dinner, and they will come!” The ability to invite—and one presumes call—anyone and have them reply flatters Trump’s ego and seems to be one of the few parts of his position that he enjoys.
In view of this oral fixation, Trump’s affection for Twitter is not as paradoxical as it seems. It requires only 140, and now 280, characters at a time, is often fed by what he’s watching on TV, and it is only outgoing: The president need not read himself to tweet effectively. The conversationality of Twitter fits his M.O., too. While Trump is billed as the author of many books, it’s clear he didn’t actually write them. Art of the Deal ghostwriter Tony Schwartz savaged him during the campaign, while Trump has blamed errors in other bookson mysterious speechwriter Meredith McIver. It’s not like these books are great literary achievements, anyway. What Trump imparts to them is his conversational shtick. Unlike past presidents, there’s little evidence of a written record of letters or other correspondence, either. The paradigmatic Trump epistle is a cease-and-desist letter from counsel.
Trump’s particular affection for television is notable. As a Baby Boomer, he is a member of a generation raised on television and still especially fond of it. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, people in Trump’s age cohort watch an average of four hours of television a day, meaning his reported four-to-eight-hour habit is only somewhat greater than the norm. But that demographic also spends the most leisure time reading—almost an hour a day, per the BLS, by far the greatest of any age group.
There’s a reason so many 65-to-74-year-olds read a lot: Many of them are retired, and don’t have to do work. Trump, by contrast, has one of the most demanding jobs in the world. One reason that it’s demanding, however, is that the holder is expected to consume, digest, and absorb prodigious amounts of information via reading, and there’s little to suggest that Trump is doing that. Instead, he has taken that time up with phone conversations, television, and golf, another forum for oral communication. (Per Philip Bump, Trump played golf every 4.7 days in 2017, good for 10 full 24-hour days and far higher than Obama’s rate as president.)
Trump denies this, of course. “All my life I've heard that decisions are much different when you sit behind the desk in the Oval Office—in other words, when you're president of the United States,” he said earlier this year. “So I studied Afghanistan in great detail and from every conceivable angle.”
The president’s actions show little such sign of preparation and study, while displaying faulty understandings of many things. After visiting Saudi Arabia and hitting it off with the country’s leaders, he forcefully backed Riyadh in its dispute with Qatar and many other issues, over the objections of some of his staff—even publicly contradicting Tillerson. In December, however, he suddenly became concerned about the humanitarian crisis in Yemen. The minimal thought put into several of Trump’s core views on China became clear when President Xi Jinping was able to change his entire view of the Korean incident in 10 minutes—10 minutes of oral conversation, of course.
Then there was his more recent decision to recognize Jerusalem as capital of Israel and move the U.S. Embassy there. That decision was controversial but not without defenders, and the U.S. insisted the move did not settle the final status of Jerusalem in peace talks with the Palestinians. Apparently Trump did not get (or perhaps did not read) the memo, because in a tweet earlier this week he said that the U.S. had “taken Jerusalem, the toughest part of the negotiation, off the table,” rattling both Israelis and Palestinians.
The refusal to read, and the resulting limits of Trump’s understanding of complicated issues, doesn’t mean that every decision he makes is bad. Indeed, it can be liberating—allowing him to act on instinct, even in the face of expert reservations. My colleague Krishnadev Calamur, for example, writes that the anger that led the White House to freeze aid to Pakistan this week is understandable. But the shaky grasp of the underlying currents means Trump is more likely to blunder on any given case, and Trump’s misstatements and missteps earn him mockery and undermine his stature around the world.
Perhaps no single area better summarizes Trump’s strange tendency than his press shop. He was reportedly driven to distraction by Press Secretary Sean Spicer’s ill-fitting suits and bumbling demeanor, and eventually Spicer was pushed out in favor of Sarah Sanders, a calmer and more commanding force in the Brady Room. But in its written work, the White House press team continues to commit errors and gaffes and issue typo-flecked statements.
While most problems faced by presidential administrations are incredibly complex, the solution to problems caused by a president who does not read is fairly simple: He ought to start reading. Simple and easy are very different matters, though, and expecting a man who has always preferred chatting and watching television to the printed word to become a reader at 71 would be foolish. There’s no Trump pivot, especially not to the bookshelf.
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Double Good News from Yesterday

Not only did Auburn beat Mississippi State 80 to 68 at the Hump yesterday, but the Titans upset the Patriots.  I get great pleasure in seeing the New England Patriots and Tom Brady lose.  I do not care who wins the Super Bowl but at least it will not be New England.
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Thursday, January 2, 2020

America Divided

KATIE MARTIN / THE ATLANTIC
George Washington’s farewell address is often remembered for its warning against hyper-partisanship: “The alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge, natural to party dissension, which in different ages and countries has perpetrated the most horrid enormities, is itself a frightful despotism.” John Adams, Washington’s successor, similarly worried that “a division of the republic into two great parties … is to be dreaded as the great political evil.”
America has now become that dreaded divided republic. The existential menace is as foretold, and it is breaking the system of government the Founders put in place with the Constitution.
Though America’s two-party system goes back centuries, the threat today is new and different because the two parties are now truly distinct, a development that I date to the 2010 midterms. Until then, the two parties contained enough overlapping multitudes within them that the sort of bargaining and coalition-building natural to multiparty democracy could work inside the two-party system. No more. America now has just two parties, and that’s it.
The theory that guided Washington and Adams was simple, and widespread at the time. If a consistent partisan majority ever united to take control of the government, it would use its power to oppress the minority. The fragile consent of the governed would break down, and violence and authoritarianism would follow. This was how previous republics had fallen into civil wars, and the Framers were intent on learning from history, not repeating its mistakes.
James Madison, the preeminent theorist of the bunch and rightly called the father of the Constitution, supported the idea of an “extended republic” (a strong national government, as opposed to 13 loosely confederated states) for precisely this reason. In a small republic, he reasoned, factions could more easily unite into consistent governing majorities. But in a large republic, with more factions and more distance, a permanent majority with a permanent minority was less likely.
The Framers thought they were using the most advanced political theory of the time to prevent parties from forming. By separating powers across competing institutions, they thought a majority party would never form. Combine the two insights—a large, diverse republic with a separation of powers—and the hyper-partisanship that felled earlier republics would be averted. Or so they believed.
However, political parties formed almost immediately because modern mass democracy requires them, and partisanship became a strong identity, jumping across institutions and eventually collapsing the republic’s diversity into just two camps.
Yet separation of powers and federalism did work sort of as intended, for a long while. Presidents, senators, and House members all had different electoral incentives, complicating partisan unity, and state and local parties were stronger than national parties, also complicating unity.
For much of American political history, thus, the critique of the two-party system was not that the parties were too far apart. It was that they were too similar, and that they stood for too little. The parties operated as loose, big-tent coalitions of state and local parties, which made it hard to agree on much at a national level.
From the mid-1960s through the mid-’90s, American politics had something more like a four-party system, with liberal Democrats and conservative Republicans alongside liberal Republicans and conservative Democrats. Conservative Mississippi Democrats and liberal New York Democrats might have disagreed more than they agreed in Congress, but they could still get elected on local brands. You could have once said the same thing about liberal Vermont Republicans and conservative Kansas Republicans. Depending on the issue, different coalitions were possible, which allowed for the kind of fluid bargaining the constitutional system requires.
But that was before American politics became fully nationalized, a phenomenon that happened over several decades, powered in large part by a slow-moving post-civil-rights realignment of the two parties. National politics transformed from a compromise-oriented squabble over government spending into a zero-sum moral conflict over national culture and identity. As the conflict sharpened, the parties changed what they stood for. And as the parties changed, the conflict sharpened further. Liberal Republicans and conservative Democrats went extinct. The four-party system collapsed into just two parties.
The Democrats, the party of diversity and cosmopolitan values, came to dominate in cities but disappeared from the exurbs. And the Republicans, the party of traditional values and white, Christian identity, fled the cities and flourished in the exurbs. Partisan social bubbles began to grow, and congressional districts became more distinctly one party or the other. As a result, primaries, not general elections, determine the victor in many districts.
Over the past three decades, both parties have had roughly equal electoral strength nationally, making control of Washington constantly up for grabs. Since 1992, the country has cycled through two swings of the pendulum, from united Democratic government to divided government to united Republican government and back again, with both sides seeking that elusive permanent majority, and attempting to sharpen the distinctions between the parties in order to win it. This also intensified partisanship.
These triple developments—the nationalization of politics, the geographical-cultural partisan split, and consistently close elections—have reinforced one another, pushing both parties into top-down leadership, enforcing party discipline, and destroying cross-partisan deal making. Voters now vote the party, not the candidate. Candidates depend on the party brand. Everything is team loyalty. The stakes are too high for it to be otherwise.
The consequence is that today, America has a genuine two-party system with no overlap, the development the Framers feared most. And it shows no signs of resolving. The two parties are fully sorted by geography and cultural values, and absent a major realignment, neither side has a chance of becoming the dominant party in the near future. But the elusive permanent majority promises so much power, neither side is willing to give up on it.
This fundamentally breaks the system of separation of powers and checks and balances that the Framers created. Under unified government, congressional co-partisans have no incentive to check the president; their electoral success is tied to his success and popularity. Under divided government, congressional opposition partisans have no incentive to work with the president; their electoral success is tied to his failure and unpopularity. This is not a system of bargaining and compromise, but one of capitulation and stonewalling.
Congressional stonewalling, in turn, leads presidents to do more by executive authority, further strengthening the power of the presidency. A stronger presidency creates higher-stakes presidential elections, which exacerbates hyper-partisanship, which drives even more gridlock.
Meanwhile, as hyper-partisanship has intensified legislative gridlock, more and more important decisions are left to the judiciary to resolve. This makes the stakes of Supreme Court appointments even higher (especially with lifetime tenure), leading to nastier confirmation battles, and thus higher-stakes elections.
See how this all reinforces itself? That’s what makes it so tricky to resolve, at least in a two-party system with winner-take-all elections.
Political science has come a long way since 1787. Had the Framers been able to draw on the accumulated wisdom of today, they would have accepted that it is impossible to have a modern mass democracy without political parties, much as they might have wanted it. Parties make democracy work by structuring politics, limiting policy and voting choices to a manageable number. They represent and engage diffuse citizens, bringing them together for a common purpose. Without political parties, politics turns chaotic and despotic.
The Founders also would have known that plurality elections (whoever gets the most votes wins) tend to generate just two parties, while proportional elections (vote shares in multi-winner districts translate into seat shares) tend to generate multiple parties, with the district size and threshold percentages shaping the number.
But at the time, the Framers believed they could have a democracy without parties, and the only electoral system in operation was the 1430 innovation of plurality voting, which they imported from Britain without debate. It wouldn’t be until the 19th century that reformers came up with new voting rules, and until the 20th century that most advanced democracies moved to proportional representation, supporting multiparty democracies.
Had the Framers accepted the inevitability of political parties, and understood the relationship between electoral rules and the number of parties, I believe they would have attempted to institutionalize multiparty democracy. Certainly, Madison would have. “Federalist No. 10,” with its praise of fluid and flexible coalitions, is a vision of multiparty democracy.
The good news is that nothing in the Constitution requires a two-party system, and nothing requires the country to hold simple plurality elections. The elections clause of the Constitution leaves states to decide their own rules, and reserves to Congress the power to intervene, a power that Congress has used over the years to enforce the very single-member districts that enforce the very plurality-winner single-member districts that keep the two-party system in place and ensure that most elections are uncompetitive.
If the country wanted to, it could move to a system of proportional representation for the very next congressional election. All it would take is an act of Congress. States could also act on their own.
Multiparty democracy is not perfect. But it is far superior in supporting the diversity, bargaining, and compromise that the Framers, and especially Madison, designed America’s institutions around, and which they saw as essential to the fragile experiment of self-government.
America has gone through several waves of political reform throughout its history. Today’s high levels of discontent and frustration suggest it may be on the verge of another. But the course of reform is always uncertain, and the key is understanding the problem that needs to be solved. In this case, the future of American democracy depends on heeding the warning of the past. The country must break the binary hyper-partisanship so at odds with its governing institutions, and so dangerous for self-governance. It must become a multiparty democracy.
This story is part of the project “The Battle for the Constitution,” in partnership with the National Constitution Center.
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