Trump 1-yr Retrospective

Shortly after Trump’s election, I wrote a few pieces on the subject, including “Why I Like Trump… AND Hillary” and “What Might Trump Actually Do?”. Both of these included predictions, so it’s time to evaluate how those predictions played out.

Qualitative Expectations
My main argument in favor of Trump was:
“If ever there was a complete huckster, a con-man who is master at the art of schmoozing and suckering, it's Trump. One of the two things that I really like about a Trump presidency is that there's no way in hell this guy is keeping his campaign promises. [...] The other thing I really like about Trump is that he has an established reputation for bringing in the most competent people to do the actual work. [...] if Trump's presidency goes anything like I expect, he'll be offloading all the work to extremely competent people, and he'll spend his time going around blustering and bullshitting and generally telling the public whatever they want to hear. In the best case, the competent people will get a great deal of freedom to do what needs to be done, while Trump bullshits the media.”

Over the past year, I’ve sat down at least four times to write a post saying I was wrong about Trump and he’s an awful president. Every time, I started by re-reading the above. And every time, I thought “actually, that’s mostly still true”. In every case, Trump was doing something really awful under a huge media spotlight… but ultimately with little impact. (Most notable examples are the Muslim travel ban and the trans military ban, both of which withered away in court.)

That said, I definitely got some parts wrong. Even without explicitly predicting much competence from Trump himself, I still overestimated his general competence and underestimated his awfulness. The trans military ban in particular was completely indefensible, even if it ultimately had little impact other than a media circus. Also, covfefe.

On the “hiring competent people front”, six months ago I was totally ready to admit that didn’t happen. But since then, the incompetent people have largely been fired - most notably Bannon. Tillerson’s great, Kelly’s great, Mnuchin’s solid, Gorsuch’s stellar. I don’t like Sessions, but I can’t fault his competence (and I’m sure many of you would say the same for some of the other names I’ve listed). It’s still not 100%, but overall, the “Trump serves as media shit umbrella while competent people do their thing” model seems to be up and running.

Specific Prediction Performance
Alright, time to march down the list of more specific predictions from “What Might Trump Actually Do?”. Here were the main predictions, by header:

• Term limits/lobbying/etc. Predictions: no term limits, lobbying & fundraising limits unlikely, hiring and regulation freezes plausible. Result: no term limits, no lobbying & fundraising limits, hiring and regulation freezes both happened. 
• Trade, jobs, EPA. Predictions: abandoning TPP and renegotiating NAFTA were plausible, and cutting various environmental regulations and funding was likely. Result: NAFTA is still on hold, but this stuff has mostly happened. 
• Immigration & Misc. Predictions: pro-judicial-constraint, mostly ignore abortion & gay marriage, lots of noise but not much substantive change on immigration. Result: judicial appointment specifically known for “textualism”, mostly ignored abortion & gay marriage, mostly noise on immigration so far. 

To be fair, I hedged by not giving numerical probabilities for these. Overall, things I found “unlikely” didn’t happen, things I found “plausible” or “likely” almost all happened. The biggest single thing I was wrong about was immigration: there’s already been more substantive damage there than I expected, and likely more to come. Even so, “mostly noise” still seems like an accurate description.

Next, I had a list of predictions about Trump’s legislative agenda. I won’t go through the whole list - most of them haven’t seen any major bill in Congress, which wasn’t a possibility I accounted for. The big two have obviously been healthcare and taxes; I predicted both of these would be high priorities and would definitely pass with all-Republican president and Congress. Obviously, I was very wrong about one of those, and very right about the other. Overall, I don’t think I outperformed (or underperformed) pundit predictions on the legislative front.

Finally, I predicted that Trump wouldn’t do anything particularly awful which wasn’t on the list. The trans military ban proved me wrong on that front, though happily it’s been the one exception to a generally-accurate rule. With that one exception, I think I had a generally accurate idea of what we were in for under a Trump presidency.

Main conclusion, one year later: damn, that was a LOT of media noise.

Would I do it again?
At this point… not sure. If you’d asked me a year ago, I would have predicted that Trump would perform worst relative to Hillary over the first year. Hillary’s big advantage was already having the day-to-day president skill set and knowledge base. I expect the worst of Trump has passed, and we’re just now getting to the point where the good parts might shine. We’ll see.

Perspective

There was some trouble posting this earlier; Blogger did something weird to the formatting. It's still not quite right, but I figured having something here is better than nothing, especially for people who use the RSS feed.

The first US census was taken in 1790. Boston, according to the census, housed 18,320 people. The famous Battle of Bunker Hill, Boston’s main battle in the American Revolution, saw about 2,400 colonial militia face off against at least 3,000 British redcoats.

Let’s put that in perspective. In 1970, Kent State University had about 21,000 students - slightly more than 1790 Boston. The protest which ended with the Kent State shootings drew about 2,000 students.

So, comparing the Battle of Bunker Hill and the Kent State shootings, we see communities of comparable size, and “rebel” forces of comparable size.

In 1775, a few strong writers and orators (e.g. Samuel and John Adams) could rile up the entire city of Boston to the point of armed rebellion. Imagine this today - despite the daydreams of protesters and organizers, it seems pretty unlikely that a major city would be driven to arms by politicians and activists. There’s just too many people to reach them all. But in 1775, the entire city if Boston was only as big as a mid-size modern university. The entire community could be riled up by a handful of writers and speakers.

The comparison between 1775 and today grows even stranger when we think about the battle itself. 2,000 militia - roughly comparable to a campus protest, but with guns - went toe-to-toe with the military of the world’s dominant empire. When the war was over, the student-protesters-with-guns came out ahead, and an entire new nation was founded.

In 1775, a person, a pen, and a soapbox could make that sort of thing happen. Today, no way. Why? Population growth. When the third largest city in the region is smaller than today’s universities, communities were small enough that a few people could mobilize a large fraction of the population. But as populations grew, the methods which once mobilized tight communities no longer worked.

One more piece of perspective, to drive home the point. In the 1790 US census, New York City had a population of 33,131. That’s comparable to today’s Claremont, CA, where I went to college. Claremont isn’t a tiny town - most people don’t know each other. On the other hand, their kids all go to the same high school (Claremont High). That was New York City, the largest city in the US, in 1790: small enough that everybody’s kids would have fit in one modern-day high school.

Some of the teachers at Claremont High have probably met a majority of the people in Claremont. Shaking hands with everyone in the city is quite feasible, and politicians in 1790 New York probably did just that.

And that was the largest city in the nation! When Jefferson called the US a nation of small farmers, he wasn’t waxing poetic or fantasizing. The whole nation had 3.9 million people in 1790; the 24 largest cities housed just 0.2 million. 90% of the population worked on farms - I’ll have more to say about this in a future post.