Is the Presidency Broken?

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The White House is a swirling mess of chaos and disappointment.

Not just this White House, basically every presidential administration in living memory.

What if the problem isn't the president?

What if it's the presidency?

This

is Radio Atlantic.

Hi, I'm Matt Thompson, Executive Editor of The Atlantic.

With me here in DC is my esteemed co-host, Jeffrey Goldberg, The Atlantic's editor-in-chief.

Hello, Jeff.

Hello, Matt.

We have with us also, for the first time around the Radio Atlantic table, one of our staff writers, Elena Plott, who covers politics for the Atlantic.

Hello, Elena.

Hi, Matt.

And with us is a guest from another podcast,

John Dickerson, a host of many things.

I thought his show was called Stranger Things.

Isn't he the host of Stranger Things?

I would like to be a host of Stranger Things.

In our family, we just binged over the spring break.

It's not healthy psychologically to binge on Stranger Things.

And don't do it the night before when you're living in strange quarters.

John, welcome to Radio Atlantic.

Thank you very much.

I'm happy to be out of my podcast bubble and in a new podcast bubble, Matt.

Well, we put you into a magazine bubble this month.

Your piece, which is the cover story of the May issue of The Atlantic, is about the impossibility of the presidency.

It is, of course, cliched to observe that the chaos of the White House at this particular moment in time.

But people blame President Trump for the disarray in the White House.

And we wanted to ask you, how much is just the job itself?

In your story, you call the presidency the hardest job in the world.

Why is it so hard?

Well, there is all the things going on in the drama of President Trump.

There are new dramas breaking out, even as I speak right now.

And one of the things about that is that it occludes our ability to look at the rest of the presidency.

The reason the job has become so difficult is that basically

you've got two big problems.

One is that the primary job of the president, which is to protect the country, has gotten much more difficult and much more intense.

So after obviously the presidency,

it got much bigger during the Civil War and then it kind of shrunk back.

Then during FDR, it basically exploded.

And then after 9-11, it not only got bigger, but the number of threats, it wasn't just one slow-moving Soviet Union that had to be worried about.

It was the threat could come through cyber, through the mail, through North Korean nuclear weaponry.

And so the presidency, just on that one specific point,

was

much more dangerous and much more on the president's plate.

And then, of course, you have the growth of the presidency that has come just in the accretion of duties that have been both ceremonial and policy-wise that have grown to the president, A, because our expectations have changed, and we can talk about that in all kinds of different ways.

And the expectations have been changed both by the public and also by the people who run for the office, who learned that the more you promise, the easier it is or the better chance you have of getting elected.

But that also means your to-do list when you get into the job is quite long.

And the abdication of the role traditionally assigned to Congress by the founders to be an active participant in government,

that role has really diminished into this kind of shriveled thing in which Congress struggles mightily to simply keep the lights on in government, which is the basic job that it can do.

And it has not done the job of producing a budget and appropriations bills on time for more than 20 years.

That's just the job.

That's just the starting stakes for the job in Congress, let alone tackling any of the big problems.

Every time Congress doesn't do something, it puts more on the president's plate.

So that's why it's gotten harder.

John, would you step back?

I mean, you could step back as far as you want to go, but give us a sense of what the presidency, the size of the presidency, the physical size of the presidency at the

beginning of the FDR administration.

Aaron Ross Powell, Right.

So, just stepping back for a minute, first the earth cooled.

Then, you know,

yeah.

When did dinosaurs disappear?

So, I think for me, one of the great moments in this narrative is in 1938.

So, basically, Roosevelt realizes that the presidency, he has no help.

And so, he

commissions a committee to look at the executive branch and

all the agencies in the executive branch.

So

the State Department, any of his cabinet agencies, and

sort of give it a once-ofer, as if McKinsey were being brought in.

And the Brownlow committee that looked at this, essentially, the conclusion of the Brownlow committee was the president needs help.

Now,

it had a lot of words behind that, but that was the thrust of the multi-document report.

And so Roosevelt asked Congress, because this was back when the executive branch, in order to enlarge itself, had to go to Congress for money and approval, which now is, you know, presidents do all kinds of things without even thinking of Congress.

But to do the basic first change in the office, programmatic change in the office of the presidency since it was created, Eisenhower had to go to Congress.

And Congress, which had Democratic majority, said no.

They said, you're not getting what you want.

You can neither reorganize the presidency and you can't get the staffers you want.

And he was asking for a handful of staffers.

I mean, he's not asking for less, I think, than a dozen.

In the end, he gets six.

But Roosevelt asks for this from Congress, and basically, people march in the streets.

300,000 telegrams are sent to the Congress.

100 or so people, many of whom are dressed up as Paul Revere, march down Pennsylvania Avenue

decrying one-man rule and the idea that this was the president's effort to basically grab more power for the presidency.

Roosevelt was so offended by the fact that Democrats of his own party turned down his request for

a few small staffers that he had a fireside chat in which he promised to purge the Democratic Party of those Democrats, which was itself an extraordinary thing.

The Democratic Party responded by basically giving him a raspberry.

Basically, none of the candidates he backed, none of the Democrats he backed against other Democrats won.

And he ultimately had to basically go begging to Congress.

He got six staffers, and Congress said, you can get them and reorganize the presidency, but for two years, and then we're going to reevaluate.

And if we don't like it, it has to go back to the old way.

And then that kind of opened the door, though, plus the Second World War, which basically the Second World War is what does it,

to the expansion of the presidency.

And the national security state, which was then increased by various subsequent presidents, ended up really mushrooming the job.

We expect a lot of things from a president, and the campaign is an audition for a certain type of job.

What does a campaign test a president for, and how does that differ from what a president actually needs to fill the role?

Aaron Powell, this is in some ways the genesis of this whole project, which Jeffrey and I have talked about in one form or another over the years,

you know, in green rooms and I'd like to say in bars, just to up the nature of the conversation.

Yeah, but mainly green rooms.

But yeah,

green rooms and other hothouses of elite opinion.

But I

many years ago wrote a series for Slate about the presidency and how basically in campaigns we don't test for the attributes that are required in the presidency.

And the more I've thought about that and then covered presidencies and then watched certainly the last campaign in 16,

basically the system selects for people who lack the attributes for the job that they then go in to have.

And so the two big causes of trouble here are one, the primary system, which essentially accentuates the most ideologically powerful voices in a party.

And when the presidency was first designed for the, and depending on where you want to put the time down,

for either, you know, 60 years or 100 years, the idea was you weren't supposed to run for office.

Anybody who had the virtue to be a president wouldn't go asking for votes.

And the idea was, the norm was that any president who sort of had to ask for votes from the people would be basically selling themselves and setting up the conditions perhaps for going into office and being beholden to those people instead of acting with reason and virtue.

Well, that's obviously gone out the window and the primaries helped

help basically put that in the grave.

And the second thing, of course, is television.

So you've got candidates who are conditioned for two years to play to the crowd and always play to the crowd and claim in greater and greater, it's like somebody who wears cologne.

You know, at first they put a little on, and then after a couple of weeks,

they're just turning the bottle upside down over their head because they become inured to the strength of the cologne.

And this is true with presidential promises.

At first, they were sort of modest in scope, and then you have Donald Trump proclaiming at his convention, I alone can fix it.

And the it is all problems known to man.

So, and I just quickly, television, of course, accentuates this, making it it more of a show.

And there's this wonderful symbiotic relationship between the growth of Hollywood tricks and the way in which campaigns both mirror those tricks and then employ those tricks and the way in which the voters become used to and have expectations for the kinds of action hero performances by a president that are all very much shaped by popular culture.

So there's kind of a straight line in a way from Kennedy in West Virginia in 1960 to Donald Trump and his reality show presidential campaign and presidency, all of which accentuates doing things that are entertaining rather than the slow, boring thing of a presidency, which is about management, persuasion, contemplation, restraint, none of which a campaign encourages.

Trevor Burrus: So, John,

one thing I loved you pointed out in your piece was just the sheer difference in vocabulary about campaigns.

We once stood for office, now we run for office.

And I was wondering if you, through your reporting research, kind of arrived at what you thought was the appropriate middle ground between those two things to both, you know, test a candidate's rhetoric, pomp, and whatnot, but also his

fitness for office.

It's a great question.

And I spent a lot of time, well, talking to

presidents about this and also Gautamakunda from Harvard, who wrote a whole book about,

and the book spends a lot of time looking at the way corporations pick for executives and the way presidencies do.

And

one of the major things he points out is that in corporations, when you get down to the five who are in the running to be CEO, they have all by their careers and patterns and habits of mind achieved 90% of CEO-ness because they've just been basically tested by the process.

And so they are all more or less going to be fine.

Now, the difference between say a Lewis Gerstner and Lewis Smith,

there may be that extra 10% that makes a fantastic CEO.

But if the second best person was picked, they may not be fantastic, but they would still be pretty good because they would have a lot of the attributes required to run that corporation because they had kind of come up through a system.

And even if you are selected across companies, you are honed.

And one of the things that's honed is your adaptability, your creativity.

So it's not just that you're a cookie cotter.

It's not just the elevation of the organizational man, but there is a way in which which corporations test.

Presidencies and the way we elect presidents don't test for much of anything anymore other than this kind of public salesmanship part of the job.

Now, that's a crucial part of the presidency.

We can very quickly come up with moments when the president's rhetoric and the president's sense of moment in a national crisis

have made the difference.

And so it's not that that's not a part of the job.

It's just that it's gotten out of shape in terms of the priorities and in terms of both the way we select for that priority and also the way in which presidents, when they come into office, and we all know this is true of modern presidents, when things go wrong, they say, well, you know, they have a meeting with their communications staff and they say, you know, if we just talked about this differently, President Obama often used to say that and would say, you know, when asked what his mistake was in his after the healthcare

debacle, the first debacle, not the second, the first being the 2010 election.

He said, you know, basically we didn't communicate with people.

I think the basic challenge is to have enough sizzle and enough stake.

So enough sizzle to both get elected and to have what Nixon called the lift of the driving dream, which is to give people a sense that their government is working for them in the grooves of the American tradition and to make them feel proud about their White House and their presidency, if for no other reason than to leave them alone.

Because if you think that they're swinging in Washington for you, you can go about living your life and kind kind of leave Washington alone to have enough of that and then have enough of the boring stuff, which includes schmoozing with politicians, which is a bootless pursuit in a lot of cases because of partisanship.

But those other skills would be a political skill, which is both knowing how to read the landscape and work the kind of quote-unquote inside game.

That would not only mean with respect to Congress, but also your cabinet.

Basically, knowing how to be a leader of men and women, how to imprint your will on them, give them enough autonomy to exercise their own sense of creativity and their own sense of mission, but within a framework that you've set, all stuff that

leaders talk about, but that there is no rule book or training manual for a presidency.

And then finally, to basically know the mix of management, internal persuasion, and showmanship and kind of have that balance right in terms of where you put your energy as a president.

John, in the modern era, who did it well?

Huh.

Well, you can include Coolidge in the modern era if that makes it easier for you.

Right.

I love Coolidge's quote, which is basically that

I'll butcher it slightly, but the greatest thing he did often was minding his own business.

You know,

this is a part of what this piece is about and about what this entire conversation is about, which is what does well mean?

So, for example,

you know, if you think of disaster relief under President Obama, you can either think of it as the BP oil spill, or you can think of it as the other thing that you can't think of, which is to say you can't think of other natural disasters that the Obama team messed up because Craig Fugate at FEMA was super dedicated, super focused, and basically managed all the disasters that happened on Obama's watch.

He showed up and did the ceremonial part of the presidency.

But one of the reasons the presidency has ballooned is you have a president who is on the hook there for an oil spill he had nothing to do with.

It was not the fault of the presidency, and yet he was absolutely on the hook for plugging that leak.

And so the question is whether a president really legitimately should be responsible for that.

You have to have a national response, yes.

But to the extent that he paid a political price for that, it may be a part of the way in which the presidency is unrealistic.

John,

let me reframe the question.

Who's your favorite president?

Yeah.

Well, I think, no, but I think when you look at.

Just say Coolidge and we'll be done with it.

Yeah.

Well, no, I mean, you know, obviously.

Dispositionally Coolidge.

Obviously, Lincoln, you know, was pretty extraordinary.

You know, I mean, so, but this is what's, I mean, obviously I can go on and on, but if you look at FDR and some of the things he did, so FDR was obviously considered

correctly as a great president.

But if you look at some of the things he did with, let's try, you know, the court packing or the attempt to purge Democrats from his own party.

In today's world, if a president tried to do that,

entire cable channels would melt,

both because of the extreme power grab in trying to pack the courts and then the utter and massive and complete catastrophic failure for FDR.

I mean, he had massive failures in his presidency that we would never allow presidents to recover from here.

And so,

you know, so that

is just when you think about measuring presidents, it's also kind of deciding how you want to measure them within their time.

And also, FDR's capacity for

basically telling straight-out lies to both his allies and his opponents

was extraordinary.

And in today's age, he would never have been able to get away with.

I think Reagan is

time and again, people, both Democrats and Republicans, talk about Reagan and his ability to basically, you know, I was talking to somebody in the Obama administration who is a big fan of the presidents and his intellectual approach to everything.

But he said, you know, with Reagan, you knew, even if you didn't talk to him for a year, you knew he basically wanted to cut taxes, shrink government, and beat the communists.

And basically, every day, if you woke up and said, what am I doing in my job to achieve those three goals?

you were in pretty good shape.

You knew you were going to be doing the right thing.

And so the entire administration had that organizing principle.

And the criticism of President Obama was that everything was being

because of the president's brain power, his interest,

his sense that this was the best way to do things, and the complexities of, you know, it was easier when you had one, when you had the Soviet Union, in a way, in terms of just

easier as a matter of framing your to-do list.

It's a lot harder when you have, you know, nation states that are falling apart and

non-state actors and so forth.

So,

but when talking to people about that organizational direction given by a president, Reagan comes comes up again and again.

So, talking about how we measure presidents, I want to get your sense of how the press has changed and impacted how we look at presidents.

I loved your line: the press has a way of describing debate as discord.

What's your sense of when that sort of palace intrigue incentive structure started?

And I mean, is it fair to say that the press does have a way of dictating what our metrics are for viewing presidents?

Well, I mean, the press was, of course,

has just always been awful.

Right.

So, I mean, if you look at the

tough but fair

present company included, what's the difference?

Tough but fair.

But I mean, if you look at, because, of course, the press for so long was highly partisan.

So, you know, if you look at the Washington administration,

his critics in the press, some of whom had been given leaks by Thomas Jefferson, were just savage.

I mean, no current,

even Sean Hannity

at his most well-rested and

fully energized could not attack President Obama the way James Thompson Callender did

either Washington or Adams.

So, but then in the era of kind of

modern press, I think what basically, I think Kennedy is responsible for a lot of this.

And I think,

I mean, as soon as you started doing the inside heroic man theory of presidents and the kind of when I worked at Time, you know, one of my editors used to say there's the fallacy of the key moment.

And he was making this case when he was making basically the argument you have to come up with a key moment for your lead.

So I understand that this key moment probably was not the key moment or that it's a lot more complex, but you need to tell a story and it's got to begin somewhere.

And to the extent that we have these heroic moments of presidencies in news magazine writing and then in biographies, it accentuated this idea that the president alone in a room is the man, the single man who solves the extraordinary problem.

And Kennedy said the essence of the decision is oblique even to the decision maker, which is to say you don't know a lot of times how these decisions get made.

But the way we have covered it, starting really, I feel like with Kennedy, although if I thought about it more, I'm sure

I could start it somewhere else.

But

that kind of president as hero is one problem.

And then basically, then you get the campaignization of presidencies now, where in campaigns it's always about who's up, who's down.

And that essentially has moved into coverage of the presidency.

And then now with the hyper-partisanship, it's possible to cover.

And in fact, you can read stories about fights between the president and Congress and have no idea the actual thing over which they are fighting, but just that the Democrats wanted this,

you know, the Democrats wanted this to happen in 30 days and the president wanted it to happen in in 90 days.

And it'll be this huge story about Trump versus Schumer.

And you'll have no idea why 90 versus 30 days was important in the context of the debate over extending government funding.

Because it's all just basically about this is what the one side said, and this is what the other side said.

Elaine, I want to ask Elaine a question because she's a young

and

we're middles.

But could you imagine a situation

in America in which a president purposely made made him or herself a receding presence in American culture, which is to say a president who doesn't play the role of the monarch and go to every

tragedy and go to every hurricane and be an action figure on TV.

Do you think that people are so,

especially your age, but I suppose it's sort of a general general, a multi-generational question, people are so used to the president as consoler in chief,

cheerleader in chief,

that

a president who actually said, you know what, I'm not going to say anything in public this week because I got nothing to say.

Do you think people would accept that?

Or do you think

that we just, our expectations are so outsized now that you can't even imagine?

I don't think people would accept it at all.

I can't fathom a scenario in which, like Eisenhower, Trump, or a succeeding president were to say, I'm actually going to let FEMA take care of things because I trust my director and I'm going to stay in the background vis-a-vis this or that natural disaster.

I think people would be outraged.

And I actually think the press would be in a corresponding way, especially people in my generation.

I think we're so conditioned to kind of say, oh, the president is not present in this crucial moment.

He's playing golf.

The country.

Yeah, exactly.

And, you know, it seems like I was so interested reading that Eisenhower very much said in

one natural disaster or another, I am going to stick in the background.

I am, I think he was playing golf in that moment.

I mean, pundits would have their fill of of airtime for days and days and days talking about that alone.

And I don't know what would have to change for that to no longer be the scenario.

One thing I wonder about, and this is a question for the thought experiment for you, Elena, also a question for you, John.

What is to prevent a president?

from being fully the performative, from being the monarch, as Jeff put it?

I mean, this argument comes up from time to time that America should have

just Beyonce should just be our monarch and that she.

Wait, Should we all decide that Beyonce was the monarch?

I mean, obviously.

I must have missed that meeting.

John, did you hear about that?

Yeah, run this.

Well, it's important.

No, I mean, fine.

I'm sure she would win, but I'm just saying, like, I didn't know that that was in the cards.

What's to prevent a president from saying actually the converse?

Not that I want to recede from the job.

All I want to do is perform?

I just want to be the figurehead.

And I've got a very capable bureaucrat that's going to delete all the boring parts and navigate all the probabilities that Obama was talking about.

There's this wonderful litany, John, in your piece of the five days around the White House correspondents dinner in April of 2011, when Obama was chairing the National Security Council time after time, but also doing an education policy speech, meeting with the leaders of Denmark, Brazil, and Panama, trying to avoid a government shutdown, doing a budget speech, immigration reform meetings.

And then there were all these public events that you could just siphon off and have someone be fully dedicated to, no?

Well, it depends.

And again, it depends on our expectations.

You know, going back just briefly to Eisenhower, he played 900 days of golf in his two years.

That's like almost a third of each year he played golf.

He would disappear to Augusta for weeks at a time to go play golf.

And yeah, he got a little grief at the end of his presidency, and Kennedy wouldn't be caught dead carrying a golf club because of the sort of blowback after Eisenhower.

But the expectations were

just so different.

Now, what if somebody tried to just be performative?

Well, I mean, the problem is, would that carry?

Would the bureaucrat?

I mean, in a sense, we are, by the way,

we're seeing a bit of that kind of an experiment now, except that the bureaucrat is just not being assigned.

Well, you know, you remember there was a great moment when

it was it, I can't remember who was being recruited for this vice presidency.

Maybe it was Kasich.

Kasich.

Kasich, yeah.

And he was talking to a Trump campaign official, and Kasich was told, well, the vice president will be in charge of foreign policy and domestic policy.

And then he said, well, what does the president do?

And the president would be in charge of making America great again.

So in theory, the Trump people had this model sort of in mind, but it didn't actually work out that way.

After the break, we'll turn to the Trump presidency and ask John how this administration is testing the president's job.

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All right, now, John, we've talked broadly about the challenges of the presidency.

How does the Trump administration in particular fit in?

Well, it is, I mean, one of the reasons we became enthusiastic with this piece beyond the fact that we had all signed on to it is that, you know, the president is putting us through a test of the presidency.

And there are a lot of beliefs and standards over time that are now getting

a full testing, and we'll see if they work out.

I mean, one of the jobs of the presidency is to be to have a system in place and have people working for you so that when the emergency hits, you've got a team in place that can handle it.

Well,

thank God we have not had yet that emergency that was not otherwise self-created to test the system.

But the second, among the many other duties of the presidency and the system, is that you're supposed to have a system in place so that you can tackle proactively the problems facing America.

And we certainly have a great number of them, and you hope not to exacerbate them, whether it's entitlement, whether it's climate change, whether it's the changing workforce in America, the

numbers of things that would benefit from the convening power of a president, the rhetorical power of a president to ask the country to do what would be required to take on some of these challenges.

All of that is basically fallow.

We also have, in a country in which we have extraordinary income inequality and also where you have either overt or simmering racial tensions and certainly inequities that

are exacerbated by

disunity or racial division, it has traditionally been the president's job to work towards unity

on the racial front, but also as we are more polarized now in some ways by party and by ideology than we are by race,

it is traditionally been the president's job to rush in there and be the president of the entire country.

What Donald Trump is doing really, he is our first base-only president in the modern era, which I say to protect myself, but you know,

which is to say a president who basically cares about his base, who doesn't really even, except for very, very, very rarely, make the traditional noises a president does about unifying the country behind a common set of ideas.

I mean, he would like the country to unify, but basically to unify behind what he would want them to unify behind.

And that's extraordinary.

And all of that stuff is not being done.

And the question is, well, what's the cost of that?

And that is a bit of a test of your question, Matt.

I think that if you had a president who tried to do this, sort of assign the bureaucrat and

then be the figurehead, the problem is if one of the roles of the president is to work Congress, and we can debate whether that's even possible anymore given the way Congress is so configured, You can't go back to the Johnson model or any previous president because they had people they could work with.

They could work with the other party.

There were people who were less ideologically homogeneous in their own parties.

So a president can't really do that.

But to the extent that a president must work with Congress, you need the guy with the ceremonial power because his ceremonial power is what gives you and elevates you in your life.

So if he's got the Beyoncé power, you want some of that sprinkled on your head because you have your own ego needs and you want to get re-elected.

And so simply achieving things the way a bureaucrat would do it would actually not give you the gold dust you need to both get the fame you want and then to get the re-election power you want.

But again, because things are so partisan,

I'd have to think that through a little bit more in terms of you'd have to break the partisan problem we have right now, as well as

those other things that I ran into about having this separated power structure.

But this is an interesting point, John.

As you point out, we are living a very unique version of this thought experiment.

Call him Schrödinger's president, because Trump is both in the picture and out of the picture at once, curiously.

Elena, I have a question for you about this.

Just the other day, you and our colleague Rob Meyer broke a big scoop about

an occurrence within the EPA.

Scott Pruitt, the EPA administrator, kind of bypassing the White House to give raises to some key aides after the White House has formally considered the request and dismissed it.

Once this information got to the White House, it became part of a current firestorm that has surrounded the EPA and Pruitt's role as its head.

But it was one of those scenarios where we see both at once

an absent president and a president being routed around and a

White House that very much wants to be in the picture and has its own agenda.

What does President Trump illustrate to you about how an executive might inhabit this seat performatively?

Well, I think taking this,

how all of this unfolded with Scott Pruitt, say they had gone to the White House with another request, something less controversial, didn't have to do with raises or taxpayer monies or anything like that.

I don't know, maybe to start a new study about a contaminant or something.

And for some reason, they went to the White House with this request and the White House said no.

I think for somebody like President Trump, and based on people I talked to

in the White House, to be defied like that is a huge problem.

And I actually think this president, with regard to his cabinet, would prefer to never be asked in the first place because then he can

kind of slough off all blame for whatever may go horribly awry.

He can also claim credit, though, if it goes really well and says, Look, that's my cabinet person.

I hired the best people.

I'm wonderful.

But from what I can tell, and I know this having profiled Ryan Zinke too, they actually think that the less you tell this president, the better,

because everything bad that happens falls on you, which, if we're talking about, you know, whether it's the president's separateness from his cabinet, from Congress, might not be the worst thing in the entire world.

Maybe not for the motivations that drive Trump in particular, but it's not the worst thing to talk about.

One of my favorite formulations in your piece, John, was the president is the jumpy man who presses the elevator button a second time, then a third time with his umbrella.

It feels good.

It looks like action, but the elevator does not move faster.

You mentioned the imperatives that heap upon the head of the president for a sense of action, for the performance of activity at any given point.

Do you think that there's an opportunity for a president after Trump, given how much action and chaos and activity and ferment there is at any given moment?

Do you think that there's an opportunity for the next president to slow down?

To do nothing?

And never give a press conference?

Well, you know, the biggest opportunity is the opportunity that still is before President Trump.

It's like there's a trunk over across the room, which all he has to do is open and take out the magic weapon, which is that he is not ideologically fixed to anything.

And that, in a sense, could be magic because he could make his own coalitions across parties and do all kinds of things.

I mean, he would break Congress up into a crazy, wonderful

kind of place of maybe active and useful chaos if he decided to run his White House in the way some people thought he might, which is in a totally non-ideological way.

Now, he'd run into some little problems, like the Speaker of the House might not,

you know, might not allow votes to come to the floor and Mitch McConnell might block him too.

But you know what?

President Trump has a pretty good ability to use the bully pulpit and to shame and put punishment on

lawmakers.

And so you could see, now he would run afoul probably of Fox News.

But I mean, he could do, because he is not ideologically tied to a party or to a set of ideological beliefs, he could try to kind of mix and match things.

You know what else he could do, John?

It's really interesting.

It just struck me he does he could be the president who doesn't go to the hurricane and he could say i'm not going to the hurricane i got people to go to the hurricane he kind of didn't i mean well i mean he went to puerto rico and then of course he threw paper towels and we remember all that but he does he still actually performs he still does some of the performances and that's interesting to me and it would be that would be a great service by the way if he just said i don't why do i have to do this it's just getting in the way right that's the mitch daniels piece mitch daniels was the former omb director governor of indiana former political director under Reagan, basically said, you have to pare the job down to about three things.

And the new president has to basically say, here's what I'm going to do.

I'm going to try and increase prosperity in America,

level the playing field, and keep you all safe.

And everything else, I love you.

You Americans out there, you're awesome.

And here's how I'm going to delegate these parts of the job that are ceremonial and substantive.

to various different people.

You're going to get to know them well.

They're going to be really interesting.

But I'm focused on these three core things.

And to do that at the front end, President Trump has done it in this interesting way, which is he has in effect done a lot of that.

He has not done those things we expect the president to do on the ceremonial or the unity front.

But then,

and he's certainly not done what I talked about in terms of breaking through the parties

as some people kind of thought he could or might, given his interesting political background.

But he's also not really been effectively formulating his group to meet the promises of his own presidency.

If you think about the things that he promised that he would do, he promised that he would drain the swamp.

The swamp is in very good working order.

And it reminds me very much of, I mean, we not only

Elena's great work on Pruitt, but also

because what is Pruitt doing?

Basically, he is both personally and for his staff, basically gaming the system to enrich themselves or to make things easier for themselves than the system would otherwise have allowed.

That was one of the great condemnations of the president's inaugural address, which is that people who'd been in the swamp too long had done things and bent the rules for themselves and not for the forgotten men and women.

But if you look at Zinke, Shulkin, Pruitt, and then the president himself in terms of what he has chosen not to do to unwind himself from his family's own connections to his presidency, that is all what he was supposedly criticizing in his State of the Union.

And so

he has not put his energies and his administration's design towards the goal of meeting the things that he said he wanted to fix.

And also, the forgotten men and women, if you look at the policies he's put forward, other than if you follow his argument and

agree to his argument that basically reducing regulations and lowering corporate taxes will, in the end, help the forgotten men and women,

if you buy that, then he has in fact done things for them.

But there is a lot and a great deal that he could have done for the forgotten men and women, including in the health care bill, which was really not guided, directed towards them.

In many ways, it would have punished them had it been passed.

So if he's not doing the ceremonial job, what is he doing?

And is he doing things with his free time that align with what he promised that he would do?

And that's,

there's not a whole heck of a lot of evidence.

What he ends up being is a pretty conventional Republican president.

And,

you know, Grover Norquist said that at one point, I think before 12 or 16, I can't remember.

He said, we just want somebody somebody with a warm hand who can sign Paul Ryan's budgets.

And it turns out Paul Ryan's budget is not even what Republicans like if you look at this most recent spending bill.

So we are seeing an experiment going on, but what is the other stuff that's getting done?

with the free time that's not being, you know, that's been gotten by not doing the other parts of the presidency.

Well, John, one thing I wanted to ask, going back to Congress, and I know this was just a hypothetical you threw out, but

saying that McConnell or Ryan might not Trump's priorities to the floor.

I actually, through my time covering the hills, see it as the opposite, that Ryan and McConnell are so scared of bringing anything to the floor that doesn't have cover from the White House.

And I was wondering how you think that Congress and the presidency can work as intended, can work effectively if Congress won't move on something without White House approval, essentially.

How do you get out of that?

Yeah, so mine was in that hypothetical I was playing out where Trump makes deals with basically the mushy middle.

So in which he's putting together deals like comprehensive immigration reform that passed the Senate.

If the president has just said, I'd like to sign that.

I'm not certain that Paul Ryan's going to bring that to the floor in the House.

So that's what I meant in terms of if the president went down a different road.

Given the road that he is going down, which is

just

a

question, I really do.

Well,

yeah, I don't know.

He's been pretty timid about doing anything that wouldn't get a majority of his own conference, and that wouldn't have gotten a majority of his conference.

But maybe, you know, if the president threw his back into it.

But anyway, given where we are right now, which is that the president is not doing anything, you know, it's amazing when you think again about what the president promised that he would come to Washington.

He made the promise every candidate does, which he'll come to Washington, get everybody in a room, get them to agree.

He never really even got the people into the room.

I mean, to the extent that we have had, quote-unquote, getting everyone in the room moments, they've been like the meeting the president held on immigration and on gun control, gun rights, gun safety, however you want to phrase it.

And in both of those, the president said a bunch of things that ended up never to come to pass.

So he has not really tried to work with the other side or put deals together.

But in terms of your point about wanting cover, that's exactly right.

I mean, they're terrified that the president will turn on Congress and will turn on members.

I mean, it's interesting given that his approval rating in the country was bouncing around in the 30s for a while.

He nevertheless had control over Congress as if his approval rating was 100%.

And that's because he has such not only a relatively high approval rating among Republicans, but a super high approval rating among enthusiastic Republicans who can primary sitting members of Congress.

Which is funny when you think about

the examples of where that hasn't worked out.

I mean, obviously, if he had the Midas touch, he would have gotten Roy Moore

elected.

But they are fearful that if the president puts his finger on you in a negative way on Twitter, that can get you a primary opponent.

It can cause you to have to raise $2 million more dollars fighting off a primary opponent or fighting off your local version of Sean Hannity, who's now coming at you because the president has declared you not in sync with his thinking.

And then I think the other reason they want, Ryan and McConnell, want buy-in from the White House is they're tired of saying, okay, we would like A, B, and C.

And then the president, like on healthcare, saying it's too mean.

You know, the president saying, well, no, I now want D.

And then having to shuffle over to D and the president saying, why didn't you give me A, B, and C?

And so they have tried to get kind of things locked down so that they don't, you know, get undermined.

And we've seen basically time and again that they kind of have been by the president as he just kind of sloshes around in different positions.

Well, I would recommend to our listeners that if they're not.

I think we've solved all the problems.

Yeah, we've solved all the problems of the presidency.

And clearly, it's just, you know, to do what President Trump does, but it's only with a secret bureaucrat.

With Beyoncé.

Yes.

And Beyonce.

But if you haven't read John Dickerson's fantastic cover story on the issue of the Atlantic, do.

And now I turn to the question that I ask at the end of every Radio Atlantic episode.

What is it that you have heard, read, listened to, watched, experienced, or seen recently that you do not want to forget?

I want to play a very relevant keeper from our listener, David from Oregon, who has a book recommendation for us.

Lincoln on Leadership: Executive Strategies for Tough Times, an out-of-print book by Donald Key Phillips.

I've read it a number of times over the years, but I'm reading it again.

And in these times that we're facing here in the US of A,

it's refreshing and it's comforting to know there is a standard of a leader who took his job and his responsibilities seriously.

I especially commend his discussion of how Lincoln dealt with personnel issues.

In particular,

his letter to Major General Joseph Hooker from January 1863.

It is just amazing and instructive about what a true leader he was.

Thank you.

We'll drop a link to a copy of that letter in our show notes so you can check it out as a taste of Don Phillips' book.

David, thank you.

And listeners, stay tuned to the credits so you can figure out how to leave us a keeper.

And now to John.

What would you like to keep?

What would I like to keep?

Well, I think the

Educated by Tara Westover, which I guess it's now been, well, anyway,

read it a little while ago, but it has really stuck with me both as

a piece of writing, as a story about her life,

and as

and also listening to her talk about the process of writing it, which I interviewed her about the book.

And

that's really stuck with me recently.

And then I'm going to shovel in another one, which is this book, Meltdown, which is about complicated systems and why they break down and

how there is a kind of DNA to complicated and complex systems that can be studied and measured.

And since I've just spent all this time on

the presidency, which is itself a super complicated

system,

this was a really interesting book in that context as well.

So

those are my two things.

That's fantastic.

And we will drop the links in the show notes.

Elena, what do you not want to forget?

I just finished reading Lincoln and the Bardo by George Saunders.

I couldn't put it down.

I read it in two days.

But I don't know if the image of President Lincoln holding his deceased child in his arms just for kind of one last conversation before they parted for good will ever leave me.

All right.

Sorry for such a dour.

It's okay.

You can bring it down.

We've talked some real downers.

Don't worry.

Sorry, Jeff.

What is your key?

I'm going to stay on the theme.

When we were working on John's piece, his cover story, I went back and watched much of the not so old, but old enough HBO series on John Adams,

which is just fantastic.

Paul Giamatti.

It's just fantastic.

It's worth watching.

Many, many hours,

but it's worth it.

There was one moment

in which

this sort of frames out this issue that we were talking talking about.

One moment when John Adams has completed his term,

steps out of the White House, a carriage pulls up,

a regular commercial carriage.

He gets on the carriage.

People look at him as if they sort of recognize him somewhere, and he says, Yes, it's me.

And then

he takes the carriage off from the White House, you know, from the front stoop of the White House and heads back to Boston.

And I just, you know, you watch that and you think, you know, my God, the presidency,

it's an understatement of the century to say the presidency has changed, but that was, it was a modest office for

people who are meant to position themselves in the world in a modest way.

But it's a brilliant, it's a brilliant mini-series.

Fantastic.

And you pulled that move before, Jeff.

I've heard it.

Yes, it's me.

Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh.

Personally, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yes, it's me.

You all have heard the adage, sing like no one is listening, love like you've never been hurt, dance like nobody's watching, and live like it's heaven.

That's a bumper sticker on your bicycle.

Yes, Yes, something like that.

Um, I want to take that, but substitute it with sing like Tiffany Haddish, love like Tiffany Haddish, dance like Tiffany Haddish, and live like Tiffany Haddish.

I guess we're having Tiffany Haddish on the show.

I would like to have Tiffany Haddish on the show.

We'll try to get that.

So, the occasion in part is just that Tiffany Haddish is having a moment of performing celebrity to speak another topic from

this episode

that is going to go down in history, in the books, in in the annals of celebrity is just a legendary moment.

She is so delightful.

In every late night performance that you hear her in, every SNL monologue that she gives.

She is pure, unadulterated joy, humor, and fun.

Katie Weaver did a fantastic profile of her in GQ recently that I will drop in the show notes for more of a sense of what makes Tiffany tick.

But Tiffany Haddish in 2018, we're going to be talking about it for a while.

And, you know, she's in Girl's Trip.

She is like the same person she is in real real life right so do you know her john john dickerson no not not at all come on you know all the famous people no no no no

but this is i mean

you could come on the podcast again when we have tiffany

one of the things that the piece is very good at is distilling where tiffany hadish's persona begins and where tiffany haddish's life ends

um at any rate fantastic john dickerson Thank you very much for joining us.

Come back again for the next day.

Contributing editor of the Atlantic, by the way.

Yeah, contributing.

Tiffany Editor editor of the atlantic here elena plott thank you for your spectacular reporting and you're joining us this episode jeff goldberg thanks as always thank you matt and we'll see you next week

That'll do it for this week's Radio Atlantic.

This episode was produced and edited by Kevin Townsend with production support from Kim Lau.

Our executive producer of Atlantic Podcasts is Catherine Wells.

Thanks as always to my esteemed co-host Jeffrey Goldberg and to our colleague Elena Plott for joining us.

Thanks also to John Dickerson for stepping out of all the host chairs and being a delightful guest on our show.

You can catch John every weekday morning on CBS This morning and hear him every week with the delightful crew at the Slate Political Gab Fest.

What do you not want to forget?

Leave us a voicemail with your keeper at 202-266-7600.

Don't forget your contact info and feel free to tell us how we're doing.

Check us out at facebook.com slash radioatlantic and theatlantic.com slash radio.

Catch those show notes in the episode description.

And if you like what you're hearing, rate and review us in Apple Podcasts and subscribe in your preferred podcast app.

But most importantly, thank you for listening.

May you dance like Tiffany Haddish, sing like Tiffany Haddish, love like Tiffany Haddish, and maybe one day even hang out with Tiffany Haddish.

We'll see you next week.