On April 28, 1982, fifteen months into his first term, President Ronald Reagan went up to Capitol Hill to meet with Tip O’Neill, the Democratic Speaker of the House. The two Irish-American politicians had to that point been bitter enemies. As Reagan had pursued his conservative agenda of tax cuts, a military buildup, and deregulation, O’Neill had done everything he could to resist. Now, though, with the budget deficit rising and the markets getting concerned about Washington’s solvency, the Republican and the Democrat needed each other’s help. The White House wanted to cut domestic spending, including Social Security. O’Neill wanted to safeguard entitlement programs and reverse some of Reagan’s tax cuts for the rich.
The meeting took place in the President’s Room, just off the Senate floor. As Laurence I. Barrett, a Time magazine reporter, recalled in his book “Gambling with History: Reagan in the White House,” from 1983, Reagan broke the ice by telling an off-color Irish joke that ended with the punch line “So I told her to shit in her hat and the fight was on.” Despite this inauspicious beginning, the two sides stuck at it. Four months later, they announced an agreement that formed the basis of the Tax Equity and Fiscal Responsibility Act of 1982, which increased tax revenues by about one per cent of G.D.P. Reagan and O’Neill also set up a bipartisan commission on Social Security, and the following year they both endorsed a set of reforms that put the finances of the public retirement system on a firmer footing. (The agreement delayed a cost-of-living adjustment and raised the retirement age. It also increased contributions and cut benefits for future retirees.)
Could this episode provide inspiration for Donald Trump following the demise of the House Republican health-care bill? Some reports say that Trump is so angry at the conservative Republicans who deserted him that he may change tack and reach out to Democrats. “This President is not going to be a partisan President,” Reince Priebus, the White House chief of staff, said on “Fox News Sunday.” “I think it’s time for our folks to come together; I also think it’s time to potentially get a few moderate Democrats on board as well.”
On certain issues, the idea of the White House picking up some Democratic votes is not outlandish. A number of Democratic senators are up for reëlection in 2018 in states that Trump won last year—and they might see working with the President as in their interest. In an extensively reported new piece in the Times Magazine, “Trump and Congress: Now What?,” Robert Draper recounts a December get-together between Trump and one of these senators, West Virginia’s Joe Manchin, at which Stephen Bannon, Trump’s chief strategist, took Manchin aside:
On Tuesday, the White House is expected to release an executive order reversing some of the Obama Administration’s efforts to promote clean air and tackle climate change by limiting emissions at coal-fired power stations. The order may also end a moratorium on coal mining on federal lands. Manchin, who in 2013 accused Barack Obama of declaring a war on coal, will surely support these measures. That could help the White House some, but the executive order will further alienate the vast majority of Democrats.
Given the scale of the defeat Trump just suffered, he needs to put up some big victories—and soon. With health-care reform sidelined and his travel ban frozen, the three main items on his domestic agenda are trade, tax reform, and infrastructure. In each of these areas, there are formidable barriers to getting legislation passed, with or without the odd Democratic supporter. Altering trade treaties requires a two-thirds majority in the Senate. Comprehensive tax reform of the sort Trump and his Treasury Secretary, Steven Mnuchin, have talked about would involve eliminating a vast array of tax breaks and loopholes, almost all of which have powerful lobbies supporting them. And although Trump has touted a trillion-dollar infrastructure plan that could conceivably attract Democratic support, he hasn’t said how he would pay for it. Until he does, it’s a nonstarter.
There’s a larger issue, too. Before Trump reaches out to Democrats, if that is his intention, he needs to decide who he is. Is he an economic populist or a trickle-down supply-sider? Is he a protectionist or a free trader who merely talks tough? Is he a big-government nationalist or a small-government Republican?
At the moment, Trump is talking like a populist and acting like a Paul Ryan Republican. The health-care bill would have amounted to a substantial tax cut for the very rich, financed by cuts in Medicaid, which serves the poor. The White House has yet to put forward a complete tax plan, but the proposal Trump campaigned on was hugely regressive. If it were enacted, the top tax rate would be reduced from 39.6 per cent to thirty-three per cent; the corporate tax rate, which also applies to investment partnerships, law firms, and other business partnerships, would be cut from thirty-five per cent to fifteen per cent; the estate tax would be eliminated, and so would the alternative minimum tax.
An analysis by the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center found that Trump’s tax proposal would reduce the tax bills of middle-income Americans by about one per cent ($1,090 a year). Households in the top one per cent would get a tax cut of about nine and a half per cent ($317,100 a year). The Trump Administration says that figures like this are misleading because they don’t take account of all the loopholes that will be eliminated. Steven Mnuchin, the Secretary of the Treasury, has stated flatly that “there would be no absolute tax cut for the upper class,” without providing any figures to back up this dubious claim.
Meanwhile, the Administration is quietly going about the business of stripping away regulations in order to benefit corporations. Working with its own conservative appointees and Republicans in Congress, it has already relaxed rules preventing mining companies from polluting streams and other sources of drinking water, passed a bill that rolls back workplace-safety regulations, and reversed an Obama Administration policy to stop employing private companies to run federal prisons. Trump has also proposed a Voldemort budget that demands sweeping cuts everywhere except the Pentagon. It would even cut programs that support after-school activities for poor kids and Meals on Wheels deliveries for the elderly.
Citing some of these developments, the Washington Post’s James Hohmann argued on Monday that “Trump is systematically succeeding in his quest to ‘deconstruct the administrative state,’ as his chief strategist Stephen K. Bannon puts it.” That may be going too far. But Trump is certainly pursuing a set of policies that could have been explicitly designed to alienate Democrats, and to preclude any sort of political accommodation.
Another factor to take into account: from what we’ve seen, Trump lacks the political skills to unite his own party, let alone win over Democrats. He’s a ranter who makes things up as he goes along. Reagan’s geniality was his big advantage, and when it came to policy details he often deferred to aides who knew what they were doing. Trump sorely lacks an equivalent to James Baker, Reagan’s wily chief of staff, who helped arrange the negotiations with O’Neill. Instead of Baker, Trump has Bannon, Priebus, and Jared Kushner—who appear to spend much of their time sniping at each other.
Even if the White House could learn from its early mistakes and start presenting a united front, the political environment has changed a lot since the early eighties—bipartisanship is much harder to achieve. Back then, O’Neill worried that his party might be punished in the 1982 midterms if it came to be perceived as needlessly obstructionist. After the past eight years, the accepted wisdom in Washington today is that obstructionism works and coöperation doesn’t. The electorate is so polarized that you don’t get credit for reaching across the aisle. All you do is rile up your party’s base and undermine your own position. The safer strategy is to copy Mitch McConnell’s tactics during the Obama era: obstruct, obstruct, obstruct.
Chuck Schumer, the Senate Minority Leader, understands this dynamic. Immediately after the election, he briefly indicated a willingness to work with Trump in certain areas. Now he is busy fighting the President’s entire legislative agenda, trying to filibuster Judge Neil Gorsuch’s confirmation to the Supreme Court, and calling on Ryan to choose a replacement for Devin Nunes as head of the House Intelligence Committee. In an interview with ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday, Schumer said that Trump, upon taking office, “moved so far to the hard right that it’s virtually impossible for us to work with him.” That is true, but Schumer is also following the path of least resistance. Trump appears to be floundering, and many Democratic voters consider him an illegitimate President.
For all these reasons, Trump will face a mighty challenge if he tries to pivot and attract Democrats. But the lessons of 1982 can’t be dismissed entirely. When Reagan started talking with O’Neill, a number of conservative Republicans in Congress, and even some members of his own staff, opposed him. On the Democratic side, liberals hated Reagan, and they resisted the idea of making concessions on entitlement programs. Much like Schumer is today, O’Neill was wary of being seen to consort with the enemy. At their meeting on April 28th, O’Neill “consented to sit next to Reagan for the obligatory ‘photo opportunity,’ but wanted it noted that he would move to the other side of the mahogany table to join his Democratic colleagues for the real business,” Barrett wrote.
Contrary to Washington mythology, Reagan and O’Neill never became close. But on this occasion circumstances drove them to coöperate. Could something similar happen to Trump and Schumer, or Trump and Nancy Pelosi? One possibility is that the White House could twin tax reform with infrastructure spending, and seek a bargain with the Democrats. Even if that doesn’t happen, some coöperation may be essential. Later this year, Congress will have to raise the debt ceiling to prevent a federal government shutdown. If history repeats itself and the members of the Freedom Caucus balk at approving a raise, as they did during the Obama years, the White House will need the support of House Democrats to get such a measure through. Trump, if he can overcome his aversion to reading, should find a copy of Barrett’s book.
Instead of doing that, though, he’s immediately gone back to attacking Democrats and sounding like a crazy person. On Saturday, he tweeted: “The Democrats will make a deal with me on healthcare as soon as ObamaCare folds – not long. Do not worry, we are in very good shape!” On Monday night, he wrote, “Why isn't the House Intelligence Committee looking into the Bill & Hillary deal that allowed big Uranium to go to Russia, Russian speech….” Does that sound a like a President who is preparing a change of course, or who is capable of learning anything?
This post was updated to take account of Trump’s latest tweets.