The Popular Clown Show
Exhausted Americans approve of the ideologically funky transition
Has the Trump transition been a clown show widely mocked by political onlookers everywhere?
Or has it been a low-key success, earning broad approval from an American public eager to tune out a decade of drama?
Both.
Nearly six in ten Americans approve of Trump’s presidential transition:
The only political figure in America more popular than Trump’s transition is Jimmy Carter, at 61%. Here’s more, via CBS News:
President-elect Donald Trump's incoming administration starts off with mostly good will from the public: a majority of Americans overall are either happy or at least satisfied that he won and are either excited or optimistic about what he'll do as president.
Trump's handling of his presidential transition gets approval from most Americans overall and brings near-universal approval from his voters, along with a net-positive response about his selections for Cabinet posts, in particular, Sen. Marco Rubio, who is Trump's pick to be secretary of state.
What’s going on?
Don’t shoot the messenger … but voters view Trump as moderate. Not as moderate as they’d like - recall the most important chart of the election - but more moderate than Democrats.
Unhinged Moderation
Back in the first Trump term,
wrote a foundational piece explaining why Democrats were learning the wrong lesson from Trump: he ran as a moderate, not an extremist.Years later, Yglesias coined a term to describe Trump’s pairing of ideological flexibility with extreme behavior: “Republicans’ unhinged moderation.”
The MAGA-fied GOP had:
… become much more unhinged. More conspiratorial, more unethical, more flagrantly dishonest … and more potentially damaging to the basic foundations of the Republic.
At the same time, if you compare the current situation to the winter after Bush’s reelection — or even the winter after the 2010 GOP midterm sweep or the winter after Trump’s surprising win in 2016 — Republicans have clearly moved to the center on concrete policy issues.
The full piece is here with a long list of ideologically conservative positions of the pre-Trump GOP that have been abandoned.
MAGA’s Ideological Diversity
Now back for round two, Trump is apparently forming one of the most ideologically diverse cabinets in modern history. The nominees include a union-friendly moderate for Labor, a former Democratic House member for DNI, a gay George Soros advisor for Treasury, and a pro-choice friend of Oprah Winfrey for CMS.
Trump’s cabinet may be unhinged, but in a way that is orthogonal to the traditional left-right spectrum.
Trump’s nominee for HHS was considered by Obama to lead the EPA!
Biden’s Missed Opportunity
Over on Team Blue, Democrats are still excitedly touting their racial and gender diversity. After losing control of the Senate, Chuck Schumer sent a tweet praising the growing diversity of his Democratic caucus, the “most diverse slate of candidates ever.”
The losses of Sherrod Brown and Jon Tester have at least one advantage for Schumer: better diversity numbers.
Yet ideological diversity in the Democratic caucus has shrunk.
Though Joe Biden ran on the idea of uniting the nation, he constructed the least ideologically and politically diverse cabinet in modern Democratic history. He did not invite a single Republican into his cabinet.
Obama included Republicans Robert Gates (Secretary of Defense), Ray LaHood (Secretary of Transportation) and Chuck Hagel (Secretary of Defense). He also included moderates like Rahm Emanuel, Timothy Geitner and Arne Duncan, who weren’t afraid to ruffle what the Obama team derisively referred to as “the professional left” (now known as The Groups).
Bill Clinton’s Secretary of Defense was Republican Senator Bill Cohen. Quick side note - what was Bill Cohen up to last month? Endorsing Jared Golden in a forceful Portland Press-Herald op-ed1 in a race the Democrat would win by two-tenths of a point.
Biden made no such attempt to appeal to Republicans, and this impulse was reflected in policymaking. The Biden-Harris Administration was far more focused on appealing to The Groups wing of the party than the moderates who sent them to the White House.
1600 Pennsylvania will see moving trucks in seven weeks.
Only Democrats are moving out.
And the American public approves.
Cohen’s op-ed endorsing Golden starts thusly: “Over more than 50 years in and around public life, I have learned a lot about the importance of staying true to your own values. In my first term in Congress in 1974, I was one of the first Republicans to vote to impeach President Nixon due to his involvement in the Watergate scandal. This was a valuable early lesson in my career of putting my country over my political party, no matter the consequences … Jared’s willingness to break with his party has been well documented. Jared’s independent streak is no mere political posturing. It is the result of his commitment to putting the people of Maine first.”