Content area
Full Text
Donald Trump entered office with aspirations for transformational policy change, much of which would have to be approved by Congress. Despite the president's many unique characteristics, we can employ the framework of the president's strategic position to explain his lack of success. The president's opportunity structure was mixed. He lacked an electoral mandate but was fortunate enough to serve in a unified government. Nevertheless, Republican cohesion was imperfect, partisan polarization was high, and there was little public pressure for Democrats to abate their strong opposition. The structure of most of the choices before Congress did not favor the president. As a result, he has not been successful in obtaining congressional support for most of his major initiatives. Making strategic assessments by asking a few key questions about the president's political environment provides us with crucial leverage for evaluating a president's likely success in obtaining the support of Congress for his initiatives.
Keywords: president, congress, Trump, leadership
A week before the presidential election, Donald Trump traveled to the Philadelphia suburbs to deliver a health care policy speech that was light on details and heavy on ambitious promises. In a hotel ballroom, Trump promised to convene a special session of Congress as soon as he was sworn in-a perplexing idea, as Congress would already be in session-so that lawmakers could "immediately repeal and replace Obamacare." All of this would happen "very, very quickly," he vowed (Johnson 2017).
Trump came to office boasting of his prowess as a leader, able to cut deals, "drain the swamp" in Washington, and transform public policy. Once in office, the president has repeatedly claimed that his stewardship had led to uncommon success with Congress, arguing that he had signed more legislation than any president since Franklin D. Roosevelt. On July 17, he tweeted his followers, "We've signed more bills-and I'm talking about through the legislature-than any president, ever." He was wrong. Moreover, a large percentage of the legislation he had signed included bills passed under the Congressional Review Act, a measure that allows Congress to overturn regulations enacted by a president. A number of others were largely ceremonial (Bump 2017d; 2017b; 2017a; Kessler 2017; Shear and Youris 2017).
The most notable fact about Trump's legislative record to this point is the...