American Political Development and the Trump Presidency by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press, Inc.
Published: 2020-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 10

State-Building as Parlor Trick: Trump, the Executive Branch, and the Politics of Deconstruction

Zachary Callen

If nothing else, Donald Trump is a president with baggage. Among the things he carried to the White House, three have shaped his administration most profoundly: his outsider status, his outsized promise to “make America great again,” and (initially) unified party control of government.1 As with conservative administrations in the past, Trump’s administration held out the possibility of a major attempt to shrink the size of the federal government—dismantling federal agencies and devolving authority to states and localities. Certainly, a number of Trump’s promises as candidate, president-elect, and nascent chief executive suggested a significantly stripped-down federal state. Trump’s promise to “drain the swamp” of Washington, D.C. insiders channeled an animosity to “business as usual” in national politics. More explicitly, he suggested radically shrinking the size of the Environmental Protection Agency.2 In addition, Trump has argued that the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) should not be engaged in climate change science, and should have a narrower mission that focuses only on space travel and research.3 Finally, Trump proposed that if Roe v. Wade were to be overturned, which is his stated preference, that abortion law would return to the states.4 Before his departure from the administration, White House strategist Steve Bannon argued that the “deconstruction of the administrative state” was one of the White House’s top three priorities.5 Of course, Trump’s dedication to dismantling the federal state is undeniably contextual: while Trump may target education or environmental programs, his administration is building the federal state’s policing apparatus. But, even with that admission, this sampling of Trump’s policy preferences nonetheless reveal a preference for a smaller, less active federal state.

On the surface, Trump promised to durably return governing authority to “the people.” As American political development (APD) scholarship reveals, this claim is not uncommon in presidential rhetoric. The American state is, after all, the product of political conflicts over how power should be distributed among both branches and levels of government, and the symbolic role of “the people” in governing these institutions.6 The size and scope of the federal government figure prominently in these debates.7 However, despite Trump’s claims, the administration has not considered serious changes in the distribution of power between state and federal governments, nor has it been especially successful in retrenching the scope of federal authority. Instead, the Trump administration’s primary goals appear to be focused on using state power for private gain, which is a marked shift in how American elites at the highest levels make use of state power and one that APD scholars have not frequently considered.8 There is certainly some overlap between changing the way the federal state functions and changing the nature of the state. However, I argue that Trump and his congressional allies are currently engaging in merely the redistribution of resources, and not a change to the scope of the federal state’s authority. Trump has gladly decimated the funding of policies with which he disagrees, but he

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