Real costs of being Donald Trump

Opinion: May 19, 2017 at 12:00a.m.

By Jonathan Bernstein

Bloomberg View

I had already seen Twitter chatter before the Washington Post blockbuster on intelligence that Donald Trump had “gotten away with” firing James Comey. After all, the episode was going to fade from the headlines soon enough, no matter how important people believe it is, and Trump is still there and Comey isn’t.

I’m all for being cynical, but I’d strongly urge against that interpretation. Presidents have limited ability to act unilaterally. Everything they want to do is easier to get done when their reputations are strong and when they are popular. We can measure the latter, and Trump has lost about 2 percentage points in his approval ratings over the last 10 days or so. It’s impossible to separate out any Comey effect (there are just too many other events, and polls aren’t always taken at the most convenient intervals), but the larger point is that each increment of popularity he loses makes it less and less likely other politicians and others whom Trump deals with will give him the benefit of the doubt.

Reputation is a lot harder to quantify, but remember what Richard Neustadt said about presidents acting by command rather than by bargaining: “It can be costly to the aims in whose defense it is employed. It can be costly, also, to objectives far afield.” It may be difficult to prove the specific connection, but I strongly suspect that a lot of congressional Republicans are that much less eager to defend Trump this time after they had to defend him previously. Those in the executive branch who were taken aback by the Comey firing will be a little more eager to leak against the White House. Moreover, even within the White House, those who had doubts about the Comey firing, or even those who supported it but didn’t enjoy dealing with the fallout, may be that much less eager to defend their boss this time and more willing to dump on him anonymously.

In other words: Don’t mistake remaining in office for avoiding any consequences. And there still may be more to learn about the Comey episode.

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