The Unread Story

The differences between Carter and Trump are many and obvious: Carter shyly confessed to having “committed adultery in my heart”; Trump brags about grabbing pussy. Carter was a moralist and a technocrat; Trump, an immoralist and a demagogue. Carter was a state senator and a governor; Trump has no political experience. Carter wouldn’t hurt a fly (or a rabbit). Trump takes pleasure in humiliating others, particularly women and people of color. The parallels between Carter and Trump are also many, if less obvious. Like Carter, Trump ran hard against his party, decrying its most basic orthodoxies on trade, immigration, and entitlements. Throughout the campaign, Trump proudly and repeatedly declared his refusal to cut Social Security and Medicare. Like no other Republican in modern memory, Trump railed against the plutocratic union of money and state power. Carter declared, “My positions are not predictable.” Trump, too, has occupied an ambiguous ideological space of ever-changing policies and commitments. And like Carter—who anointed himself the sole vehicle of reform, cultivating, in his words, “the lonely, independent candidate image depending on the voter only”—Trump has declared himself the single, solitary voice of renovation: “I alone can fix it,” as he said at the Republican National Convention. Since his election, Trump has opened an even wider breach with his party, waging an astonishing war against the nation’s security establishment. After the media reported CIA claims that Trump was elected to office with help from the Russians, and Republican Senate leaders announced their intentions to open hearings on the topic, Trump began tweeting on a semi-regular basis about the CIA’s incompetence and buffoonery. This unprecedented attack by a President-elect on the CIA prompted another first: the Senate Minority Leader musing on national television that an elected President should be careful about what he says, because the CIA has “six ways from Sunday at getting back at you.” Both Trump and Carter failed to get a majority of the party’s vote during the primary before winning the presidency. Both Trump and Carter, in other words, were nominated to lead parties that tried bitterly to resist their rise. Just as Trump provoked a variety of last-ditch attempts to stop him, so was there an abortive “Anybody But Carter” movement late in the 1976 primaries. Trump will enter the White House with an even greater liability: the loss of the popular vote. And while Trump’s unfavorable ratings have declined since his election—every President-elect enjoys a honeymoon—they still remain, as of early January, unprecedentedly high…. However tempting it may be to ascribe these phenomena to Trump alone, some part of the specter of illegitimacy and disapproval that has enveloped him is due to the increasingly fragile nature of the Republican regime itself. In the same way that Carter was saddled with a debilitated New Deal regime, so has Trump, despite his moves toward heterodoxy throughout the campaign, hitched himself to Reagan’s free-market regime, with its worship of the man of the market and the man of money, and concomitant commitments to tax cuts and deregulation. That regime has been in a slow free-fall for several years. The declining trajectory of support for Republican Presidents—from Nixon’s 60.7 percent of the vote in 1972 to Reagan’s 58.8 percent in 1984 to Bush’s 50.7 percent in 2004 to Trump’s 46 percent—is one measure. The steady diminution of voters identifying as Republicans—Gallup polls consistently put Republicans behind Democrats and independents—is another. And while Presidents winning without the popular vote was unheard of throughout the 20th century, that has now occurred twice in the 21st, both times with a Republican.