Last Saturday, at his golf club’s golf course in Bedminster, NJ, President Trump sat down at a small table and signed four terms that he said would ‘take care of this whole situation’ – his euphemism for the coronavirus recession that has hit millions of Americans out of work.
Club members in Bermuda shorts and other golf attire applauded them loudly. Television cameras included. Within hours, the president was rewarded with the headlines he was looking for.
“Executive action: the president goes around Congress to extend unemployment benefits,” NBC Nightly News began. “Side-stepping Congress, Trump signs executive measures for pandemic relief,” the New York Times reported.
That was exactly the message that Trump and his aides hope to convey. “The American people … are seeking leadership, and President Trump is delivering,” said his press secretary, Kayleigh McEnany.
Other than that, he did not – not in the sense of effective action that Americans could fight if the economy turned around.
For months, the president has been on a rampage of executive statements. He announced unilateral actions aimed at extending benefits to non-residents, reducing drug prices, protecting patients with pre-existing medical conditions, and even punishing those who attack statues.
Some of the actions, including the four at Bedminster, were dismissed as unconstitutional by constitutional lawyers, angry Democrats and even a few Republicans.
But most have a deeper flaw: They are false – little more than political theater designed to make the president look good.
It’s the Potemkin government: announcements that pretend to do something but do not really do much.
Take his order at Bedminster to the Federal Emergency Management Agency to pay $ 300 a week to unemployed workers to replace the $ 600 federal payment that expired last month.
Trump said the total benefit would be $ 400 a week, but that number includes $ 100 from state coffers, which may or may not come from existing unemployment benefits.
States say they have no system to manage the funds, and some say their unemployment plans are running out of money.
But even if the president’s order were carried out seamlessly, experts say the $ 44 billion he has earmarked for the plan would not last more than six weeks. It is hardly a solution to a deep recession forecast to expand well into next year.
Or take the president’s favorite measure, postponing his decision to pay payroll taxes – the taxes that Social Security and Medicare fund – to employees who make less than $ 100,000 a year.
It’s a straightforward cut in middle-income taxes, delivered weeks before voters begin filling out their emails. Its political appeal is self-evident.
But their economic reason is thin. The tax delay would benefit people with jobs, not the severely unemployed.
And the advantage would be short life; next year, the IRS would have to bill workers for the taxes they skip, unless Congress finds another way to fund Social Security and Medicare. It’s one reason even Republicans have rejected the idea.
The president’s package would also allow about 35 million lenders to transfer payments on federal student loans by the end of the year – another benefit that gets past election day, but not much more than that.
Trump’s most vicious action was a mandate from federal agencies to “prevent evictions and evictions of homes as a result of financial difficulties caused by COVID-19.” But he did not specify any actions; he told only agencies to see what they could do.
“The housing order does absolutely nothing,” said John Hudak, a government scientist at the nonpartisan Brookings Institution.
That did not stop Trump’s chief economic adviser, former television personality Larry Kudlow, from making a grandiose promise: “There will be no expulsions,” he said.
And that’s the underlying problem with many of Trump’s executive actions: They have promised and are under delivery.
It’s not that the orders are unconstitutional or illegal – though some may be.
It is not that he thought of unilateral action when his negotiations with Congress broke down; his predecessors, including Barack Obama, did the same.
It’s not even the hypocrisy of a man who once accused Obama of preferring to play golf over dealing with Congress, and is now calling out his golf club. Trump has surpassed Obama’s pace of executive orders, by issuing an average of 49 per year; Obama draws only 35 a year, according to the American Presidency Project at UC Santa Barbara.
The most striking thing about Trump’s executive orders is their transparent use to send political messages, especially in an election year.
Earlier presidents sometimes announced important mandates from the White House; Trump is the first to make routine signing ceremonies in political theater, exposing his jagged signature as proof of his power.
That gives the president credit: He has invented a new political art form – or at least an old stretch to a new extreme.
The important thing is to appear to do something – whether it is “something” effective or not. It’s not a board, it’s reality television.
The danger he faces is that voters will notice if his promises do not come true – if the unemployed do not get the promised benefit of $ 300, if evictions do not stop, if the pandemic continues to spread.
Big statements can not substitute for real solutions – and Trump has not offered any of these.
