A year in office: Judge Trump on what he does

Almost one year into Donald Trump's presidency, you have to pinch yourself to make sense of it all. America is caught up in a debate about the president's sanity. Trump fans the flames by taking to Twitter to crow about his "very stable genius" and to boast about the impressive size of his nuclear button.

Trump-watching is compulsive — who hasn't waited guiltily for the next tweet with horrified anticipation? Given how much rests on the man's shoulders, and how ill-suited he is to the presidency, the focus on Trump's character is both reasonable and necessary.

But, as an evaluation of his presidency so far, it is also incomplete and a dangerous distraction.

Consider first that the American economy is in fine fettle, growing by an annualized 3.2 percent in the third quarter. Blue-collar wage growth is outstripping the rest of the economy. Since President Barack Obama left office, unemployment has continued to fall and the stock market to climb. Trump is lucky — the world economy is enjoying its strongest synchronized upswing since 2010. But he has made his own luck by convincing corporate America he is on its side.

For many in that economy, especially those disillusioned with Washington, a jeremiad over Trump's imminent threat to all of America does not ring true.

What's more, despite his grenade-throwing campaign, Trump has not carried out his worst threats. As a candidate, he spoke about slapping 45 percent tariffs on all Chinese goods and ditching the North American Free Trade Agreement with Canada and Mexico. There may soon be trouble on both those fronts, but not on that original scale. He also branded NATO obsolete and proposed the mass deportation of 11 million illegal immigrants. So far, however, the Western alliance holds, and the level of deportations in the 12 months to September 2017 was not strikingly different from earlier years.

Trump's legislative accomplishments have been modest and mixed. A tax reform that cut rates and simplified some of the rules was also regressive and unfunded. His antipathy to regulation has invigorated animal spirits, but at an unknown cost to the environment and human health. His proposed withdrawal from the Paris climate agreement and the fledgling Trans-Pacific Partnership was foolish, but hardly beyond the pale of Republican thinking.

His opportunism and lack of principle, while shameful, may yet mean that he is more open to deals than most of his predecessors. Just last week, he combined a harsh plan to deport Salvadoreans who have temporary rights to live and work in America with the suggestion of a broad reform to immigration. He also said that he will be going to the World Economic Forum this month in Davos, where he will rub shoulders with globalists.

The danger in the Trump character obsession is that it distracts from deeper changes in America's system of government. The bureaucracy is so understaffed it is relying on industry hacks to draft policy. They have shaped deregulation and written clauses into the tax bill that pass costs from shareholders to society. Because Senate Republicans confirmed so few judges in Obama's last two years, Trump is moving the judiciary dramatically to the right. And nonstop outrage also drowns out Washington's problem: its disconnection from ordinary voters.

As we have written repeatedly, Trump is a deeply flawed man without the judgment to lead a great country. America is being damaged by his presidency. But after a certain point, raking over his unfitness becomes an exercise in wish-fulfilment, because the subtext is so often the desire for his early removal from office.

For the time being, that is a fantasy. The Mueller probe into the Trump campaign's dealings with Russia should run its course. Only then can America hope to gauge whether his conduct meets the test for impeachment. Ousting Trump as mentally incapacitated via the 25th Amendment, as some favor, would be even harder. He does not appear any madder than he was when the voters chose him over Hillary Clinton. Unless he can no longer recognize himself in the mirror (which, in Trump's case, would surely be one of the last powers to fade) neither his Cabinet nor Congress will vote him out.

Neither should they. Alarm at Trump's vandalism to the dignity of the presidency cuts both ways. Were it easy for a group of Washington insiders to remove a president, American democracy would swerve toward oligarchy. The rush to judge Trump before Mueller finishes his inquiry politicizes justice. Each time critics put their aim of stopping Trump before their proper justification for doing so, they help set a precedent that will someday be used against a good president fighting a worthy but unpopular cause.

That logic holds for North Korea, too. Trump is not the first president to inspire questions about fitness to control nuclear weapons — consider Richard Nixon's drinking or John Kennedy's reliance on drugs. Ousting Trump on the gut feeling that he might be mentally unstable smacks of a coup.

Trump has been a poor president in his first year. But the presidential telenovela is a diversion. He and his administration need to be held properly to account for what they actually do.

Copyright 2013 The Economist Newspaper Limited, London. All Rights Reserved. Reprinted with permission.