Subject: Trump is Good at Being Bad at Presidenting
...or, "What's All This About Greenland, Now?"


Once upon a time, back on the old Fool website, there was a lot of talk about Donald Trump's first term, both about what he was doing (lots of disruption!) and not getting done ("Infrastructure Week!"). In some of those discussions, I frequently made the observation that Trump was bad at Presidenting.

That wasn't a judgement on whether his policies were good or bad. Just that he wasn't doing a very good job of the mechanics of getting his preferences implemented. His Administration was bad at getting regulations drafted, they were constantly having regulations overturned in court for stupid procedural issues, he had little success in getting his proposals through Congress (like the Wall!), and generally wasn't doing an especially efficient job of working the levers of power.

I was reminded of that when I read an interview between Ezra Klein and conservative Yuval Levin, where Levin argues that Trump is failing to use most of the powers of the Presidency, and as such isn't likely to have as much durable impact on America as one might think given how central he seems to be in every news cycle. In trying to find that interview, I came across an Atlantic article he recently wrote where he makes the same claim. Here it is in a nutshell:

I actually think that’s not quite right and that there’s an important story to tell about the absence of action in the past year, too — the absence of traditional uses of presidential power and authority in our system.

There has been very little legislation. It’s true the “big, beautiful bill” is law, but Donald Trump has signed fewer pieces of legislation than any president in the modern era.

The pace of regulatory action is actually slower than the last five or six presidents. If you look at the numbers, the amount that they’re doing that amounts to durable policy change is actually pretty constrained.

So I think the question is: How do you reconcile the amount of activity with the absence of durable action?


Thinking about those two things, it seems to me that Trump is still very bad at Presidenting. But I think he is much more aware that there are parts of the job that he's not very well suited for and parts that fit him to a T. And he's doing an outstanding job of focusing on the tools of the Presidency that do suit him.

So he's not messing around with drafting regulations, which require both doing a lot of homework and running through all the fiddly procedural gantlets. He's not messing around with legislation, which requires working with people who don't listen to you and soothing other people's egos and finding win-win-win outcomes instead of just dominating a counterparty.

And Levin is right that these are the tools that make durable policy change. Presidential terms end. And your successor can simply undo everything you did while you were President by just reversing all your EO's and directions to staff. But the United States Code and the Federal Register live on. If you want to make policy changes that last for years, even generations, you would normally look to passing legislation and changing the regulations. And Trump isn't paying much attention to those things.

What Trump has been adept at doing is finding changes he can make using the more ephemeral power of "I'm the President right now" that can't be undone. He's not bothering to change the Immigration and Naturalization Act, or any of the regulations that implement it - he's just going out and trying to throw out as many undocumented immigrants as possible, and that can't be undone easily. He's not setting up a committee to evaluate the East Wing architecture - he just goes out and tears it down. Go out and get a new Air Force One, build yourself a monument, depose Nicolas Maduro. The "Board of Peace." He's good at bullying counterparties, especially if they're weaker than him. But he's finding a lot of things that will have lasting impacts that go on even once the bullying has stopped. These are things that use the current power of the President to do things that will have impacts long after he's left office that don't require Congress.

Which brings us to Greenland. Greenland would be huge. The U.S. hasn't expanded its territory in any significant in nearly a century. Adding Greenland? Bigger than Alaska. Bigger (by area) than the Louisiana Purchase. The kind of thing that lasts. I think that's part of why he's focused on it. It's something he can do with the powers of the Presidency he's skilled at wielding (the true Executive powers, not writing rules or laws) that doesn't suffer from the ephemeral nature of most of those actions.

That's why I say he's good at being bad at Presidenting. I think this is a deliberate choice on his part, to focus his energy on the tools of the Presidency that work for him, and to have his agenda be what he can do with those tools rather than try to accomplish things with tools he's not adept with.


https://www.nytimes.com/2026/0...
https://archive.ph/74Eiw#selec...