How to Be an Ineffective President

Charlie Cook: “If you wanted to offer a graduate-school class in how not to be an effective president of the United States, Donald Trump could write the textbook and teach the course.”

“The first lesson would be to cater myopically to your base, alienating those in your party who are not in your core constituency—particularly the congressional leadership and power players who would be the ones instrumental to actually getting anything done. The second lesson would be to offend independent voters, those not married to either party who are at least theoretically open to the arguments from both sides. Finally, the third lesson would be to do everything possible to eliminate any chance of getting defections from the ranks of the other party while riling up the other party’s base, giving them an intensity that they may have lacked when they lost last year’s election.”

“That’s pretty much how you would do it—and it’s what Trump has done.”