Republicans Could Really Use a ‘Magic Asterisk’

That structural account has some truth to it: Today’s Republican tax-cutters really do have it harder than their forebears did. But that doesn’t explain why this process seems so … haphazard. They are not quibbling about minor details, or even one big stumbling block; one day before the bill was supposed to be out, a number of its biggest and most controversial provisions were still simultaneously under negotiation.

But we can also tell a different story about these facts: a story about how much presidential leadership matters.

When Trump was elected, I found myself asking old Washington hands a question: How well could the government run itself without Trump’s participation? He had shown little interest in the policy parts of the presidency during the campaign, and it seemed unlikely that he was suddenly going to develop a governing philosophy and a late-life interest in the contents of wonky briefing books. Could he just end up as a figurehead, attending signing ceremonies and ribbon-cuttings, while the real business of government went on without him?

The response was derisive laughter. American government, they said, didn’t and couldn’t work that way. I reserved judgement until I saw how things developed, and having seen it, I concede that they were correct. The absence of leadership from the president himself — shaping priorities, guiding the process, using his political capital to secure a deal and sell it to the American public — has left a power vacuum at the heart of the legislative process. And that vacuum threatens to suck even the most agreeable, obvious, and dearly held Republican ambitions into the void.

Even when the president wants to do a tax plan — as he clearly does — he is insufficiently focused on the process to assist in making it happen. His assistance appears to consist of occasionally tweeting about things he would not like to find in the bill, things that would probably be better communicated in private. Meaning he will have a hard time coming out in favor of some provision that he was days earlier excoriating. This will complicate the one job he must do, if Republicans want to get tax cuts through: convincing the public that it’s a good idea.

Republicans are struggling on taxes for the same reasons they’re struggling on everything else: They are less of a party than an uneasy alliance of warring factions with little in the way of a common cause. Unless they find some leadership to hold them together, they are likely to end up where such alliances usually do: broken on the wheel of history.

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