Will Donald Trump’s policies be better than his campaign rhetoric? - Bronwen Maddox

Could Donald Trump become a normal president? Could he settle down and push through a coherent slate of policies? Take the advice of his Cabinet and work patiently with Congress to achieve things he’s promised to do?

Sadly not, although among many real horrors within his campaign promises are other changes that could actually be good for the United States. At the start of the fifth week of his presidency things are calming down just a fraction (although it’s a first that the world seems be counting the days that have passed, and the exact number still to go, in his first term). His impulses are coming up against the reality of running a country — successful challenges by the courts, and now a new willingness by Republicans in Congress to challenge him. They’ve been jolted out of their alarmed but solid support by the revelations of links to Russia — and even more dangerous questions, in the Washington tradition, about who knew what and when — that pushed Trump last week to sack his National Security Adviser Michael Flynn.

It seems far more likely, though, that his personality will continue to trounce policy. That will continue to give us unending uncertainty, impulsive jolts in opposite directions at the same time, where the few things that he might have done to improve the US are lost amid others that are damaging or confused. Those who wistfully hope that a coherent Trumpian agenda will emerge are likely to be confounded by the unpredictability that is already this administration’s most powerful characteristic.

The most striking spectacle of the first weeks has been not the frenetic, sleeve-tugging script of executive orders and tweets from the White House but the rock-solid discipline of Republicans in Congress. Until the Flynn debacle, they did not in any way that troubled the President break ranks to oppose his first Cabinet nominations or storm of orders.

It is a pact with his own party that some political analysts have described as Faustian and others simply as the pure essence of politics. Many evangelical Republicans on Capitol Hill never believed they would see a president apparently so keen to push through policies close to their hearts, such as the appointment of conservative judges to the Supreme Court. In return they have been willing to overlook that he is a thrice-married New Yorker with no obvious great interest in religion. The free-traders in the party have found the bargain harder; his protectionist instincts are anathema to them, for which the promise of tax cuts and reforming Obamacare is just about worth it.

But the bargain is already strained. Even though the frenetic, “look at me” rate at which Trump generates news has quietened down a little, Republicans cannot be sure he will do what they think he promised any more than can, say, Vladimir Putin — and clear sounds of disconcerted dismay emanated from Moscow last week after Flynn’s sacking.

Advisers are trying to stitch together a coherent message from flat-out contradictions such as his welcoming reception of a phone call from Taiwan followed by a firm endorsement of the “One China” policy in a later call to Chinese premier Xi Jinping. Or Trump’s remarks on the campaign trail that Nato was obsolete followed by his apparent reassurance to Theresa May that the US would stand firm behind the defence alliance.

The truth, says one former official who came up against him extensively in New York City property deals, “is that he cares more about publicly being called ‘a winner’ than he does about the actual content of deals”. For Trump, he added, “every day is a new day”, which brings with it a kind of perpetually reborn resilience, albeit one fuelled by a willingness to jettison or simply deny what was said yesterday.

Those who hope he will settle down point to examples of his actions that may be less alarming than the campaign rhetoric. The immigration ban that caused global uproar on his first weekend was clearly not thought out, they concede, but point out that President Barack Obama also pressed ahead with deportation of illegal immigrants yet with a fraction of the media attention. Difficulty in finding a replacement for Obamacare that does not leave 20 million Americans uninsured may mean, Trump himself says, that no replacement is suggested until 2018 — an election year for Congress, which is hardly going to make the task quicker. He has already stepped back from the rhetorical confrontation with China, including his vow to punish it for currency manipulation that seemed an easy prelude to something worse. He has backtracked from ripping up the Iran nuclear deal, as he vowed. Despite the number of times he has held the thick, black zigzag of his signature up to the cameras, remarkably little has been achieved in his first month.

But it’s hard to take much reassurance from ineffectiveness. The casualness with which he overturned two decades of support for a “two-state solution” to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, proclaiming his support for whichever outcome “both parties like” showed a lethal lack of understanding for what the alternative might mean. As the world knows, there is no “deal” that both sides like. On trade, his protectionism will not bring back manufacturing as he promised — many jobs have gone to robots, not to Mexico. On “draining the swamp” in Washington of lobbyists, many would cheer, but one lobbyist with a front-row view of the jostling now under way to get a slice of the tax cuts that he has promised has said that “for all the talk, the alligators are pretty well fed right now”.

Above all, though, it is his war of choice with the intelligence agencies and the media, and his disparagement of the judiciary that has alarmed Republicans in Congress. Their willingness last week to launch investigations into Russian links and a possible cover-up there show that they are calculating the point at which the bargain is no longer worth it.

Trump has spent a month consumed by trying to write the script of a drama with himself at centre stage and to control the reviews of his performance. With personality not policy the guiding force of his White House, it gives us terrifyingly little clue to what he will really do — or how he will respond when outside events crash in on the drama, as they always do.

Bronwen Maddox is the director of the Institute for Government.