by Paul Henninger

Watching the last few months of the Trump campaign from afar one thing has been very clear: the substantive distance between Donald Trump and the rest of the republican field is dramatic. Much to the consternation of the Republican leadership (and to the visible exasperation of his opponents in the last Republican debate) Trump’s platform is a storm of powerful emotions often devoid of practical thoughts on or understanding of the nuances of foreign or domestic policy. Reflecting on the last decade of national politics, however, brings up a single person who’s political success bears a resemblance to Donald Trump: Barak Obama.

Although ideologically at the other end of the traditional political spectrum, Obama too rode a wave of emotion past an unprepared Hillary Clinton and the rest of the democratic field into key primary victories and ultimately the Presidency. The emotion was superficially different, “change” versus Trump’s anger with a broken system and a hobbled nation, but both appealed to their supporters via a strong emotional pitch. Obama might not have appeared as literally mad as hell compared to Trump but both clearly conveyed the core message that they weren’t going to take it anymore. Obama positioned himself as a political outsider in the same way that Trump fire bombs the political establishment. And each gathered a vocal, inspired and emotional base of support that crossed traditional political lines of support.

As concerning, however, is the prospect that a Trump presidency could suffer from some of the same failings of the Obama presidency, seemingly in its waning days since its very early days. As much as Obama’s criticism of the Washington establishment was energizing, his failure to effectively interface with the ways and means of Washington politics has undermined the effectiveness of his own efforts and of the core mechanisms of American government. Obama is notorious for not talking with congressional leadership and while die hards might see this as an ongoing critique of the political elite, ultimately the administration’s petulance has meant that many worthwhile debates – on gun control, for example – were dead in the water before they ever started.

One wonders whether a Trump presidency wouldn’t suffer from the same ineffectiveness. Trump is a man whose most concrete policy proposal is a literal manifestation of emotion: a wall between the USA and Mexico, built by Mexicans. His grasp of the how tariffs work in his comments on China during the recent Republican debate didn’t betray a strong understanding of global economics, not to mention a real sense of how trade discussions actually play out in real life. Trump could very well ride a wave of emotion into political success, just add Obama did. But Obama has shown that an unwillingness to work with the Washington political machine, however attractive to all of our inner adolescents, can very simply translate into a long period of policy ineffectiveness. It’s getting easier to believe that Trump has something on his side that could win an election. But the lessons of the Obama administration’s futility are another reason to suspect that Trump is unlikely to have what it takes to actually govern.