United States Politics: Trump backs $4+ trillion in new spending

[benji]

Let's consider the 2024 presidential campaign. Democrats appeared to adopt the classic lawyer tactic of saying, "My client didn’t do anything." There’s good reason this has become a cliché: You win in court by showing that your client followed the law and the other guy didn’t. Which is why as a lawyer, you do everything in your power to make it seem like your client was off flying kites with his kids or staring out the window at pretty clouds while the other guy was doing the most.

In other words, you try to make your client seem like Kamala Harris and the other guy seem like Donald Trump.

As a lawyer, you also always put the focus on the opposition. If you talk too much about your own client, that might encourage people to look too closely and begin to notice their flaws. So you make your client’s story all about the person across the aisle: It’s hardly ever about "my client did good" and almost always about "my opponent did bad." That’s exactly what the Democrats did last year, seeking to undermine the opposition’s case ("Here are all the reasons Trump is bad") instead of building their own case ("Here are all the reasons Harris is good").

But like any good lawyer — and Harris is unquestionably a good one — she then put the focus back on her opponent. And the Democrats’ vision of the future once again became negative — in other words, all about what it wasn’t, rather than what it was or what it might be. And to be fair, that’s not a bad courtroom strategy against an opponent who is almost pathologically predisposed to putting his foot in his mouth.

Here’s the funny thing about voting, though: It doesn’t happen in court.

The similarities didn’t stop there. Democrats seemed intent on avoiding policy specifics, while also pronouncing a series of vaguely progressive policy goals. That was another classic lawyer move: Keep your positions just specific enough to point out the other side’s flaws, and just vague enough that it’s hard to attack them in court.

When you’re a lawyer, you also never want to make it sound like you’re saying something dramatically different from what people have said before, because you win with a judge by showing that what you’re asking for is consistent with existing law. In a campaign, that line of argument almost makes itself when your candidate for president is also the current vice president.

Here’s the bottom line: In 2024, the Democrats ran a campaign out of a lawyer’s wet dream, and Kamala Harris seemed like the perfect client, painting a picture of a future that didn’t offend anyone. And it changed absolutely nobody’s mind. Trump was a client who would give any good lawyer nightmares (and surely has done so). His vision of the future was chaotic and offensive. And he won.

The thing about lawyers is that we’re great at being lawyers and terrible at virtually everything else. This is partially by design: Lawyering is a specialized profession that requires a real depth of knowledge. But some of it is also by circumstance, since lawyers often work in environments that consist roughly 99% of other lawyers. While there are certainly benefits to this kind of specialization, there are drawbacks too: an inherently narrow viewpoint; an unwillingness to take the opinions of non-lawyers seriously; and a reluctance to acknowledge that the letter of the law is not the only thing that matters.

These drawbacks are particularly glaring when it comes to running, and winning, a presidential campaign.

As a lawyer, I buy what Democrats are selling. But as a voter, I don’t. Because as a voter, I want to feel like my vote has power. And you don’t demonstrate power with dry, technical arguments; you demonstrate power by making people feel. Even now, I don’t really know what it would feel like to live in the Democrats’ world, except that it’s not Trump’s. And even though that “not Trump” vision certainly has its appeal, on an emotional level, it’s  hard to get excited about not going somewhere.
 
By contrast, what Trump did better in this election was painting an affirmative vision of what the world could be like, and making people feel like it was real. That’s why I can understand why people voted for him (even if it’s a separate question entirely whether they’re getting what they hoped for). Because if you want to feel like your vote has the power to change the world, you vote for the person who makes you feel like they can do that And it’s hard to dispute that Trump makes you feel like he’s changing the world.
 
Moreover, unlike Biden — who, despite significant policy accomplishments, was rather lackluster at making me feel the scope of those accomplishments — Trump will never let us forget what it feels like to have him in charge. The first month of his administration has made that obvious: It is difficult to do literally anything without being reminded of him. That feeling will be a big part of American life for the next four years — and that is exactly the point.

They’re not wrong about any of that. But they’re also missing the point.

Facts are great when you’re a lawyer in court or when you’re a wonk writing policy briefs and refining legislative language. But when you’re trying to convince people to buy into a possible future, facts don’t really matter. What matters is offering people an affirmative story — not a reactive one, not a story whose climax is “at least we’re not him” — and being able to sell it. Facts and policy can certainly serve as proof-points for that story, but they can’t be the story itself. And while Trump’s initiatives are unquestionably flawed from a legal standpoint, from a storytelling standpoint, they are flawless. This isn’t about the next four years anymore — it’s about the years after that, in this country and elsewhere. That’s what Trump seems to understand instinctively.

Good governing takes good lawyers. But good politics — and especially good presidential campaigns — takes bad ones. Governing and campaigning are fundamentally unrelated skills. Like too many lawyers, Democrats seem to believe that only the governing part matters, and that the kinds of lawyerly arguments that work well in courts are also going to work well with the public.

In normal litigation, the existence of the courtroom itself is not at stake. The courtroom’s presence is physical and immutable, and no matter what happens on any given day in the course of a lawsuit, lawyers from both sides will have to walk into that same courtroom the following day and play by the same rules. But in a presidential election like the one we just had, and likely the next one as well, the existence of the system itself is exactly what’s at stake. It’s not about which side leaves the courtroom with a win; it’s about what the courtroom will look like the next time around, or whether that courtroom will still be there at all. That’s why being a good, risk-averse lawyer — where, by definition, you  take the law as a given — is an incredibly risky strategy in a presidential campaign, particularly one where both sides have ratcheted up the stakes to existential levels. Because if you’re telling people that the future of the courtroom itself is in doubt, you also need to tell them what the new one should look like, or they’re going to vote for the person who does.

It's funny that Obama is in the head image because while a lot was made about his being a lawyer, especially the first Black head of the Harvard Law Review, he never actually practiced or had any experience with constitutional law. Though I'm not sure exactly how much value I want to give attorney generals as "practicing" anyway. Bill probably practiced as much as Obama and Biden despite two years as one. Kamala did have nearly as long as a DA as she did AG though.

This isn't entirely an original observation though, Democrats have long been lawyer captured. The Republican lawyers are a different breed and party has more hostility to them. You can see it just from their candidate debates where Democrats and Democrat-aligned people will watch lawyerly candidates and think they were great while voters and Republicans respond more to the politicians. It's probably why they couldn't understand either Bernie or Trump's appeal and had to keep falling back on insulting their supporters. (And this was also the Hillary camps opinion towards Obama in 2008 we shouldn't forget.) From that angle, neither made sense, their supporters overlooking things made even less sense, when it was exactly their willingness to take positions that appealed even if people didn't care for all the positions. (Which is why Bernie failed the second time, Biden could challenge that link in a way Hillary could not. Nobody's even bothered to try it with Trump.)