I was friends with Rob Stutzman at Placer High School. He was a couple of years behind me. We worked on the school newspaper together for a couple of years. When I graduated, he became the Editor.
Even in high school, Stutzman had his head screwed on straight. While I was constantly saying and doing things that I would regret, sometimes within seconds, he was always centered and living his Christian values. He didn’t make needless enemies and yet he never backed off what he stood for.
It was then and remains today very hard to dislike Rob Stutzman the man, however much you may hate things he supports.
A year ahead of me at Placer (and my predecessor as Editor) was a similarly impressive Christian headed for success and power — Eric Schulzke (now a political science professor at BYU).
Schulzke, Stutzman and I were all Christian conservatives and all fans of Ronald Reagan. Schulzke was the most right-wing. Stutzman and I were more OK with Reagan’s need at times to compromise with Democrats. I was the most bizarre of the three, the most troubled, the most likely to go off in weird directions. Schulzke and Stutzman had the stuff of future Republican leaders. I was always going to be disreputable and embarrassing.
Stutzman supports Marco Rubio and he wants America to take in Syrian refugees and other immigrants.
In contrast to his vagueness on the size of government, Trump is absolutely clear on the central theme of how he sees the presidency: the personal use of executive power.
In almost every statement he makes, Trump depicts the presidency as an arena in which he would fix problems through the exercise of his will and negotiating ability.
A characteristic comment came in an interview with ABC’s “This Week” in response to a question about Russian President Vladimir Putin.
“I have been an extremely successful deal maker. That’s what I’ve done over years,” Trump said. “And I know people, because deals are people. And I think I’ll get along very well, for the good of our country…. I’ll get along fine with Putin.”
Trump’s rivals in the GOP race routinely denounce President Obama as having exceeded the powers of his office. Trump says Obama acted “stupidly” and made the wrong decisions, but he’s less likely to emphasize the claim that Obama has tried to make the office too powerful.
Even the most forceful modern presidents, however, quickly discover the limits of what they can do.
“It’s not that he can come in, start with a clean sheet of paper,” said Andrew Card, who worked for the last three Republican presidents, including 5 1/2 years as George W. Bush’s chief of staff. Congress, the courts and the bureaucracy of federal agencies guard their own prerogatives.
“Governors tend to understand that better than CEOs,” who have far more authority over their companies than a president has over the government, Card said.
“When you’re the president, you’re not a dictator.”
That’s not to say a president lacks power. Some of Trump’s most controversial plans could be carried out by executive authority. Many legal experts believe, for example, that Trump could impose his plan to bar most foreign Muslims from entering the U.S., at least for a while, because the president has broad authority over immigration, particularly where it intersects with national security.
“He will have a very easy time doing whatever he can do through executive authority alone. That includes the conduct of foreign relations, up to a point,” said William Galston of Washington’s Brookings Institution, who worked in the White House under President Clinton.
By contrast, “he would have a hard time doing anything that requires the cooperation of Congress.”
If elected, Trump would take office after what amounts to a hostile takeover of the Republican Party and over the opposition of Democrats. He probably would not be able to count on much support from either side on Capitol Hill. That would mean trouble for his promises to build a wall along the Mexican border or to round up and deport the roughly 11 million people currently in the U.S. without legal authorization. Both would require Congress to approve billions of dollars in new appropriations even if Trump could pressure the Mexican government into reimbursing the U.S. for the cost of the wall, which Mexico says it won’t consider.
On foreign policy, a President Trump would face a different set of constraints — other countries…
“You have to tell people ‘no’ all the time” in government, said Rob Stutzman, a Sacramento-based political consultant who worked as a top advisor to another larger-than-life figure, former Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, and who backs Rubio. “It ultimately is a business where you disappoint people.”
That fact hits all presidents, eroding their popularly over time, but it might particularly affect Trump because he has built his campaign around personal dynamism and promises that few think are possible to fulfill.
“There’s never going to be a wall. Mexico is not paying for anything. Apple’s not building iPhones in the United States,” said Stutzman. “My guess is he’ll hire very well — hire very capable people — and he’ll take their counsel, but then I think he finds himself in a difficult position of trying to sustain political capital because he’ll have to start explaining why he can’t.”
