Politico: Trump as America's Mayor

[MBS]

http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/06/26/trump-president-style-mayor-215294?

Excerpts:

Gathering a flock of House Republicans in the Rose Garden on May 4 to salute them for voting to repeal Obamacare, President Donald Trump took a moment to shift from the topic to his favorite subject: President Donald Trump.“How am I doing?” Trump asked with a smile, throwing his open hands wide. New Yorkers of a certain age would have immediately recognized the question: Trump was lifting the signature phrase of three-term New York Mayor Ed Koch. Walking the city’s streets and prowling its subways from 1978 through 1989, Koch dispensed the “How’m I doin’?” line on his constituents like a blessing. In the circus of New York politics, Koch was ringleader, commanding the spotlight and cracking the whip. But it wasn’t all showmanship. The questions he flung at New Yorkers were sincere—at least early on, he really wanted to know what people thought. He expected both bouquets and brickbats in return, and the feedback mattered to him.

That is not what Trump was doing. From Trump’s lips, the line pealed like a juvenile request for affirmation. He was looking for love, not feedback. Another paradox about Trump’s quote was that he hated Koch. As mayor, Koch resisted Trump’s demands for Manhattan tax abatements and tabled his other requests for New York government favors. And Koch hated him back. A “moron,” Trump once called Koch. “Greedy, greedy, greedy,” Koch called Trump in return. So why the homage? As with so much of Trump’s governance, Trump’s question is at first a puzzle. He disliked the guy who coined the phrase. He doesn’t really want to know how others think he’s doing. Had any of those Republicans offered their serious opinion of his presidency, it would have been the last Rose Garden invitation of their lives. But the point wasn’t the substance. It was the style. Whether he knows it or not, Donald J. Trump, lifelong New Yorker, isn’t really governing as president. He’s trying—in his grandstanding, room-filling, blow-dried way—to be America’s mayor. . .

Every Electoral College victor brings to the presidency his own style, and among Trump’s first moves was to downgrade the White House from stately power palace to casual hangout for his political aides and cronies. In a May Time cover story, Trump led reporters on a rambling tour of the joint like a teenager showing off his parents’ place while they were away. Under Trump, press reports tell us, the new Oval Office resembles a busy mayor’s “open” office, as informal as Trump’s 26th-floor office in Manhattan was. Aides and fixers exercise “walk-in privileges” that permit them to treat the president’s office like a gold-curtained airline lounge—a place to kill time between connecting flights. Few aides bother with making appointments with Trump’s scheduler, as my colleague Annie Karni reported in Politico, and no formal chain of command restricts their visits. . .
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Given Trump’s mayoral core, one big question looms over his political career: Why didn’t he run for mayor? He’s already on a political footing with New York’s top businessmen, contractors, union bosses and mobsters after having negotiated with them all—and surely New York politics owes him something after the many donations he has dropped on Democrats and Republicans.
Mayoral skills are real skills. But sending Trump to Washington is like sending a local plumber to repair the Hoover Dam. Perhaps Trump, who had been contemplating a run for the presidency since the 1980s, deduced that the path from mayor to president is a famine trail, a political dead end landscaped with bones and dust. . . . And perhaps he simply knew how the cards were stacked. A mayor succeeds by winning the loyalty, affection and enthusiasm of the people who know him best—who went to school with him, who know his family, who brush up against him. This variety of politics seems to be beyond Trump’s political talents. People who knew him only from TV and from his rallies had more zeal for him than those who knew him as a neighbor—the New Yorkers who have absorbed his life story like a serial drama in the New York Post and the Daily News for 35 years, who had to live with his developments and his pleas for tax breaks. In the neighborhood where Trump lives, in midtown Manhattan, he was booed when he showed up to vote on Election Day; he ended up losing his own precinct 2-to-1. And in Jamaica Estates—the neighborhood where Fred built his dynasty, and which established the Trumps as a kind of local royalty—85 percent went for Hillary Clinton. It was like a message to America: We know our native son, and you’ve been warned.