How Would Trump and Hillary Govern?

What kind of president would Donald Trump make? What kind of president would Hillary Clinton make? Those questions weren’t answered definitely during the first presidential debate, mainly because Hillary Clinton spent most of the debate trotting out old talking points while feeding Trump enough rope to hang himself from a gibbet of his own construction.

But we have one basic indicator: what they think of the office itself.

Every presidential candidate has a picture of what the presidency represents. Bill Clinton thought the presidency was JFK’s Camelot: an image-first, good-time position designed to give Americans a feeling of hope and fun. Bill Clinton saw the presidency as a piece of performance art; he wrote in his autobiography, “I decided I wanted to be in public life as an elected official. I loved music and thought I could be very good, but I knew I would never be John Coltrane or Stan Getz. I was interested in medicine and thought I could be a fine doctor, but I knew I would never be Michael DeBakey. But I knew I could be great in public service.” The presidency was all simply an expression of personal ambition for Clinton, and he treated it that way.

George W. Bush thought the presidency was a paternal office, a model for dignified governance. That’s why he saw the Clinton presidency as a blot after his father’s staid White House stint, and pledged to “restore honor and dignity” to the office. To that end, he wanted his presidency to demonstrate “compassion” as well as a stoic self-possession.

Barack Obama thought the presidential office was created to provide Americans with a moral guide. While half-heartedly decrying his own role as “moral arbiter,” Obama refers continuously to the arc of history, the requirements of acting morally in accordance with “who we are.” He sees himself as a guiding voice in shaping a new, progressive values system, in creating new human beings.

So, where does that leave us with Hillary and Trump?

Hillary Clinton thinks the presidency is a technocratic job, an expert playing with the levers and gears of American life.

Hillary Clinton thinks the presidency is a technocratic job, an expert playing with the levers and gears of American life. She’s never been able to clearly express why she wants to be president — she thinks she’s owed it because she’s been working inside the system for so long, she knows best how to operate without the instruction manual. She’s less interested in the presidency as a tool to reshape society than as a way of gradually pushing people to act in certain ways. She’s always been an advocate for systems, which is why she decided not to act in accordance with mentor Saul Alinsky’s suggestion to break the system from the outside. As she told Black Lives Matter activists last year, “I believe you change laws, you change allocation of resources, you change the way systems operate. You’re not going to change every heart.”

Trump believes that the presidency is merely a caudillo office. His only knowledge of politics is via his self-proclaimed bribery of public officials. He thinks the president can order members of the military to murder children. He says that as president, he “alone can solve” various problems — and solving them includes punishing members of the media with whom he disagrees. He pledges to single-handedly rewrite both domestic law and American foreign policy.

So this election pits the leftist technocrat against the nationalist strongman.

Trump believes that the presidency is merely a caudillo office.

Hillary is dangerous because all leftists in positions of power are dangerous. But Hillary’s presidency represents something existentially dangerous only if you believe, as she does, that she’s a highly competent politician. She isn’t. The presidency isn’t a Model UN position. It requires the capacity to use the bully pulpit, as Obama has; she has no such capacity. It requires building trust with the American people; she has none. President Hillary looks far more like the incompetent President Carter than the transformational President Obama. She’s a tinkerer who mistakes herself for a master craftswoman.

Trump is a different story.

Trump doesn’t know the system. He doesn’t care about the system. He’s entering the system to destroy it from the inside, by his own accounting. That means he doesn’t know where his limits lie. He’s only comfortable using the bully pulpit, or negotiating broad agreements with supposed enemies so as to declare himself a genius deal maker, or offering payoffs to those he wishes to buy.

Hillary is acutely aware of the presidency’s limits, and thinks she can work around them; the danger of Trump is that he isn’t even aware of his limits, because he believes the president has no limits.

#related#So, which is scarier: the far leftist who wants to twist the system to her advantage, or the nationalist who wants to burn it all down? For conservatives, there’s no clear answer. The alt-Right may want to “burn the system down” because the Left has controlled the system for so long, but it’s the system that has stopped President Obama from utterly destroying the country. By the same token, conservatives understand that the wholesale corruption of the system itself — the hijacking of the bureaucracy of the executive branch — renders it an institutional tool for the Left that outlives the current occupant of the Oval Office.

In the end, the question may come down to an assessment of the future: Can we restore the presidency to its constitutional role? If so, voting for someone who wishes to destroy the system becomes impossible. If not, we may as well elect the lesser-of-two-evils would-be-dictator.

— Ben Shapiro is the editor-in-chief of DailyWire.com.