Four Metaphors to Better Understand the President and the Left-Right Limits of His Presidency

The president has power but not agency. Much of the time he’s not in control of his own actions much less the actions of others. 

Metaphor 1: navigation by echolocation. The president alternates between making noise and listening to it bounce back. He makes no distinction between the noise he hears from the people serving with him in government and the noise he hears from people outside of government.

He's just as likely to gain signal from the next noise he hears as he is from his own cabinet. He can travel in any direction and the collective reverberations point him where to go next. This explains why he can fly blind and disregard information his staff is giving him.

Metaphor 2: a random walk. Summon the image of a “drunken man staggering around an empty field,” to borrow the words of investor Burton G. Malkiel, who conceived the analogy. Malkiel said of the drunken man, “He’s not rational, but he’s not predictable either.”

“A random walk is one in which future steps or directions cannot be predicted on the basis of past history.” The president moves from one place to the next, bumping into lines and crossing over them, with no apparent appreciation for legality or prudence.

Officials at all levels, receiving orders from the president, interpret orders in a directional sense, making legal determinations on their own, aware the president makes no distinction between serious and non-serious orders.

Metaphor 3: Tay the Microsoft chatter bot. In 2016 Tay started posting on Twitter and learning from other users. Tay had a built-in repeat-after-me capability and little appreciation for inappropriate behavior.

Twitter users exploited these vulnerabilities and within hours Tay began posting inflammatory and offensive content. Microsoft suspended the experiment in less than a day. Tay’s algorithm is a line-for-line copy of the way the president learns and communicates.

Metaphor 4: Liebig’s Barrel. “Just as the capacity of a barrel with staves of unequal length is limited by the shortest stave, so a plant's growth is limited by the nutrient in shortest supply.” “Growth is dictated not by resources available, but by the scarcest resource."

In the Trump administration, accountability is in short supply. The result is Rule by Nobody: “When neither superiors nor subordinates may be held responsible, we face an uncanny situation in which responsibility has seemingly been conjured out of existence.” Moral Responsibility in the Age of Bureaucracy (1992)