SNA (Tokyo) — The Trump administration has just finished its first hundred days. It’s a good time to look back on what’s been done during a president’s “honeymoon period,” the high-water mark of his political momentum; and also it’s a bellwether for the pace and direction of the rest of the presidency.

So far, the report card is not good.

Trump’s approval rating at this point in his presidency is the lowest of any modern president (except himself last time). His systematic yet shambolic dismantling of institutions and agreements has alarmed allies and delighted adversaries. His tariffs are ungrounded in reality and applied in ways that help nobody except insider traders on the stock market. His hiring of incompetent people in the name of “meritocracy” has caused scandal after scandal, which would be grounds for impeachment for any other president. And so on.

Anyone following the news knows all this and probably skipped the last paragraph. So what new insights could I possibly offer?

Well, one mystery has always been, “How can he get away with all this?” How does Trump survive scandal after scandal?

Political science may have an answer.

Political Parties and Polarization

Brace yourself for some theory about political parties.

Broadly speaking, political parties in functioning multi-party democracies come in two flavors.

The first is “party-centered” political parties.

As the term implies, everything is centered on what the party organization wants. Candidates subsume their individual beliefs to ride the coattails of the party brand. Representatives toe the party line or get expelled.

You’ll find these political parties in parliamentary systems, e.g., Europe and Japan.

For example, in Japan, I was lobbying individual candidates for their support of a law against racial discrimination right before an election. Their reaction? They deferred to the party’s manifesto. Nobody would take an individual stance if the party hadn’t taken a stance.

The clearest example was the Japan Communist Party. All they would say was, “We will run it by the Central Committee” (chuo iinkai). If it eventually created a party plank, everyone followed it or was expelled from the party.

That is how party discipline is enforced. Consequently, voters in “party-centered” systems vote less for individual candidates in their district and more for a party.

As such, this system is called “party government” (as in, a government controlled by parties, not bureaucrats, dictators, or individual politicians).

Under “party government,” political polarization is normal. Parties enforce their strict dogma, appeal only to their base, and once in power, shut the opposition out of policymaking.

What stops this system from becoming undemocratic is the existence of multiple parties, offering voters enough choices so usually no one elected party has complete control. Then parties form coalitions in the legislature and must compromise or lose their majority.

Now contrast this with the American system.

Individualistic US Political Parties

The other flavor of political parties is “big-tent,” since the United States has only two viable options: Democrats or Republicans.

Of course, each party has an ideology and policy stances, but party discipline is only loosely enforced.

In elections, people run as individuals and create a brand for themselves within their electoral district. With an “entrepreneurial” style, American candidates generally run and fund their own campaigns, appealing to their local constituents’ narrow interests. For example, you see candidates running on oddly specific local issues such as ethanol subsidies in Iowa or Jewish space lasers in northwest Georgia.

Once elected, they also vote in Congress as individuals. They can even vote against their own party without being expelled. Why? Because a “big-tent party” has to hold together as many seats as possible or lose their majority. This means, for example, Democrats occasionally voting for Republican-sponsored measures if there’s a close election in their home district.

A generation ago, there was plenty of overlap in the “big tents.” Some Democrats were further right than some Republicans and vice versa, meaning there was space for compromise that one would expect in a country as diverse as America.

But that has all changed. Conditions where polarization in American politics has been brewing since the 1990s. Now the “big tents” no longer overlap.

The Rise of “Conditional Party Government” in America

The Republicans in particular have become more like European “party-centered” systems. Not only can they publicly shame and deter members for not toeing the party line, they also can effectively expel them through early elections (i.e., primaries).

This happens when a party leader manages to amass powers by diktat. Meaning he has control over essentials such as party leadership, policymaking committees, the floor agenda, and party funding.

This is often welcome in a Congress that is slow and fractious by design. Finally, a leader who “gets shit done.” Then in election season, the party gets more votes. The party then gets more seats, making the party leader even stronger.

It’s a positive feedback loop. If the party leader can hold that together, you get one-party dominance.

This is called “conditional party government,” meaning that only under certain conditions do you get European political party dynamics in America.

We had those conditions more than a century ago with a House Speaker nicknamed “Czar Joe Cannon.” But it didn’t last long. He got drunk with power, was booted out, and rules were later changed so that the Speakership never got as dictatorial again.

That held until the 1990s, when Newt Gingrich took back the Speakership for the Republicans for the first time in forty years. He assumed enough power to once again create conditional party government.

Gingrich not only shut out the Democrats from power, but also depicted them as the “enemy” who were so “evil” they had no right to have power ever again.

He too soon got drunk with power and lost his Speakership. But this time things didn’t snap back like they did under Czar Cannon. When Democrats were back in power, they took revenge, enforcing their own party discipline and excluding the Republicans. Then the Republicans came back, and it became a cyclical diktat tit-for-tat.

Now, after a generation of conditional party government, polarization has become institutionalized to a degree probably not seen since before the Civil War.

The difference is that if America had been a parliamentary system, sooner or later people within a party ruled by fiat would call foul, break ranks, call for a vote of “no confidence,” and trigger elections. Then new parties and coalitions would form in a multiparty system that forces compromise.

Not in the United States, where elections only happen at prescribed intervals. If you break ranks, the government doesn’t fall, and you still have to live with the fallout under the same leadership for years, probably getting primaried out of your seat before the next general election.

“Conditional Party Government” Abets Authoritarianism

This is where Trump comes in. This time, the dictatorial party leader is not a leader of a Congressional chamber, with powers limited to that body. It’s the president.

And since that is a separate branch of government and the most powerful leadership position in the world, that means the perfect storm of American “conditional party government” is undermining the very separation of powers that keeps US democracy intact.

But to get back to the original question: Here’s why Trump survives scandals.

As telecaster and author Chris Hayes insightfully noted in a recent interview: “The thing that Trump learned from his first term is, if no one inside the tent starts criticizing, you can kind of hold together this 40 to 42%, and then everything just sort of goes away if you stick it out long enough.”

So there you have it. “Conditional party government” encourages decisive moves in ways that only rule by diktat will let you, even if that rule is capricious and corrupt. Because you can enforce party discipline so that your side can’t criticize and undermine what you’re doing.

All you have to do is weather the storm and let the next scandal you generate overtake the previous one. Impeachment obviously doesn’t work, and consequences in elections aren’t going to happen for years. So just keep riding the wave of the scandal and jump on the next one before it crashes.

Propaganda Closes the Positive Feedback Loop

There’s one more key factor in all of this.

Party discipline isn’t just forced on party cadres. In America, it’s enforced in the media.

A person by the name of Roger Ailes once lamented that his erstwhile boss, Richard Nixon, would probably not have been hounded out of the presidency in 1974 had there been more “pro-administration coverage.”

He noted in a memo, “People are lazy. With television you just sit—watch—listen. The thinking is done for you.” Nixon embraced the idea, saying he and his supporters needed “our own news.”

Years later, Ailes launched Fox News.

This propaganda network, designed to support the Republicans under all circumstances, remains the most watched cable news network. It’s what holds together the 40-42% minimum bedrock of public support necessary to weather any scandal.

Consider how effective it’s been. It saved Trump from taking responsibility for hundreds of thousands of unnecessary deaths from a botched Covid response, two impeachment convictions, and criminal conviction afterwards. It even got him re-elected!

Decades of “conditional party government” have produced the most effective authoritarian feedback loop ever seen in American history.

When Will the Fever Break?

We’ve asked many times when people will wake up and see the damage Trump is doing to American democracy.

But even after the most disastrous first hundred days in modern American presidential history, that’s still not happening.

Trump’s approval rating is still at around 40%, a level he’s bounced back from in previous scandals.

So scandal is in fact the status quo, and all we can do is wait for the next one, because his supporters will never desert him, and his party will always back him thanks to “conditional party government.”

This all happened because of America’s creaky and flawed democracy, one that has always favored conservative interests. It remains hard to reform after 250 years of bad habits. As I’ve written before, things have to get really dire, including wars and deaths of presidents, before landmark reforms happen. I cannot see how bad it has to get before Trump loses power.

And even if Trump leaves quietly in 2028 (which seems unlikely), his legacy will linger. He’s been the most influential person in American politics for a decade now, permanently damaging American democratic culture. Now there is a new generation of mini-Trumps, young voters who came of age during the Trump era, sharing his transactional worldview because they think it’s normal. It’s all they know.

I saw a shift like this happen when I was their age. In college, I saw how Ronald Reagan spawned a generation of cynical Yuppies, who believed “greed is good” and you don’t criticize your fellow Republicans. Once they were my classmates. Now they lead the Republican Party.

I was even a classmate of the Federalist Society’s Leonard Leo at Cornell, and witnessed how a conservative-leaning jurist’s thinking evolved to the point where he could justify the ruthless politicization and corruption of the judiciary.

As long as his political party did whatever was necessary to win any contest, there would always be someone who would explain it all away—no matter how big the scandal. Once it was spin doctors tethered to a political party. Now it’s Fox News.

As the first hundred days reveal the antidemocratic impulses under a lawless president, fortified by America’s “conditional party government,” I don’t see any way out of this. The perfect storm remains perfect. Short of a black-swan event, Trump will continue to escape any scandal, and America’s democracy and rule of law will founder.

Become a Shingetsu News supporter on Patreon.