Jack Shafer is Politico’s senior media writer.

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.

At first, this might seem like a strange thing to say about a president who ran as anti-urban a campaign as we can remember. He is unique among presidents in having never done any kind of public service before—never been a governor, or a congressman; never even sat on a school board. But he does know one kind of politics up close: city hall. Growing up in the nearly all-white, well-off Queens neighborhood of Jamaica Estates under the tutelage of his self-promoting developer father, Fred, Trump learned the basics of New York City’s ethnic politics. He watched as Fred plied politicians with campaign donations, cultivating such politicians as Abraham Beame, who eventually became the city’s mayor. It was in Queens, which was defined by segregation in the 1960s and 1970s, that Trump acquired his tribal sense of politics and the fear that mayhem ruled just blocks from his safe white home. When he warns of the dangerous “inner cities,” he’s citing that past.

You can take the boy out of the borough, but you can’t take him out of the city. From Koch, perhaps the last of the hotdogging big-city mayors and one of the longest-serving mayors in Trump’s lifetime, he learned by osmosis the glad-handing and kibbitzing that go into governing. Other mayors Trump observed during his foundational years have also sharpened his political reflexes—he rages and belittles like Rudy Giuliani; he pictures himself a billionaire king in the manner of Michael Bloomberg.

Watching Trump campaign for president—and now, watching him try to be president—it’s apparent that the superficial duties of the job, the kind of civic theater that mayors specialize in, are at the heart of his model of leadership. Doesn’t he look happiest when boarding Marine One or Air Force One, stepping into his armored limo, gripping-and-grinning, traveling to Saudi Arabia to collect chintzy honors from a king, calling on the pope, filling the federal equivalent of potholes, and being photographed with world leaders? When he blows kisses to Vladimir Putin, it feels less like serious diplomacy toward a belligerent nation than like courting Moscow as a future sister city.



The superficial duties of the job, the kind of civic theater that mayors specialize in, are at the heart of Trump’s model of leadership.



Our classic big-city mayors all cut a similar figure. Even after winning office, they kept campaigning, stumping for their causes without apology. They blustered in the name of the neighborhoods, the parishes and the synagogues. They feuded with their enemies. Loudly. They “fixed” things, looked for deal-making partners and struck alliances. They maintained peace between labor and capital, and they kept civil order. They played the booster. The classic mayors knew how to shame companies from moving their headquarters out of town, how to crowd their way to the center of any photo opportunity, how to junket and how to get results. Most of all, classic mayors were virtuosos in the art of blowing their own horns.

It’s from this script that Trump has largely governed, which helps to explain why, surrounded by all the trappings of the presidency, he still seems so unpresidential. It also helps explain why the initial months of his administration have accomplished so little. He’s a self-proclaimed champion dealmaker. But where are the deals? How can someone with the political skills to become president so totally lack the political skills to be president? Because he basically misunderstands the dimensions of the job. The presidency isn’t a supersized mayoralty. Mayors can get away with bullying city councils and acting like a legislature of one because councils are relatively weak. We’ve seen the approach in the first months of Trump’s presidency in the dismissive way he treats Congress—and we’ve seen it fail, over and over.

Illustration by Joe Ciardiello

Being a mayor isn’t easy, but it also isn’t the complex bureaucratic balancing act that a president needs to pull off. Mayors don’t command the armed forces or make foreign policy. Their fingers don’t rest on the nuclear button. They represent—at most—hundreds of thousands of voters, not the tens of millions that presidents attract. They might lead their local party, but not the national organization. They are cogs, not the wheel. In one sense, a president is vastly more powerful than a mayor, but in another, he’s far more hamstrung, forced to contest with other branches of government for power. Mayors can steer a development project to a donor or bury an activist by sending the housing inspector to his home to write up code violations, but lucky for us, the Constitution precludes presidents from exercising their will with “Make it so” directives. The best example from the Trump administration so far: The courts enjoined his “Make it so” immigration executive orders; his only recourse was to file an appeal and shout the judges down, as though he could beat them just by rallying his voters again.

Trump started playing America’s mayor even before he took office. Just a few weeks after the election, he made it his mission to save 1,100 Carrier manufacturing jobs in Indianapolis from being exported to Mexico. (In reality, only 800 such jobs were under threat.) “I am working hard, even on Thanksgiving, trying to get Carrier A.C. company to stay in the U.S.,” Trump tweeted. “Will know soon!” As city hall-style theater, the Carrier stunt was brilliant, but it was about as presidential as blowing your nose while reading a televised Oval Office address. As both the left and the right observed, U.S. presidents don’t jawbone individual companies by name. And Trump’s achievement was, on a national scale, irrelevant. Had a big-city mayor like Koch preserved 800 jobs in Queens back in the ’70s, he would have deserved accolades. But in the context of total U.S. employment, where tens of thousands of jobs vanish and appear every month, the 800-job deal meant little. It was also a fluke. Trump could intimidate Carrier only because its parent, United Technologies, takes down about $5.6 billion in government contracts annually. Trump’s implied threat was that he would go after those contracts. But when he attempted to strong-arm Rexnord about closing an Indianapolis factory and sending 300 jobs across the border, the company could ignore his tweets: It does its business selling to other companies, not the feds. Rexnord probably feared the mayor of Indianapolis more than it worried about Trump.



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So, if Donald Trump is a mayor, what kind of mayor is he? Although he might have absorbed his moves from the Koch-Giuliani-Bloomberg templates, his leadership style most closely echoes a mayor he has probably never heard of—William Hale “Big Bill” Thompson, who helmed Chicago like a king and jester from the 1910s into the early 1930s. His administrations were scandal-kissed. He tolerated gangsters—Al Capone’s St. Valentine’s Day Massacre went down on his watch. He switched political positions without warning, giving his mayoralty no coherence. He also was a man of height and great girth. If ever a case for parallel evolution in politics could be made, the Trump-Thompson pairing is it.

Bill Thompson, Chicago, 1915-1923; 1927-1931



Sam Yorty, Los Angeles, 1961-1973



Frank Rizzo, Philadelpia, 1972-1980



Ed Koch, New York, 1978-1989



Rudy Giuliani, New York, 1994-2001 Credit: Getty Images

“Thompson was a buffoon, a smart showman, a shrewd politician, all in one,” wrote James Doherty, who covered him for the Chicago Tribune, in a 1951 assessment. Thompson was a master at sensing and projecting whatever image his supporters fancied. Like Trump, Thompson didn’t tap a political machine to thrust him into power—his personality was the machine. The New York Times and other newspapers of the era recognized his charisma, calling his political ideology “Bigbillism” and his followers “Bigbillites,” the way we call Trump’s ideology Trumpism and his most blindly loyal followers Trumpkins. Like Trump, Thompson savaged his opponents and entertained his base with political stunts. He once instructed his followers to meet him at noon at Chicago’s Cort Theatre for a rally at which flyers promised the production of a one-act play called The Rats. Before a packed house, he hoisted onto the stage two caged rats, addressing one as “Fred” and the other as “Doc,” named after his political foes. He lectured and defamed the rats to the cheers of the crowd.

At times, Mayor Thompson seems to fully ghost President Trump. Like Trump, Thompson campaigned on an explicit “America First” platform. At one point, he started a preposterous feud with England’s King George V, promising him a “bust on the snoot” if he ever dared to visit Chicago. The Thompson-Trump affinities stretch further. Thompson was a demagogue, recognized and feted by fellow tub-thumper Huey Long in Louisiana. Thompson hated the press, and literally—like Trump—ran against the media. “By voting for Mayor William Thompson, you fight the commercialized newspapers,” one Thompson handbill stated. At the same time, he was desperate for media approval, and he and his press agents did everything possible to curry positive campaign news. Thompson vowed that he would bring “prosperity” and a “full dinner pail” to the city’s citizens, and knew how to stimulate a rally with vaudeville tricks. He blasted his political opponents with schoolyard insults. “He hasn’t taken a bath in 20 years,” he said of one. “He ought to be running for garbage collector.” He billed himself as a builder of infrastructure—the polite name for pork-barrel politics—and never cared about the details of governing. He was given to grandiose pronouncements about the sweep of his own movement: Early in his career, when enforcing the Sunday closing of a saloon, he raged against his foes. “They are not opposing Thompson. They are opposing an army.”

Trump shares some political heritage with two other showy 20th-century mayors as well, especially when it comes to pitting people against each other: Los Angeles’ Sam Yorty (three terms, 1961 through 1973), who traveled the world peddling his own foreign policy, and Philadelphia’s Frank Rizzo (two terms, 1972-1980), a former police commissioner with a violent streak. Law-and-order firebrands, Yorty and Rizzo unleashed the police against minorities and the powerless. “Black people are really racist. They vote for black people because they are black,” Yorty said in 1981, during a failed comeback for mayor. In 1970, cops working for then-Police Chief Rizzo raided the city’s Black Panther headquarters, where suspects were handcuffed and stripped. “Imagine the big Black Panthers with their pants down,” said Rizzo, a Democratic mayor who became President Richard Nixon’s darling.

Yorty and Rizzo pandered to white voters, Trump-style, slathering them with an unearned sense of victimhood. (This is one point of difference with Thompson: He was a race liberal by the standards of the times, seeking and winning African-American, as well as white, votes.) The exploitation of ethnic divisions for electoral gain has been a chapter in the playbook for aspiring mayors for more than a century. In Boston, the Irish banded together in the 1880s to elect a kinsman mayor, and, from then on, enjoyed a long domination of city government. In Washington, Cleveland, Chicago and Atlanta, African Americans gathered political clout commensurate with their numbers and began to populate, even dominate, mayors’ offices. Trump didn’t campaign explicitly on a “white ethnic” platform, but he implicitly played on exactly those tribal grievances: By attacking a “Mexican” federal judge and soft-pedaling his criticism of white nationalist David Duke, he made such overt measures unnecessary. The goal of the backward-looking Trump campaign was to recreate not only the Ivory Snow politics of midcentury Jamaica Estates, where whites ran the program, but also the Fred Trump housing agenda that impeded blacks from moving into the apartment towers he built. White voters—especially those without college degrees—got Trump’s unsubtle message, which attempts to reverse two generations of racial headway made by presidents from both parties. Trump’s gamble is that he can build a motivated base big enough to construct for himself a big city hall on the Potomac from which he can govern by decree.



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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.

None of the major louches to have loitered in the Trump White House—Steve Bannon, Reince Priebus, Sebastian Gorka, Kellyanne Conway, Michael Flynn, Keith Schiller, Mike Dubke, Michael Cohen, the Trump brothers, Boris Epshteyn, Jared Kushner, Ivanka Trump, Sean Spicer, Hope Hicks, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, David Bossie, Omarosa Manigault, Corey Lewandowski and Stephen Miller—would look out of place if cast in a period film titled America’s Mayor. What big-city mayoralty doesn’t have a dark-arts practitioner like Roger Stone on retainer? What classic mayor doesn’t indulge in nepotism, as Trump has with Javanka, or insist on his underlings pledging personal loyalty to him? The mind’s eye has no trouble seeing Trump’s insecure minions jockeying for his attention while they simultaneously plot interoffice back-stabbings: For mayoral staffs, all politics is personal. It’s sometimes very personal—it’s easy to imagine that a rookie mayor, operating under the assumption that with kinship comes loyalty, would impose his son-in-law on the hierarchy as a top aide. The ensemble Trump has convened awaits only the right screenwriter to repurpose its shenanigans as a midcentury city hall movie, and the right director to decide whether it’s a dark comedy or an American tragedy.

Like your average mayor, Trump thinks he won office on the strength of his personal charms. When he speaks, he sounds like that mayor who delights in hearing the sound of his own voice, whether he’s addressing a captive audience or a joint session of Congress, or making girl talk on the phone with bestie Putin. The deeper responsibilities of the job, however—the nation-scale responsibilities—daunt him.

Illustration by Joe Ciardiello

Even small-state governors learn how to function as mini presidents by managing a legislature, commanding a cabinet and directing state agencies. Compare that with Trump’s experience: The largest bureaucracy he has ever mastered is his 150-person executive suite at the Trump Organization’s headquarters, and even that, reportedly, he ran mostly just by barking orders at a circle of advisers small enough to be within earshot. Trump might be our least-experienced president ever—with even less experience than Barack Obama. At least Obama, who served in both the Illinois senate and the U.S. Senate, was smart enough to rely on the existing managerial outlines for his presidency, and hire smarter. Even Obama’s critics would concede that he faked being presidential better than Trump so far has done.

Assuming that Trump will continue to swagger like a mayor, what can we expect from his presidency? Unlike a mayor, he faces both a national and an international press corps, which can’t be tamed or deflected as easily as can local media. Trump’s constant lying, which might survive in a place like Richard Daley’s Chicago, can’t escape scrutiny in Washington, where his imagined charms are spent on the press like seed spilled to the ground.

The press is only one of Trump’s problems. When a mayor takes over, he can clean house at city hall, replacing the chief of police and other top officials with his loyalists. Trump’s sacking of FBI Director James Comey was the sort of preemptive move a mayor might make—eliminate the top cop, and his troublesome investigations will disappear. But decapitation doesn’t make Washington bureaucrats cower. The bureaucracies possess power independent of their chiefs, and they don’t fold easily in the face of outside “meddling.” Even though many FBI agents voted for Trump, they telegraphed their ire at Comey’s sacking by letting the administration know that Trump wouldn’t be greeted warmly at FBI headquarters if he made his planned visit. Has any president ever gotten such a whistling brush-back pitch from his own law-enforcement guys? Trump enjoys a limited welcome at the State Department and the Environmental Protection Agency, as well, and would be snubbed by broad elements at the Pentagon and the CIA.

Trump’s problems extend beyond who likes him in D.C. and who doesn’t. He depended on the sort of ethnic-identity politics that have elected mayors for almost a century and a half. But with that strategy comes a bundle of political problems that have plagued mayors over the decades. Identity politics have long helped out-of-power groups achieve power, but they’re no guarantee of success, especially as the voting base changes. In Trump’s case, if he expands his constituency beyond his white base, he risks alienating the group that elected him. But is his white base big enough to maintain Republican majorities in the House and Senate? Can the base return him to the White House in 2020? If he continues to insist on governing like an ethnic mayor—buoying his fans with every gesture while ignoring, even attacking, the groups who didn’t vote for him—he can only invigorate his opposition. Ethnic victors tend to be replaced by ethnic challengers. This happened in Los Angeles to Yorty, who was unseated by Tom Bradley, an African American, and in Philadelphia, where Frank Rizzo eventually made way for W. Wilson Goode, also black. In Boston and Chicago, white tribal mayoral politics added an extra dose of sour to race relations that still taint today’s politics.



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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. In his 1980 essay “Whither the Mayors? A Note on Mayoral Careers,” scholar Russell D. Murphy observes that mayors tend not to advance to higher office because their political skills don’t translate well to the national scene. The equation works the other way, too, he writes, saying that “it is as difficult to envision Richard Nixon as mayor of Los Angeles, or John Kennedy as mayor of Boston as it is to picture Richard Daley as President.” Mayoral skills are real skills. But sending Trump to Washington is like sending a local plumber to repair the Hoover Dam.

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.