Using Steve Skowronek’s theory of the presidency, particularly his theory of disjunctive presidencies, I’ve been plugging the Trump-Carter comparison, as many of you know. It occurred to me yesterday morning, however, on reading this quite astute piece from Matt Yglesias, that there may be an interesting flaw in that comparison.

Yglesias points out, and I think he’s right in ways that few people have grappled with, that in many ways, Trump ran well to the center of the Republican Party during the primaries. Trump promised not to touch Medicare, Social Security, and Medicaid; he seemed chill with gay marriage; at times he praised Planned Parenthood; he ran against free trade; and he was a sharp critic of the neocon adventurism of the Bush administration. Rhetorically; in the campaign. I’m not talking about how he has governed; that’ll come in a minute.

That kind of willingness to mix it up, to fuck with standard GOP positions, is the hallmark of disjunctive presidents. Carter did something similar during the campaign in 1976: he promised to scramble the New Deal coalition (particularly labor), to roll back the regulatory state, to take on welfare. As occurred with Trump, that scrambling of the map provoked a major backlash from the pillars of the party, and like Trump, Carter won the nomination and the presidency.