Donald Trump has done everything except unite Americans

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He’s punished foes and elevated friends. He’s targeted Democratic-governed cities and states and rewarded Republican areas. He’s portrayed his rivals as un-American, communists and lunatics, and he celebrates his allies as patriots. He’s won a peace – for now – in the Middle East but is making war in the streets of the United States. He’s set back Iran’s nuclear program but is undermining the functioning of the programs of his own government.

But what also matters – what also sets U.S. President Donald Trump apart from his predecessors, many of whom he reviles – is what he hasn’t done. He hasn’t taken steps to bring the country together.

Indeed, allies and adversaries alike have noted that Mr. Trump, rather than working to close the country’s divisions, has actively acted to widen them.

This was never so evident as it has become in the latest government shutdown, which soon will enter its third week. Americans say both the President and congressional Republicans (58 per cent of respondents, according to the latest Associated Press/NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll) and the Democrats (54 per cent) are responsible for the lingering impasse.

As recently as Friday, Mr. Trump e-mailed his supporters a “STAND WITH TRUMP” message reminding them, “Not only will we have to fight back against the Democrats this cycle, we will also have to battle their strongest allies, judges, puppet masters, and the liberal fake news media.”

Crowds rally against Trump at No Kings protests across the U.S.

A day later, on Saturday, hundreds of thousands of anti-Trump protesters across the country took to the streets in the latest “No Kings” demonstrations.

Mr. Trump’s profile and policies, including his tariff and immigration initiatives, are a great deviation from presidential precedence. Together they may be fundamentally altering the nature of the office.

“Since the Cold War, presidents from both parties generally tried to tamp down efforts for partisan advantage” said Thomas Whelan, a social-science professor at Boston University. “Yet Trump seems to believe the more division, the more it helps him.”

In his first inaugural address, Franklin Delano Roosevelt – himself so divisive a figure that his opponents referred to him as “that man in the White House” so as to avoid even speaking his name – nevertheless said amid the wreckage of the Great Depression that the country faced “the arduous days that lie before us in the warm courage of the national unity.” He referred to “the clear consciousness of seeking old and precious moral value” and called upon Americans to recognize their “interdependence on each other.”

None of this kind of rhetoric is in the Trump playbook.

That’s in part because the President depends so much – both politically and psychically – on the allegiance of his political base, which has stuck with him since 2015.

It also grows out of his business and media profile as a battler who brooks no impediment, tolerates no dissent and profits from division – a view that has come into sharp relief during the government shutdown. “The Democrats are getting killed in the shutdown, because we’re closing up programs that are Democrat programs that we’re opposed to,” the President said last week. “And they’re never going to come back, in many cases.”

Recognizing, and even sowing, division is not without precedent in American political life.

In a famous 1969 speech, Richard Nixon spoke of a “silent majority” that he believed was at odds with the cacophonous opposition to his Vietnam policies.

Opinion: Trump’s big triumph in the Middle East will make him more autocratic than ever

But even then, he pivoted to speak of national unity. In the address that introduced the “silent majority” phrase, the 37th president said that he wanted to bring the war to an end “so that the energy and dedication of you, our young people, now too often directed into bitter hatred against those responsible for the war, can be turned to the great challenges of peace, a better life for all Americans, a better life for all people on this Earth.”

Jimmy Carter, who won the White House in the bitter 1976 race against president Gerald Ford, later grew close to Mr. Ford. In his eulogy for his predecessor, 31 years after the election, Mr. Carter said: “You learn a lot about a man when you run against him for president, and when you stand in his shoes, and assume the responsibilities that he has borne so well, and perhaps even more after you both lay down the burdens of high office and work together in a non-partisan spirit of patriotism and service.”

The 1992 contest between president George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton was equally bitter. But when Mr. Clinton first sat at the Oval Office desk, he found a letter from Mr. Bush saying, “Your success now is our country’s success. I am rooting hard for you.” The two later became close friends, sharing laughs and cigarette-boat rides off the coast of Maine that became a potent symbol of national unity. Mr. Clinton said he had become the “black sheep son” of the Bush family. Some Bush children joked that George H.W. Bush considered Mr. Clinton his favourite child.

By contrast, Mr. Trump, in his remarks to Israel’s Knesset last week, castigated his two immediate predecessors, Barack Obama and Joe Biden. He regularly refers to Mr. Biden as the “worst president ever,” a phrase he also has appended to George W. Bush – who, throughout his 2000 presidential campaign, told campaign crowds, “I’m a uniter, not a divider.”