The Reckoning

by Mary L. Trump;

  Out of “respect” for the office, or a desire for continued access to the White House, reporters kept asking the wrong questions. For example, instead of asking which Democrat could beat Donald in 2020, they should have been asking, Why is someone so unfit, who lies to the American people multiple times each day, who constantly betrays his oath to uphold and defend the Constitution, and who puts his own self-interest above the country’s national security interests in increasingly alarming ways, being allowed to run?

  During his time in office, the media failed to put the actions of his administration in particular and those of the Republican Party in general in their proper context. Donald wasn’t just incompetent, laughable, and cruel—though he was all of those—he was actively laying the groundwork, through his rhetoric, his policies, and his perversion of democratic norms and institutions, for autocracy. The Republican Party wasn’t simply wielding its power to push through a mandate in the furtherance of democracy; it was engaging in antidemocratic, counter-majoritarian tactics that aligned with their goal of clinging to power and establishing minority rule. Both the executive and legislative branches were trending toward fascism, but a mainstream media that had been reluctant to call a liar a liar or a racist a racist during the first three years Donald was in the Oval Office certainly couldn’t be counted on to find the language necessary to describe the reality of our increasingly fraught political moment.

  The politically motivated attacks inspired by Donald’s rhetoric and his example contributed to the growing sense of chaos. From the mass murder at two mosques in New Zealand in which fifty-one people were killed to the attack at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh in which eleven people were killed to the El Paso shooting in which twenty-three people were killed, a line can be drawn to Donald’s unrestrained anti-Semitism and xenophobia, demonstrated by his talk of Mexican “hordes” and his description of neo-Nazis as “fine people.” He tweeted his vitriol and used the most powerful platform on the planet to demonize one group and support the other. Putting it out there so blatantly had the counterintuitive effect of making his views more acceptable to tens of millions of people. If what he was saying was so bad, wouldn’t he keep it hidden?

  Women were targeted. Muslims were targeted. The LGBTQ community was targeted. Poor people were targeted. Puerto Ricans were targeted. And then children were targeted, too.

  The cruelty of the first three years reached its peak with the implementation of the child separation policy (so-called zero tolerance), which was adopted in April 2018. Every other morally bankrupt act that had gone before—from the travel ban of several majority-Muslim countries to the exclusion of new transgender troops from the military to the blocking of Syrian refugees—suddenly seemed a prelude to this particular horror. It felt like the school shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School that claimed the lives of twenty first graders, with this difference: our government was the perpetrator. In justifying the policy, Attorney General Jeff Sessions said, “If you don’t want your child separated, then don’t bring them across the border illegally. It’s not our fault that somebody does that.” It was the language of the abuser. The U.S. government kidnapped the children, even those who had family living legally in the United States, put them into concentration camps, and then, due to incompetence, carelessness, or depravity, was unable to unite many of these children with their families because the government hadn’t bothered to keep track of them.

  Next, he went after our institutions.

  On September 1, 2019, Donald tweeted that Hurricane Dorian was heading toward Alabama. It was a mistake—a simple mistake that anybody could have made. When the Birmingham office of the National Weather Service corrected him in a tweet (“Alabama will NOT see any impacts from Dorian”), his pathological aversion to admitting he’s wrong prompted an absurd doubling down. He created false evidence, revising a map of the hurricane’s path with, of all things, a Sharpie. It was obvious and embarrassing and most people didn’t take it (or him) seriously. Some Alabamans might have done so, however, in which case they thought Dorian could be headed their way. But it wasn’t so, and in the end his lie was harmless.

  Or was it? What if the opposite scenario had played out, and a dangerous hurricane had been headed Alabama’s way and Donald had mistakenly tweeted that Alabama would be spared? What if he doubled down on this claim when corrected and then changed the map to exclude Alabama from the hurricane’s path? Would some residents, believing they were out of danger, have failed to prepare? What if people had died because, instead of trusting the experts, they listened instead to the man in the Oval Office? The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), up until then an elite government agency, didn’t do itself any favors when five days later it released an unsigned statement that read, in part, “Hurricane Dorian could impact Alabama,” which backed up Donald’s lie and undercut the National Weather Service’s truth. The question is, why?

  Almost everything that Donald did from the 2017 inauguration on—the gratuitous cruelty, the international embarrassments, the lawbreaking, the bullying, the endless trips to his golf courses, and the juvenile tweeting—took its toll on us both as individuals and as a society. Our political divide seemed to be widening past the point of coherence, but beyond that, none of what was happening seemed to threaten the fundamental landscape of American democracy. No, this wasn’t where the real damage was being done.

  In retrospect, the stories that took up most of our attention (and sapped most of our strength) did exactly what they were meant to do: keep us from focusing on what was really happening below the radar. The contours of our government were shifting. Only the most practiced (or obsessed) observer could have pieced together the fact that the onslaught of foreign policy blunders and lies and the displays of incompetence and nepotism and grifting were distracting us from the real threat this administration posed—the systematic dismantling of the very institutions put in place to protect us when people like Donald manage to ascend to power.

  Fragile systems bend toward the dysfunction of the most psychologically disordered member of the system, especially if that person is disproportionately powerful. America’s institutions were designed to be impervious to the depredations of any one individual, regardless of how dysfunctional he might be, but in a country that relies so heavily upon traditions and norms, the Senate, cabinet members, and advisers need to act as safeguards, not accomplices. When they fail to—or choose not to—rein in the dysfunctional individual, he (with assistance from his enablers) is left with all of the resources of his position at his disposal to pervert every institution he controls until they come to amplify and exemplify the worst of him.

  At literally every single cabinet-level agency in our government there was significant disruption during the four years of Donald’s administration at both the structural and human level. It’s not as if these agencies had become newly vulnerable when Donald entered the Oval Office, and it’s not as if Donald was the first White House occupant to co-opt the Department of Justice for his own purposes. He was just the first one lucky enough to have his party in complete control of the government and, thanks in part to looming demographic irrelevance, desperate enough to let him break or exploit whatever he could get his hands on as long as the party got its originalist judges, its tax cuts, its voter suppression, and its gerrymandering. Donald was the Republican Party without the pretense.

  Barack Obama and George W. Bush could have bent Justice and State to do their bidding if they’d been so inclined, if it had occurred to them to try as long as their party was in power and willing to be complicit. The danger going forward is that the path has already been walked. All it’s going to take to complete the destruction is for another authoritarian to get into the White House with a legislative branch that’s willing to do his bidding.

  What many of us didn’t realize is that most of our government is based on the belief that antiquated concepts like honor and shame will sufficiently motivate our elected offi
cials to follow precedent. As incompetent as most of the people in Donald’s inner circle were, there were some who knew how to suss out the weaknesses in the system and were willing to exploit them. It’s easy to break shit, especially when you think doing so will benefit you. Donald’s entire career has demonstrated that he is much better at tearing things down than he is at building them, so it should have come as no surprise that his administration would be as well.

  The unique threat Donald posed was made worse by his administration’s almost total lack of transparency. It would be up to the media, the courts, and Congress to keep us informed and protect us from executive branch overreach. From the inauguration on, those institutions largely failed us (Congress most of all), either by failing to take Donald seriously or portray his actions in a straightforward way or through their willingness to exploit him for their own purposes (ratings, ideology, or raw power), no matter the cost to the American people or the American experiment.

  So while no one was keeping tabs, Donald was free to treat cabinet nominations as ambassadorships, a way to pay back cronies and allies. There’s no other explanation for former Texas governor Rick Perry, neurosurgeon Ben Carson, or wealthy person (and sister of mercenary Erik Prince) Betsy DeVos to have been placed at the departments of Energy, Housing and Urban Development, and Education, respectively. None of them had relevant experience. Perry had previously run for president on a platform that would have included eliminating the Department of Energy if he could have remembered its name. In the case of DeVos, her role as a staunch advocate for school choice (teachers unions were critical of her nomination) and her public pronouncements on the relationship between schools and Christianity (she described education activism and reform efforts as means to “advance God’s Kingdom”) were even more alarming. A comprehensive report by Becca Damante, posted on the online forum Just Security in September 2020, found that fifteen officials in Donald’s administration in “acting” positions held their positions illegally. Other positions were kept vacant on purpose. It’s a lot easier to push through your agenda and get away with repurposing the cabinet-level departments if you’re willing to break the law and nobody bothers to stop you.

  The greatest damage done during Donald’s tenure, though, was at agencies where the people put in charge deliberately changed the culture and the mission of the organizations they led. In terms of short-term consequences and long-lasting impact, the most negatively affected were the Department of State and the Department of Justice. (The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention also suffered under the administration, but the extent to which this was the case wasn’t revealed until COVID hit.)

  The Department of Justice mission statement is straightforward enough: “to enforce the law and defend the interests of the United States according to the law; to ensure public safety against threats foreign and domestic; to provide federal leadership in preventing and controlling crime; to seek just punishment for those guilty of unlawful behavior; and to ensure fair and impartial administration of justice for all Americans.” It says nothing about defending the interests of any particular individual. Nonetheless, Donald, forever in search of his Roy Cohn, made the assumption that people would do his bidding even if they worked for the government and not for him. When James Comey at the FBI and Sally Yates at Justice failed that test, they were both dismissed.

  Jeff Sessions seemed the perfect guy to put in charge of the Department of Justice—in February 2016 he had been the first senator to endorse Donald, a potentially risky move politically. But getting the job had been his goal all along, and it paid off. In 1986, when Sessions had been picked by President Ronald Reagan for a judgeship in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Alabama, things hadn’t gone as smoothly. His nomination couldn’t get out of the Judiciary Committee. The bipartisan vote was 10–8 to oppose recommending him to the full Senate for a vote. Numerous charges of racism along with his shoddy record on civil rights torpedoed his chances. Attorney General Edwin Meese called the committee’s failure to approve the nomination “an appalling surrender” to the politics of ideology, as if antiracism is an ideology that shouldn’t be submitted to. In any case, the judgeship went to somebody else.

  This time the Sessions nomination for the position of attorney general made it through the Judiciary Committee and a bitter fight in the Senate ensued. Many of the same accusations of racism from the 1986 nomination were raised, and some of them, including a letter by Coretta Scott King that Senator Elizabeth Warren attempted to read into the record, were silenced by then majority leader Mitch McConnell. The final vote to confirm Sessions was 52–47, almost entirely along party lines, with the exception of Joe Manchin, Democrat from West Virginia, who also voted aye. Racism was no longer an obstacle in today’s Republican Party.

  Not surprisingly, Sessions would curtail the use of consent decrees, an important tool in helping the Department of Justice enforce civil rights. The DOJ was founded in 1870, and one of its original mandates was to protect freedmen and freedwomen from potential abuses after the Civil War. Sessions was making it harder for his own department to do the important work of ensuring police integrity, in direct contradiction of that mandate.

  Sessions made one mistake, however—he forgot where his loyalties lay. After it was revealed he had met twice with Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak during the 2016 campaign (contradicting a sworn statement he had made during his confirmation hearing), Sessions recused himself from the investigation of the serious allegations that Russia had interfered with the election in order to swing the results in Donald’s favor and that Donald and his advisers had eagerly accepted that help. As a result, Robert Mueller was appointed Special Counsel, prompting Donald to exclaim, according to the report Mueller eventually wrote, “Oh my God. This is terrible. This is the end of my presidency. I’m fucked.” Although Donald didn’t accept Sessions’s proffered resignation, he never got over what he deemed a betrayal—he had wanted a loyalist handling the Russia investigation and Sessions failed to deliver. Donald continued to torment his attorney general, largely via tweet, until Sessions resigned in November 2018 in order to run unsuccessfully for his old senate seat.

  After decades of searching (and three months of Acting Attorney General Matthew Whitaker), Donald finally found his Roy Cohn in the person of one William Barr. Barr made it clear even before taking office where his allegiance would lie when he sent an unsolicited memo to Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein spelling out his ideas regarding obstruction of justice as they pertained to the Mueller probe. The document read more like an audition than anything else, so it’s not surprising that Donald, desperate to impede, if not entirely crush, the investigation into his alleged conspiracy with a hostile foreign power, gave Barr the part.

  Barr made no pretense at objectivity while in office. The list of his most egregious betrayals of the Department of Justice is long. It includes spiking whistleblower complaints; attempting to prosecute Donald’s political enemies; attempting to take over Donald’s defense in the E. Jean Carroll defamation suit because Donald was, according to court papers filed by the DOJ, acting in his “official capacity” when he denied her accusation that he had raped her; and appointing U.S. Attorney for Connecticut John Durham to investigate the origins of the FBI probe into Russian interference in the 2016 election (investigating the investigators). Barr’s most consequential action came just before the release of the redacted Mueller report, when he claimed, falsely, that no conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russian officials had been uncovered and no conclusion had been reached by Mueller and his team regarding the obstruction of justice charge. Mueller forcefully rejected this characterization in a private letter to Barr that was subsequently shared with The Washington Post, but the damage was done.

  While the DOJ took stances against the protection of voting rights and against a university’s race-conscious admissions policies, Barr took no interest in investigating claims of voter suppression. He also ignored the in
creasing threat of white supremacist domestic terrorism, focusing his concern instead, as he said during remarks at the University of Notre Dame law school, on the “militant secularists” behind a “campaign to destroy the traditional moral order,” which, as far as I know, is not something that exists.

  Donald Ayer, a former deputy attorney general in the George H. W. Bush administration, said Barr, who had worked with him, “poses the greatest threat, in my lifetime, to our rule of law and to public trust in it.”

  After George Floyd’s murder in May 2020 and the Black Lives Matter protests that followed, Barr announced his intention to pursue an “independent investigation into possible violations of federal civil rights laws” in the killing of Floyd. Barr’s promise rang hollow given the egregious failures of his department’s Civil Rights Division to pursue cases of racial discrimination. As it turned out, the DOJ planned to investigate Derek Chauvin’s murder of George Floyd independent of any review of corrupt practices and abuse within the Minneapolis police department, extending the practice of curtailing the use of consent decrees meant to ensure police integrity started by Jeff Sessions back in 2018.

  Instead of investigating corrupt police practices, Barr focused on suppressing protests, or at least the kind of protests of which he did not approve. He made no effort to intervene in or investigate the mobs of heavily armed white men storming state capitols in order to intimidate state governments into easing COVID restrictions.

  After Barr came to the conclusion that the Black Lives Matter protesters were not peaceful, he sanctioned, if not directly ordered, the use of pepper spray and rubber bullets, as well as the deployment of what appeared to be unidentified storm troopers in Portland, Oregon. When you conceptualize your interactions as “dominating the battle space” (as Secretary of Defense Mark Esper did at the time), your approach will be influenced by that framing, even if the people you end up assaulting are simply exercising their First Amendment rights.