Trumpocracy

  What did these party loyalists receive in return for their indulgence and protection? In the end, not much. The “enough working digits” theory of the presidency proved wrong. Absent effective presidential leadership, Congress could not organize itself to enact a bold reform agenda. House members from ultra-secure districts could not agree with senators from competitive states. Leaders in the House and Senate could not cajole or coerce straying votes. No effective communication strategy could be agreed on, nor did anyone have the authority to absorb feedback from the communicators and revise the reform program in ways that responded to criticism. The only criticism that mattered was criticism from the activist base, never from the reachable center. As much as any crank on Facebook, the Republican majority in Congress had locked itself within a closed information system. A party that listens only to itself, and speaks only to itself, deprives itself of the power to persuade anybody else.

  Yet, whatever sordid things Republicans in Congress did for Trump, it was never enough for Trump’s voting base. In August of 2017, a George Washington University poll asked Republican voters in Republican-held districts what they thought of their member of Congress. Was he or she doing enough to support President Trump, too little, or too much? Only 35 percent answered “just enough.” A majority, 53 percent, said “too little.” (A defiant 4 percent said “too much.”)61

  So the time ticked down, month by month, with scant domestic legislation to show for it. Some individual members of Congress did receive highly personal returns for their indulgence of Trump’s use of power. Representative Tom Price of Georgia, one of Congress’s most active traders of stocks under the jurisdiction of his committee, was appointed secretary of Health and Human Services. Price resigned in September 2017, after incurring almost $1 million in charter jet costs in less than eight months. Representative Mick Mulvaney, a Tea Party radical who had pushed the United States to default on its obligations in the debt-ceiling battles of 2011 and 2013, was named the director of the Office of Management and Budget. The former Montana congressman Ryan Zinke, a hunting companion of Donald Trump Jr., got the Interior Department. Elaine Chao, the wife of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, returned to head the Labor Department, resuming a post she had held under President George W. Bush.

  The supply of such tangible rewards is finite, however. Appointments of House members to executive branch jobs generate special elections, with all their political risks. Although the GOP retained the seats opened by Trump’s appointments, it did so by worryingly narrowing margins: only four points in Georgia’s Sixth District special election, for example, down from twenty-three points in the election of November 2016. This kind of patronage could be safely distributed only to representatives of the reddest seats in the reddest states. It might seem more prudent to reward members of Congress by promoting their aides to executive branch jobs. That method bumped into another problem: the slow Trump staffing process. There are many explanations for that slowness, but at the bottom of them all seems to be Trump’s own profound and incorrigible distaste for organization.

  The Trump Organization had habitually lived in chaos, careening from crisis to crisis. Trump’s biographers have reported with amazement that his companies did not generate balance sheets or profit-and-loss reports, in large part because Trump could not or would not read them.62 “It surprised me how much of a family-type operation it was, instead of a business kind of orientation where there is a structure and there is a chain of command and there is delegation of authority and responsibility.” That assessment of Trump’s business style was delivered in 1989 by the CEO of Trump’s brief and disastrous venture into the airline business. “I don’t think he manages,” said the head of a construction company that worked on Trump Tower. “I think he lets it all just happen.”63

  Trump never built a proper transition team. New Jersey governor Chris Christie, Vice President Mike Pence, Jared Kushner—each headed his own effort, each canceling out the work of the others. The head of the office of presidential personnel in the new administration, Johnny DeStefano, had headed the data operation of the Trump presidential campaign. A former congressional aide, DeStefano had no executive branch experience, no experience in recruiting in either the private or public sector, and limited authority anyway to make hiring decisions. Trump himself insisted on reviewing the résumé of every candidate for every sub-cabinet and sub-sub-cabinet job—a process that held the entire staffing process hostage to Trump’s short attention span, weak work ethic, and ferocious demand for abject personal loyalty. Yet it would be wrong to regard the irregularity of Trump’s White House and administration as a story of failure. Trump the president, like Trump the businessman and Trump the candidate, plunged his working environments into chaos because he intuited that chaos enhanced his power. “We can’t do that, sir, it’s against the rules” are words Trump never wanted to hear.

  Trump did not merely fail to organize his government. He actively sabotaged organization wherever it began to take form. He let his former personal secretary schedule his telephone calls, subverting the accustomed role of the White House chief of staff.64 He staffed his National Security Council with sinister oddballs. He mocked the stature of the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and questioned the IQ of the secretary of state. He conducted public business on his insecure personal cell phone.65 He made political speeches to agents of the Central Intelligence Agency, exhorted captive military audiences to call their members of Congress to support his agenda, and delivered an address to the National Scout Jamboree so vituperatively partisan that the organization felt obliged to apologize to attendees.66 Most catastrophically of all, he exposed his hurts, rages, fears, and schemes for all to see on his personal Twitter account.

  Speaking at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in February 2017, Trump’s senior presidential aide Steve Bannon listed “the deconstruction of the administrative state” as one of the three supreme goals of the new administration.67 Deconstruction would involve repealing laws and eliminating agencies. This was the kind of work President Carter did when he deregulated passenger air travel and commercial freight traffic in the 1970s; that President Reagan did when he freed oil and natural gas prices in the 1980s; that President Clinton did—for better or worse—when he scrapped the New Deal regulation of the financial services industry in the 1990s. It’s hard work, built on serious economic analysis, requiring approval by Congress and support from public opinion.

  The Trump administration settled for an easier project: paralyzing the state either by failing to staff it in the first place or else by filling its ranks with incompetents and self-seekers, by trashing ethical rules, and by abdicating the responsibility of the president and White House to set policy and then confirm that policy is in fact executed.

  Trumpocracy as a system of power rests not on deregulation but on nonregulation, not on deconstructing the state but on breaking the state in order to plunder the state.

  Chapter 6

  Enemies of the People

  “Generally speaking, do you favor or oppose permitting the courts to shut down media outlets that are biased or inaccurate—or haven’t you heard enough yet about that to say?”

  The YouGov polling agency put that question on behalf of the Economist to a robustly large sample of 1,482 Americans in July 2017. A plurality of Republicans and Trump supporters endorsed the idea: 45 percent of both said they favored permitting courts to shut down media organizations.1

  That seems a pretty extreme result. Yet the poll was no freak.

  In March 2017, Pew Research Center asked, “Is it very important in maintaining a strong democracy in the United States to . . . ” followed by a list of rights. Only 49 percent of Republicans defended “the freedom of news organizations to criticize political leaders” as “very important” to democracy, as opposed to 76 percent of Democrats.2

  A July Marist poll for NPR-PBS asked a series of questions about whether certain rights had gone “t
oo far.” Asked about freedom of the press, 42 percent of Republicans surveyed said yes, versus only 11 percent of Democrats.3

  Donald Trump has not had many successes as president. Convincing his supporters to regard honest media as “fake news” must rank high among them.

  No American president in history—no national political figure of any kind since at least Senator Joe McCarthy—has trafficked more in untruths than Donald Trump. He owed the start of his political career to the Birther hoax. He falsely insisted that he lost the popular vote only because of somewhere between three and five million ballots cast by illegal aliens. He falsely claimed that his was the largest inaugural crowd in history. He repeated false stories about New Jersey Muslims cheering the 9/11 attacks. He recited false statistics about the majority of terrorists since 9/11 entering the United States from foreign countries. He falsely denied that his campaign communicated with Russia about hacking the Hillary Clinton campaign. He falsely boasted that he enacted more bills in his first one hundred days and first six months than any previous president. He even told a false anecdote about an imaginary friend named “Jim” who never visits Paris anymore because “Paris is no longer Paris.”4

  And yet at the same time as Donald Trump’s mouth and iPhone were propagating falsehoods, fictions, and fantasies to a vast global audience, he convinced himself that it was he who was the victim of a vast media campaign of defamation and falsehood.

  “Dishonest media says Mexico won’t be paying for the wall if they pay a little later so the wall can be built more quickly. Media is fake!” Trump tweeted those words on January 8, 2017.5 Three weeks later, Trump signed an executive order that called for funding the wall from future federal budget requests.6 When asked in March whether there was any possibility that Mexico would pay for the wall, Senate Majority Leader McConnell tersely replied, “Uh, no.”7 By June, Trump had retreated to a hope that the hypothetical wall could be paid for with revenues from solar panels on its surface.8

  “Totally biased @NBCNews went out of its way to say that the big announcement from Ford, G.M., Lockheed & others that jobs are coming back . . . to the U.S., but had nothing to do with TRUMP, is more FAKE NEWS. Ask top CEO’s of those companies for real facts. Came back because of me!”9 Thus Trump tweeted January 18, 2017. But of course NBC was right. Trump was taking credit for decisions by Ford and GM to cancel planned expansions in Mexico because of waning demand for the small cars produced there, the Ford Focus and the GM Cruz, respectively. There would be no “return” of jobs to the United States. The cars were not wanted, so they would not be manufactured anywhere.10 In June, Ford would announce termination of all North American production of the Focus and the shifting of all future Focus production to China.11

  Trump tweeted literally dozens of variants on the claim that “the Russia story” was “fake news” “invented by the Democrats.” Here’s just one, from February 26, 2017: “Russia talk is FAKE NEWS put out by the Dems, and played up by the media, in order to mask the big election defeat and the illegal leaks!”12 By July, the “FAKE NEWS” had become real even to the Trump Twitter feed. “Just out: The Obama Administration knew far in advance of November 8th about election meddling by Russia. Did nothing about it. WHY?”13

  March 18: “Despite what you have heard from the FAKE NEWS, I had a GREAT meeting with German Chancellor Angela Merkel. Nevertheless, Germany owes. . . . .”14 Ten days after that “GREAT” meeting, Angela Merkel gave her famous Munich speech warning that Europe could no longer rely on the United States to defend its interests and must henceforward take its future into its own hands.15

  Enraged by negative coverage of conditions on Puerto Rico, Trump tweeted eight separate fulminations against “fake news” over the weekend of September 30–October 1, 2017.

  Trump’s grandiosity led him to escalate his allegations against the press. They were not merely “unfair” or “fake”—they were outright enemies. Not merely personal enemies either. A president of the United States who gratefully welcomed campaign assistance from a hostile foreign spy agency denounced America’s free press as enemies of the nation.

  “The FAKE NEWS media (failing @nytimes, @CNN, @NBCNews and many more) is not my enemy, it is the enemy of the American people. Sick!”16 President Trump tweeted those words on February 17, 2017.

  He repeated the phrase in his February 2017 speech to CPAC. “A few days ago I called the fake news the enemy of the people, and they are—they are the enemy of the people.” He threatened, “We’re going to do something about it.”17

  Trump fired off tweet after tweet intimating retaliation against Amazon to punish its founder, Jeff Bezos, for his investment in the Washington Post. Trump knocked $9 billion off Amazon’s stock valuation on August 16, 2017, with this tweet:

  Amazon is doing great damage to tax paying retailers. Towns, cities and states throughout the U.S. are being hurt—many jobs being lost!18

  Against the even more hated CNN, Trump’s staffers plotted a yet larger-scale revenge. Michael Grynbaum reported for the New York Times in July 2017:

  White House advisers have discussed a potential point of leverage over their adversary, a senior administration official said: a pending merger between CNN’s parent company, Time Warner, and AT&T. Mr. Trump’s Justice Department will decide whether to approve the merger, and while analysts say there is little to stop the deal from moving forward, the president’s animus toward CNN remains a wild card.19

  Threats were the habitual and natural language of Trump’s staffers too. In a postinaugural interview on Meet the Press, Trump’s aide Kellyanne Conway warned Chuck Todd that unwelcome questioning would provoke some unspecified reprisal.

  Chuck Todd: All right, Kellyanne, let me stop you here because . . . you make a very reasonable and rational case for why crowd sizes don’t matter. Then explain, you did not answer the question, why did the president send out his press secretary, who’s not just the spokesperson for Donald Trump. He could be—He also serves as the spokesperson for all of America at times. He speaks for all of the country at times. Why put him out there for the very first time in front of that podium to utter a provable falsehood? It’s a small thing. But the first time he confronts the public it’s a falsehood?

  Kellyanne Conway: Chuck, I mean, if we’re going to keep referring to our press secretary in those types of terms I think that we’re going to have to rethink our relationship here.20

  Yet if Trump and his aides pondered more carefully, they might have realized that there was no need for retaliation. Much as Donald Trump would have enjoyed a world in which all media were reduced to the sycophancy of Fox & Friends and Hannity, the tactical lobe of Trump’s brain surely recognized the superior usefulness of the media as an enemy.

  In the early days of the Trump transition, Nic Dawes, a journalist who has worked in two authoritarian-trending countries, India and South Africa, delivered a warning to the American media about what to expect from a figure like Trump. “Get used to being stigmatized as ‘opposition,’” he wrote. “The basic idea is simple: to delegitimize accountability journalism by framing it as partisan.”21

  Donald Trump is often praised for “not speaking like a politician.” What that means in practice is that Trump never equivocates. Peter Bull, a specialist in political communication, has rightly observed:

  We all equivocate in certain situations but politicians are particularly prone to it. That’s not necessarily because they are devious, slippery or evasive, but because conflict is endemic to politics, and politicians get asked a lot of questions that cause communicative conflicts. These conflicts occur especially when all the main forms of response may make the politician look bad or threaten their future freedom of action.22

  To be unequivocal, however, is not the same as to be honest. Politicians equivocate precisely to avoid lying. Trump lies without qualm or remorse. If necessary, he then lies about the lie. (The Hillary Clinton campaign made a powerful online ad that contrasted repeated instances of Trump in
sisting, “I never said that” followed immediately by a clip of him saying precisely that thing.23) But whatever Trump says, he says without qualification, deceiving the inattentive into regarding him as a truthful man, rather than the most shameless liar in the history of the presidency.

  The Russia-born journalist Masha Gessen has astutely noted the commonality of the dishonesty of Donald Trump and the man he admires so much, Vladimir Putin. “Lying is the message,” she wrote. “It’s not just that both Putin and Trump lie, it is that they lie in the same way and for the same purpose: blatantly, to assert power over truth itself.”24

  The normal politician calculates that lying is counterproductive over the long term. Lie too often, and you develop a reputation as a liar. Donald Trump gained just such a reputation in his pre-political career. “I wouldn’t believe Donald Trump if his tongue were notarized,” said a deputy mayor of New York. Innumerable investors, lenders, customers, and graduates of Trump University would say the same. In national politics, however, Trump benefited from the hesitation of reporters and journalists to call a lie for what it is. In a CNN interview in September 2016, Kellyanne Conway shut down a searching inquiry about Trump’s tax returns by Alisyn Camerota with the taunting challenge, “Are you calling him a liar?”25 Trump’s explanations for not releasing his returns were indeed blatant and untenable lies. But to say so outright on TV? It violated every instinct in a responsible and fair-minded TV interviewer’s being.

  Sometimes lying is unavoidable in government. During the Cuban missile crisis, the Pentagon’s chief spokesman, Arthur Sylvester, said things that were later exposed as untrue. Summoned before a congressional committee to explain himself (in those bygone days, official lying was thought to require congressional action!), Sylvester replied that a government had the “right, if necessary, to lie to save itself when it’s up into a nuclear war.”26 Responding to the criticism those words touched off, Sylvester later elaborated what he meant: