by David Frum
“This was presidential, this was big-league stuff,” said CNN’s David Gergen after Donald Trump’s first face-to-face meeting as president with Vladimir Putin.57 “He became president of the United States in that moment, period. There are a lot of people who have reason to be fearful of him, to be mad at him. But that was one of the most extraordinary moments you have ever seen in American politics,” said CNN’s Van Jones after Trump paid tribute to the widow of a Navy SEAL in his first speech to a joint session of Congress.58
President Trump, however, did not notice or appreciate this bias in his favor. He raved and raged and seethed in self-pity. His claque at Fox and on talk radio agreed with and amplified him.
The United States used to champion rights and liberties around the world. In his July 2017 trip to Warsaw, however, Donald Trump stood side by side with Polish president Andrzej Duda and joined him in a joint attack on press freedom. Trump opened with an attack on CNN and NBC (“Despite the fact that I made them a fortune with The Apprentice, but they forgot that”). He then turned to the Polish president and asked him, “Do you have that also, Mr. President?”59 Duda smiled and agreed. Duda’s party had politicized Poland’s state broadcaster, converting it into a propaganda outlet for the governing party, and then banned independent media organizations from reporting inside the Polish parliament. The outright ban had to be abandoned in the face of public protests, but stringent restrictions on the coverage of both parliament and the courts remained in place.60
CNN’s Tom Kludt asked a White House spokesperson for comment on this apparently unprecedented attack on the free media by an American president on foreign soil—and received the following answer:
This is a president who was elected by the American people for telling it like it is and he will do that no matter the setting, unlike many in the media and political circles who change their messaging based on the audience and venue. Furthermore, the media certainly has no problem attacking the President on the global stage.61
Elected leaders normally accept press criticism as part of the job. Trump could not endure even a taste of it, a vulnerability mockingly commented upon by Vladimir Putin at their first post-election face-to-face meeting. The journalist-murdering Russian leader jerked a thumb at the American press corps and slyly asked Trump, “Are these the ones who have hurt your feelings?”62
Restrictions on media freedom are an early warning sign of de-democratization in declining democracies. Turkey, once the great hope for democratization in the Islamic world, detained hundreds of journalists during the April 2017 referendum campaign to concentrate power in the hands of its authoritarian leader Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.63 Hungary’s Viktor Orbán politicized his country’s state broadcaster and used government advertising to bring privately owned print media under his party’s control. South Africa’s state broadcaster refuses to cover protests against the governing African National Congress and has fired journalists who defy its ban.64 India’s Narendra Modi forced a liberal TV channel off the air for twenty-four hours in November 2016 to punish it for allegedly compromising national security.65
More than on any other issue—more than on taxes, or health care, or immigration, or trade, or anything else he supposedly cares about—President Trump has made it his supreme and highest priority to defame those who responsibly and accurately report his tenure of his high office. What Donald Trump wants is more bias, not less; more fake news, not less. What he demands from the media is not objectivity, but complicity.
And from the right-of-center media, complicity is what Trump is getting. Trump is doing all this with the acquiescence of the institutional Republican Party and the support of conservatives across the country. What we are seeing here is not merely one man’s petty ego needs on display, although we are certainly seeing that. What we are seeing is a grant of permission from millions of people to the president of the United States to diminish, discredit, corrode, and ultimately subvert what the authors of the US Bill of Rights listed among the very first freedoms necessary to their great experiment in self-government.
Chapter 7
Rigged System
“A record 137.5 million Americans voted in 2016,” reported the Pew Research Center after the fact.1 That achievement, however, was marred by some odd discrepancies.
African American electoral participation has steadily risen over the past decades, reaching a peak of more than 65 percent of those eligible in the presidential election of 2012. Four years later, only 58 percent of eligible black Americans cast a ballot, a decline unprecedented in modern times for any American ethnic group.
Perhaps black voters were uninspired by Hillary Clinton’s candidacy. “Young Black Voters Voice Doubts About Clinton,” reported the New York Times on September 5, 2016.2 On the other hand, similar headlines could surely have been reported about John Kerry in 2004. Yet African Americans turned out for Kerry in greater percentages than for Hillary Clinton.
Something else happened to dampen African American participation in the election of 2016, and that something was the surge of Republican victories at the state and local levels during the Obama presidency. Republicans entered the 2016 cycle controlling all elected branches of government in half the states in the country, their best showing since the 1920s. Democrats controlled only seven states, their worst showing since Reconstruction.
Among the first uses to which Republicans put their ascendancy was revising state voting procedures. Between 2010 and 2016, some twenty states rewrote their laws in ways that made voting more difficult, often with blatantly partisan effect. For example, six states cut back on early and weekend voting. Early voting encourages participation by minority voters, who tend to have less control over their working hours. By contrast, mail-in ballots—preferred by the elderly and by military personnel, and historically the most fraud-prone element of the American electoral system—went untouched. Ten states instituted new voter identification rules, again often with partisan effect. Texas, for example, allowed only seven forms of identification: a concealed-carry permit was acceptable; a photo ID from the state university system was not.3
Of the twenty states that raised new difficulties to voting during the Obama years, only six did so in time for 2012; fourteen in time for 2016. One of the most consequential of the pre-2016 changes occurred in Wisconsin, a must-win state for Republicans: the abolition of the state’s “special registration deputies,” individuals certified by the state to check proofs of eligibility and add names to the voter rolls. These deputies had played a critical role in minority registration drives in the city of Milwaukee. In their stead, Wisconsin instituted a system of online registration more convenient to those with computer access and savvy—and a stark impediment to those who lack either or both.4
Mike Pence’s Indiana did not lag far behind. An August investigation led by Fatima Hussein of the Indianapolis Star found that Republicans used their control of state and local government to reduce early voting options in center-city Indianapolis and expand them in the Republican suburbs to the northeast. Early voting stations in GOP-leaning Hamilton County were multiplied from one to three; in Democrat-favoring Marion County, they were cut from three to one. Result: while early absentee voting rose by 63 percent in Hamilton between 2008 and 2016, it tumbled by 26 percent in Marion. Options were expanded in other Republican counties as well, helping to shift the state from Obama’s Democratic column in the presidential election of 2008 back to Romney and Trump in 2012 and 2016.
Enabling many of these changes was a 2013 Supreme Court decision, Shelby County v. Holder, that put an end to the most biting section of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. That section required nine states (Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, Texas, and Virginia) as well as some forty counties (in states including California, Florida, New York, and North Carolina) to gain preclearance from the federal Department of Justice for changes to their voting rules.
At the time Republican-led states adopted their new voti
ng rules, Donald Trump’s candidacy for president was imagined by virtually nobody. Wisconsin’s governor, Scott Walker, hoped that the 2016 Republican presidential nominee might be himself. But the new system was positioned for Trump to use—and to weaponize with some special measures all his own.
Throughout their existence as members of a self-governing republic, Americans have fused a deep conviction that “here, the people rule” with a deep ambivalence about who exactly should be enumerated among “the people.” This ambivalence has never been resolved, and if anything seems to have become more intensely felt over the past quarter century. The same Marist poll quoted in the previous chapter that showed that 43 percent of Republicans thought the country had “gone too far” in protecting the rights of the media also showed that a quarter of them believed the United States had gone “too far” in protecting the right to vote.5
As the country has become polarized between rich and poor, and as the white majority in the United States has dwindled, a mood of anxiety has gripped those who feel themselves vulnerable to new demands on the state. This anxiety was eloquently expressed by Paul Ryan’s 2011 “tipping point” speech:
America is drawing perilously close to a tipping point that has the potential to curtail free enterprise, transform our government, and weaken our national identity in ways that may not be reversible.
The tipping point represents two dangers: first, long-term economic decline as the number of makers diminishes and the number of takers grows . . . and second, gradual moral-political decline as dependency and passivity weaken the nation’s character.6
The same thought was expressed more crudely the next year by Donald Trump Jr., who in October 2012 tweeted, “The American republic will endure until the day Congress discovers it can bribe the public with the public’s money,” a remark he (spuriously) attributed to Alexis de Tocqueville.7
The elder Trump articulated the same apprehension for the future in a September 2016 interview with the Christian Broadcasting Network’s David Brody.
I think this will be the last election if I don’t win. I think this will be the last election that the Republicans have a chance of winning because you’re going to have people flowing across the border, you’re going to have illegal immigrants coming in and they’re going to be legalized and they’re going to be able to vote and once that all happens you can forget it. You’re not going to have one Republican vote. And it’s already a hard number. Already the path is much more difficult for the Republicans. You just have to look at the maps.8
It was not out of the ether that Donald Trump confected his postelection claim that he lost the popular vote only because “millions” voted illegally.9 Such claims have been circulating in the Republican world for some time, based in some cases on purported statistical evidence.10 Beyond the evidence, however, was fear: fear that the time would soon come, and maybe already had come, when democracy would be turned against those who regarded themselves as its rightful winners and proper custodians. That fear can legitimize actions that once would have seemed utterly unacceptable, antidemocratic, un-American, verging on the treasonable.
Through the 2016 campaign, Trump had denounced American democracy as a “rigged system”: rigged against him, specifically, by a “small handful of global special interests.” Trump’s final campaign ad, released on November 6, 2016, showed three faces to illustrate those “global special interests”: the financier George Soros; the chair of the Federal Reserve, Janet Yellen; and the CEO of Goldman Sachs, Lloyd Blankfein. A voice-over intoned:
It’s a global power structure that is responsible for the economic decisions that have robbed our working class, stripped our country of its wealth, and put that money into the pockets of a handful of large corporations and political entities.11
The Anti-Defamation League issued a worried statement about this closing appeal:
Whether intentional or not, the images and rhetoric in this ad touch on subjects that anti-Semites have used for ages. This needs to stop. In the final days before the election, tensions are extremely high. It’s a time when all candidates need to be especially responsible and bid for votes by offering sincere ideas and policy proposals, not by conjuring painful stereotypes and baseless conspiracy theories.12
But for some Republicans, Trump’s “rigging” claims represented an opportunity rather than an embarrassment. Trump followed up his ungrounded claims of widespread illegal voting by forming a presidential advisory commission on electoral integrity under Vice President Mike Pence. The commission’s strongest personality, Kansas’s secretary of state, Kris Kobach, had long argued that US elections were corrupted by illegal voting—and that the proper remedy was the frequent and aggressive purging of voter registration rolls.
Duplication of voter registration is an endemic feature of American life. A young person born in one state who attends college in another, finds a first job in a third, and then settles down in a fourth could leave a trail of registrations behind her, because nobody invests much energy removing people from registration rolls when they leave a state. On the other hand, there’s very scant evidence that this duplication of registration leads to duplication of votes. While it’s theoretically imaginable that our itinerant young person could fraudulently request absentee ballots from states one, two, and three, the lawbreaking would require considerable effort. Absentee ballots are typically sent by US mail only to the recorded street addresses, so the fraud-minded voter will have to arrange some kind of multi-state collection service.
To ascertain whether a Juan Garcia Gomez who cast a ballot in Kansas is the same person or different from a Juan Garcia Gomez who voted in Nebraska requires much more specific information, such as a Social Security number. State law, however, typically protects individual voter information. For that reason, fifteen states refused to cooperate with the Pence commission, contending that its requests for voters’ names, birth dates, and Social Security numbers violated state law; those states were Arizona, California, Connecticut, Delaware, Kentucky, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Mississippi, New Mexico, New York, Pennsylvania, South Dakota, Tennessee, Virginia, and Wyoming. Others signaled negative responses soon to come: Arkansas, Hawaii, Illinois, Louisiana, Maryland, Montana, and Rhode Island. The majority of the states that did offer cooperation with the commission insisted that they would provide only publicly available information, not including Social Security numbers, for example.13 (Wisconsin added that it would provide the federal government publicly available information only on the same terms it provides voter information to political parties: on payment of a fee of $12,500.)
But of course the publicly available information would not advance the commission’s case very far. Vexed, President Trump angrily demanded in a July 1, 2017, tweet:
Numerous states are refusing to give information to the very distinguished VOTER FRAUD PANEL. What are they trying to hide?14
The answer to that presidential question quickly became obvious, as the White House was forced to acknowledge that it lacked a secure means to store voters’ information. It would be too grimly ironic if a White House project to stop voter fraud instead created a centralized database of voter information that hackers could access . . . to enable voter fraud.
This fear is not at all a hypothetical concern. The Russian effort to subvert the 2016 information did not stop at “fake news.” Hackers attacked state voting systems too: 150,000 attempts just in the state of South Carolina.15 Like the invading Martians in H. G. Wells’s War of the Worlds, who are ultimately laid low by humble earthly diseases, the Russian hackers were impeded by the decentralized chaos of American voting systems. If election-critical information is centrally stored, however, it will have to be effectively secured. The competence record of a White House that routinely misspells names, bungles titles, and makes crude factual errors in the course of wrongly accusing others of factual errors is not reassuring.16
I write this book, and perhaps you read it, at a time when many details of the
Trump-Russia collusion remain unsettled. Yet the essential elements of the transaction have been apparent since the summer of 2016: Russia mounted a costly and aggressive espionage campaign to help elect Donald Trump and congressional Republicans and to defeat Hillary Clinton and congressional Democrats.17 Donald Trump’s son, son-in-law, and campaign manager privately met with Russian spies offering damaging information about Hillary Clinton. “If it’s what you say I love it especially later in the summer,” replied Donald Trump Jr. to the offer of Russian aid, an offer that specifically referenced “Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump.”18
Trump’s team of foreign policy advisers in 2016 was led by people who had received pay from the Russian state or state-controlled businesses.19 Most troublingly—and without overstepping what has yet been proved—it certainly looks as if the Trump campaign coordinated its strategy and messaging with Russian-sponsored hacking and disinformation efforts.20
But the culpability does not stop with Donald Trump, his family, or even his campaign.
In December 2016, the Washington Post reported on what had happened when congressional leaders were briefed on the Russian hacks earlier that year.
In September, during a secret briefing for congressional leaders, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) voiced doubts about the veracity of the intelligence, according to officials present. . . .
In a secure room in the Capitol used for briefings involving classified information, administration officials broadly laid out the evidence U.S. spy agencies had collected, showing Russia’s role in cyber-intrusions in at least two states and in hacking the emails of the Democratic organizations and individuals.