President Trump exhibited clear authoritarian instincts during his first year in office. In Chapter 4, we presented three strategies by which elected authoritarians seek to consolidate power: capturing the referees, sidelining the key players, and rewriting the rules to tilt the playing field against opponents. Trump attempted all three of these strategies.
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President Trump demonstrated striking hostility toward the referees—law enforcement, intelligence, ethics agencies, and the courts. Soon after his inauguration, he sought to ensure that the heads of U.S. intelligence agencies, including the FBI, the CIA, and the National Security Agency, would be personally loyal to him, apparently in the hope of using these agencies as a shield against investigations into his campaign’s Russia ties. During his first week in office, President Trump summoned FBI Director James Comey to a one-on-one dinner in the White House in which, according to Comey, the president asked for a pledge of loyalty. He later reportedly pressured Comey to drop investigations into his recently departed national security director, Michael Flynn, pressed Director of National Intelligence Daniel Coats and CIA Director Mike Pompeo to intervene in Comey’s investigation, and personally appealed to Coats and NSA head Michael Rogers to release statements denying the existence of any collusion with Russia (both refused).
President Trump also tried to punish or purge agencies that acted with independence. Most prominently, he dismissed Comey after it became clear that Comey could not be pressured into protecting the administration and was expanding its Russia investigation. Only once in the FBI’s eighty-two-year history had a president fired the bureau’s director before his ten-year term was up—and in that case, the move was in response to clear ethical violations and enjoyed bipartisan support.
The Comey firing was not President Trump’s only assault on referees who refused to come to his personal defense. Trump had attempted to establish a personal relationship with Manhattan-based U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara, whose investigations into money laundering reportedly threatened to reach Trump’s inner circle; when Bharara, a respected anticorruption figure, continued the investigation, the president removed him. After Attorney General Jeff Sessions recused himself from the Russia investigation and his deputy, Rod Rosenstein, appointed the respected former FBI Director Robert Mueller as special counsel to oversee the investigation, Trump publicly shamed Sessions, reportedly seeking his resignation. White House lawyers even launched an effort to dig up dirt on Mueller, seeking conflicts of interest that could be used to discredit or dismiss him. By late 2017, many of Trump’s allies were openly calling on him to fire Mueller, and there was widespread concern that he would soon do so.
President Trump’s efforts to derail independent investigations evoked the kind of assaults on the referees routinely seen in less democratic countries—for example, the dismissal of Venezuelan Prosecutor General Luisa Ortega, a chavista appointee who asserted her independence and began to investigate corruption and abuse in the Maduro government. Although Ortega’s term did not expire until 2021 and she could be legally removed only by the legislature (which was in opposition hands), the government’s dubiously elected Constituent Assembly sacked her in August 2017.
President Trump also attacked judges who ruled against him. After Judge James Robart of the Ninth Circuit of the U.S. Court of Appeals blocked the administration’s initial travel ban, Trump spoke of “the opinion of this so-called judge, which essentially takes law-enforcement away from our country.” Two months later, when the same court temporarily blocked the withholding of federal funds from sanctuary cities, the White House denounced the judgment as an attack on the rule of law by an “unelected judge.” Trump himself responded by threatening to break up the Ninth Circuit.
The president took an indirect swipe at the judiciary in August 2017 when he pardoned the controversial former Arizona sheriff Joe Arpaio, who was convicted of violating a federal court order to stop racial profiling. Arpaio was a political ally and a hero to many of Trump’s anti-immigrant supporters. As we noted earlier, the chief executive’s constitutional power to pardon is without limit, but presidents have historically exercised it with great restraint, seeking advice from the Justice Department and never issuing pardons for self-protection or political gain. President Trump boldly violated these norms. Not only did he not consult the Justice Department, but the pardon was clearly political—it was popular with his base. The move reinforced fears that the president would eventually pardon himself and his inner circle—something that was reportedly explored by his lawyers. Such a move would constitute an unprecedented attack on judicial independence. As constitutional scholar Martin Redish put it, “If the president can immunize his agents in this manner, the courts will effectively lose any meaningful authority to protect constitutional rights against invasion by the executive branch.”
The Trump administration also trampled, inevitably, on the Office of Government Ethics (OGE), an independent watchdog agency that, though lacking legal teeth, had been respected by previous administrations. Faced with the numerous conflicts of interest created by Trump’s business dealings, OGE director Walter Shaub repeatedly criticized the president-elect during the transition. The administration responded by launching attacks on the OGE. House Oversight Chair Jason Chaffetz, a Trump ally, even hinted at an investigation of Shaub. In May, administration officials tried to force the OGE to halt investigations into the White House’s appointment of ex-lobbyists. Alternately harassed and ignored by the White House, Shaub resigned, leaving behind what journalist Ryan Lizza called a “broken” OGE.
President Trump’s behavior toward the courts, law enforcement and intelligence bodies, and other independent agencies was drawn from an authoritarian playbook. He openly spoke of using the Justice Department and the FBI to go after Democrats, including Hillary Clinton. And in late 2017, the Justice Department considered nominating a special counsel to investigate Clinton. Despite its purges and threats, however, the administration could not capture the referees. Trump did not replace Comey with a loyalist, largely because such a move was vetoed by key Senate Republicans. Likewise, Senate Republicans resisted Trump’s efforts to replace Attorney General Sessions. But the president had other battles to wage.
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The Trump administration also mounted efforts to sideline key players in the political system. President Trump’s rhetorical attacks on critics in the media are an example. His repeated accusations that outlets such as the New York Times and CNN were dispensing “fake news” and conspiring against him look familiar to any student of authoritarianism. In a February 2017 tweet, he called the media the “enemy of the American people,” a term that, critics noted, mimicked one used by Stalin and Mao. Trump’s rhetoric was often threatening. A few days after his “enemy of the people” tweet, Trump told the Conservative Political Action Committee:
I love the First Amendment; nobody loves it better than me. Nobody….But as you saw throughout the entire campaign, and even now, the fake news doesn’t tell the truth….I say it doesn’t represent the people. It never will represent the people, and we’re going to do something about it.
Do what, exactly? The following month, President Trump returned to his campaign pledge to “open up the libel laws,” tweeting that the New York Times had “disgraced the media world. Gotten me wrong for two solid years. Change libel laws?” When asked by a reporter whether the administration was really considering such changes, White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus said, “I think that’s something we’ve looked at.” Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa used this approach. His multimillion-dollar defamation suits and jailing of journalists on charges of defamation had a powerfully chilling effect on the media. Although Trump dropped the libel issue, he continued his threats. In July, he retweeted an altered video clip made from old WWE footage of him tackling and then punching someone with a CNN logo superimposed on his face.
President Trump also considered using government regulatory agencies against unfrie
ndly media companies. During the 2016 campaign, he had threatened Jeff Bezos, the owner of the Washington Post and Amazon, with antitrust action, tweeting: “If I become president, oh do they have problems.” He also threatened to block the pending merger of Time Warner (CNN’s parent company) and AT&T, and during the first months of his presidency, there were reports that White House advisors considered using the administration’s antitrust authority as a source of leverage against CNN. And finally, in October 2017, Trump attacked NBC and other networks by threatening to “challenge their license.”
There was one area in which the Trump administration went beyond threats to try to use the machinery of government to punish critics. During his first week in office, President Trump signed an executive order authorizing federal agencies to withhold funding from “sanctuary cities” that refused to cooperate with the administration’s crackdown on undocumented immigrants. “If we have to,” he declared in February 2017, “we’ll defund.” The plan was reminiscent of the Chávez government’s repeated moves to strip opposition-run city governments of their control over local hospitals, police forces, ports, and other infrastructure. Unlike the Venezuelan president, however, President Trump was blocked by the courts.
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Although President Trump has waged a war of words against the media and other critics, those words have not (yet) led to action. No journalists have been arrested, and no media outlets have altered their coverage due to pressure from the government. Trump’s efforts to tilt the playing field to his advantage have been more worrying. In May 2017, he called for changes in what he called “archaic” Senate rules, including the elimination of the filibuster, which would have strengthened the Republican majority at the expense of the Democratic minority. Senate Republicans did eliminate the filibuster for Supreme Court nominations, clearing the way for Neil Gorsuch’s ascent to the Court, but they rejected the idea of doing away with it entirely.
Perhaps the most antidemocratic initiative yet undertaken by the Trump administration is the creation of the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity, chaired by Vice President Mike Pence but run by Vice Chair Kris Kobach. To understand its potential impact, recall that the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts prompted a massive shift in party identification: The Democratic Party became the primary representative of minority and first- and second-generation immigrant voters, while GOP voters remained overwhelmingly white. Because the minority share of the electorate is growing, these changes favor the Democrats, a perception that was reinforced by Barack Obama’s 2008 victory, in which minority turnout rates were unusually high.
Perceiving a threat, some Republican leaders came up with a response that evoked memories of the Jim Crow South: make it harder for low-income minority citizens to vote. Because poor minority voters were overwhelmingly Democratic, measures that dampened turnout among such voters would likely tilt the playing field in favor of Republicans. This would be done via strict voter identification laws—requiring, for example, that voters present a valid driver’s license or other government-issued photo ID upon arrival at the polling station.
The push for voter ID laws was based on a false claim: that voter fraud is widespread in the United States. All reputable studies have concluded that levels of such fraud in this country are low. Yet Republicans began to push for measures to combat this nonexistent problem. The first two states to adopt voter ID laws were Georgia and Indiana, both in 2005. Georgia congressman John Lewis, a longtime civil rights leader, described his state’s law as a “modern day poll tax.” An estimated 300,000 Georgia voters lacked the required forms of ID, and African Americans were five times more likely than whites to lack them. Indiana’s voter ID law, which Judge Terence Evans of the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals called “a not-too-thinly veiled attempt to discourage election day turnout by certain folks believed to skew Democratic,” was taken to the Supreme Court, where it was upheld in 2008. After that, voter ID laws proliferated. Bills were introduced in thirty-seven states between 2010 and 2012, and by 2016 fifteen states had adopted such laws, although only ten had them in effect for the election.
The laws were passed exclusively in states where Republicans controlled both legislative chambers, and in all but Arkansas, the governor was also a Republican. There is little doubt that minority voters were a primary target. Voter ID laws are almost certain to have a disproportionate impact on low-income minority voters: According to one study, 37 percent of African Americans and 27 percent of Latinos reported not possessing a valid driver’s license, compared to 16 percent of whites. A study by the Brennan Center for Justice estimated that 11 percent of American citizens (twenty-one million eligible voters) did not possess government-issued photo IDs, and that among African American citizens, the figure rose to 25 percent.
Of the eleven states with the highest black turnout in 2008, seven adopted stricter voter ID laws, and of the twelve states that experienced the highest rates of Hispanic population growth between 2000 and 2010, nine passed laws making it harder to vote. Scholars have just begun to evaluate the impact of voter ID laws, and most studies have found only a modest effect on turnout. But a modest effect can be decisive in close elections, especially if the laws are widely adopted.
That is precisely what the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity hopes to make happen. The Commission’s de facto head, Kris Kobach, has been described as America’s “premier advocate of vote suppression.” As Kansas’s secretary of state, Kobach helped push through one of the nation’s strictest voter ID laws. For Kobach, Donald Trump was a useful ally. During the 2016 campaign, Trump had complained that the election was “rigged,” and afterward, he made the extraordinary claim that he had “won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally.” He repeated this point in a meeting with congressional leaders, saying that there had been between three and five million illegal votes. The claim was baseless: A national vote-monitoring project led by the media organization ProPublica found no evidence of fraud. Washington Post reporter Philip Bump scoured Nexis for documented cases of fraud in 2016 and found a total of four.
But President Trump’s apparent obsession with having “won” the popular vote converged with Kobach’s voter suppression goals. Kobach endorsed Trump’s claims, declaring that he was “absolutely correct” in asserting that the number of illegal votes exceeded Clinton’s margin of victory. (Kobach later said that “we will probably never know” who won the popular vote.) Kobach gained Trump’s ear, helped convince him to create the Commission, and was appointed to run it.
The Commission’s early activities suggested that its objective was voter suppression. First, it is collecting stories of fraud from across the country, which could provide political ammunition for state-level voter-restriction initiatives or, perhaps, for efforts to repeal the 1993 “Motor Voter” law. In effect, the Commission is poised to serve as a high-profile national mouthpiece for Republican efforts to pass tougher voter ID laws. Second, the Commission aims to encourage or facilitate state-level voter roll purges, which, existing research suggests, would invariably remove many legitimate voters. The Commission has already sought to cross-check local voter records to uncover cases of double registration, in which people are registered in more than one state. There are also reports that the Commission plans to use a Homeland Security database of green card and visa holders to scour the voter rolls for noncitizens. The risk, as one study shows, is that the number of mistakes—because of the existence of many people with the same name and birthdate—will vastly exceed the number of illegal registrations that are uncovered.
Efforts to discourage voting are fundamentally antidemocratic, and they have a particularly deplorable history in the United States. Although contemporary voter-restriction efforts are nowhere near as far-reaching as those undertaken by southern Democrats in the late nineteenth century, they are nevertheless significant. Because strict voter ID laws disproportionately affect low-income minority voter
s, who are overwhelmingly Democratic, they skew elections in favor of the GOP.
Trump’s Commission on Election Integrity did not carry out any concrete reforms in 2017, and its clumsy request for voter information was widely rebuffed by the states. But if the Commission proceeds with its project unchecked, it has the potential to inflict real damage on our country’s electoral process.
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In many ways, President Trump followed the electoral authoritarian script during his first year. He made efforts to capture the referees, sideline the key players who might halt him, and tilt the playing field. But the president has talked more than he has acted, and his most notorious threats have not been realized. Troubling antidemocratic initiatives, including packing the FBI with loyalists and blocking the Mueller investigation, were derailed by Republican opposition and his own bumbling. One important initiative, the Advisory Commission on Election Integrity, is just getting off the ground, so its impact is harder to evaluate. Overall, then, President Trump repeatedly scraped up against the guardrails, like a reckless driver, but he did not break through them. Despite clear causes for concern, little actual backsliding occurred in 2017. We did not cross the line into authoritarianism.
It is still early, however. The backsliding of democracy is often gradual, its effects unfolding slowly over time. Comparing Trump’s first year in office to those of other would-be authoritarians, the picture is mixed. Table 3 offers an illustrative list of nine countries in which potentially authoritarian leaders came to power via elections. In some countries, including Ecuador and Russia, backsliding was evident during the first year. By contrast, in Peru under Fujimori and Turkey under Erdoğan, there was no initial backsliding. Fujimori engaged in heated rhetorical battles during his first year as president but did not assault democratic institutions until nearly two years in. Breakdown took even longer in Turkey.
How Democracies Die Page 17