The Best People

by Alexander Nazaryan

  Chapter 7

  The Shitshow Strategy

  Trump’s was the first intentionally nonlinear presidency, lurching several times each day between policy objectives that could have been dictated by a Fox News anchor, a friend from Mar-a-Lago, or the prime minister of Norway. This was especially true in the first six months, when a paranoid Priebus concluded that the best way to save his job was to not do it. He neglected his most basic responsibility, which was to regulate the flow of people and information into the Oval Office. Michael Wolff skulked around the campus, Sean Spicer hid in the bushes, and Priebus did nothing about any of it. Later, after he had been expelled from the White House, Priebus would complain about the White House under Trump, with seemingly no awareness of how much he had done to contribute to the disorder of the place.

  The first several weeks under Trump were a genuine “shitshow,” as one West Winger put it. This was the presidency as envisioned by Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller. This was Trump sitting at the Resolute desk, happily signing executive orders: on the Muslim ban, on funding for groups that did abortion-related work abroad, on the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which he and his supporters hated, on the Dakota Access Pipeline, which he and his supporters loved. The war on domestic regulation, a new approach to international trade: these came with relentless speed during the winter and spring of 2017.

  Priebus was too busy fending off attacks about his incompetence to do something, anything, to prove those attacks untrue. Trump had disdained process and procedure as a private businessman, and that disdain carried over into the Oval Office. Priebus’s inability to foist anything like order on the West Wing worked to the advantage of those who had no business making anything approaching decisions of national import, but saw an opening to do just that. It was, for example, Representative Mark Meadows, a revanchist from North Carolina, who prevailed on Trump to declare a ban on transgender troops in the military that summer. There was no planning for the announcement, merely a tweet from the president that left Meadows thrilled but the Pentagon aghast.

  “It was hopeless,” one veteran of that time remembered.

  The disorder was also exaggerated, agreed many of those who worked in senior West Wing positions. Many of them saw the press as grossly overplaying the disorder, the extent to which Trump trampled the norms of his office. Uniformly unreadable though they were, books by Trump veterans and surrogates to the last included an episode from Trump’s first day in office. A capable young reporter for the Associated Press, Zeke Miller, wrote that a bust of Martin Luther King Jr. had been removed from the Oval Office. This was a perfectly innocent mistake, committed because a Secret Service agent was standing in front of the bust. Miller apologized and corrected his reporting, but memory of the incident lingered. For Trump and his supporters, it was irrefutable evidence that no matter what he did, the press had already concluded he was a grotesquely inept impostor. They would give him no quarter. He would return the favor.

  Some in the White House grasped that such reports were to their advantage, that the press could—and should—be baited into reporting of this kind. A shitshow strategy thus emerged. If the public was arguing about the King bust or discussing reports of Trump wandering the West Wing in his bathrobe, it was almost certainly not paying attention to work being done across the federal government. “We never gave you time,” the ex–White House staffer said of the press, a savage little smile playing on his lips. “We kept the foot on the gas. There was no chaos, only method.”

  And work was being done, even if Trump was spending an inordinate amount of time playing golf at Mar-a-Lago and watching Fox News. If his presidency had a North Star, it was deregulation, the conviction that we had too many laws, and consequently too many rules stemming from the interpretations of those laws. According to conservative dogma, those rules straitjacketed ordinary Americans, depriving them of God-given liberties, sullying the Jeffersonian ideal. The various constituents of the modern-day Republican Party—paleoconservatives, neoconservatives, libertarians, evangelicals—could not agree on gay marriage or taxation, but they definitely agreed that fewer rules were preferable to more rules. It may have been all they agreed on.

  And if Trump disappointed on other fronts, he did not disappoint on this one. Even as some of its top nominees struggled to articulate the basics of governing before Senate committees, the Trump administration launched an aggressive, and generally successful, assault on the regulatory framework that had undergirded the U.S. government since the Great Depression.

  Conservative convictions about regulation stemmed in good part from the writings of Milton Friedman, the libertarian thinker who “didn’t make a distinction between the big government of the People’s Republic of China and the big government of the United States,” as the economist James K. Galbraith would later say of him.

  In 1962, Friedman—then at the University of Chicago—published Capitalism and Freedom, an answer to the big-government liberalism ascendant under John F. Kennedy. “To the free man, the country is the collection of individuals who compose it, not something over and above them,” Friedman wrote. All government, he argued, tends toward paternalism, toward dictating and prescribing, as well as proscribing. Government, in this conception, was the enemy of freedom, not freedom’s enabler. “A major source of objection to a free economy is precisely that it gives people what they want instead of what a particular group thinks they ought to want,” Friedman wrote. “Underlying most arguments against the free market is a lack of belief in freedom itself.”

  The year after Capitalism and Freedom was published, Kennedy was assassinated, and Lyndon Johnson became president. The five years that followed saw the most dramatic peacetime expansion of the federal government since the Great Depression. Johnson’s Great Society, with its invocation of “creative federalism,” included everything from Head Start to the Highway Beautification Act, as well as the Civil Rights Act, the Economic Opportunity Act, and the Voting Rights Act. The historian Paul K. Conkin wrote in 1986 that during the Johnson administration, “the American government approximately doubled its regulatory role and at least doubled the scope of transfer payments,” which is to say, the money available through welfare programs.

  As far as conservatives were concerned, those welfare programs created a permanent class of dependents who would always vote Democratic in order to keep those programs sufficiently funded.

  By the 1970s, the hopeful mood of the early Johnson years had curdled into recrimination and regret. The good he had done at home paled beside his disastrous decision to turn the Vietnam conflict into a full-blown war. And the civil unrest of the late 1960s—Newark in flames, troops in Detroit—made skeptics of some of the very same people who believed that a Great Society was possible, perhaps even inevitable. As American cities smoldered and Southeast Asian jungles burned, notions of collective greatness seemed to recede, and many Americans retreated from the aspiration that marked the opening of the decade.

  Upon assuming the presidency in 1969, Nixon brought Friedman, who had advised his campaign, to the White House. Friedman was a philosopher, not an ideologue, willing to go where the rigors of thinking would take him. One of those places was a resistance to the military draft, which he had announced in a magazine article in 1967, as the Vietnam War was reaching its bloody nadir. Once in the White House, Friedman worked with the Gates Commission on its 1970 report, which led to the eventual return to an all-volunteer army. It would prove one of the greatest achievements in a career punctuated by the Nobel Prize for Economics, which Friedman won in 1976.

  Friedman was as opposed to regulation as he was to conscription. His fierce advocacy for free markets would render Friedman, who stood all of five feet two inches tall, a giant who loomed over the federal government well into the 21st century.

  Nixon’s successor, Gerald Ford, signaled his own intentions in a 1975 address to the National Federation of Independent Business: “We must free the business community from regulatory bondage so
that it can produce.” Among his prime targets was the Civil Aeronautics Board, which had controlled the operation of commercial airlines for four decades. He found an unlikely ally in Edward M. Kennedy, the liberal senator from Massachusetts. Ford also tried to deregulate the trucking industry with the Motor Carrier Reform Act, a proposal that met with strident opposition from organized labor, with the head of the Teamsters declaring “the end of Western civilization.” Neither effort succeeded during Ford’s single term in office, and Western civilization held on for a little while longer.

  Jimmy Carter may have been a liberal, but he was also a deregulator, declaring that “the American people are sick of the bureaucratic confusion here in Washington,” in a line that could have come from the mouth of Donald Trump, if not for the mellifluous Georgia accent. He succeeded where Ford had not, signing the Airline Deregulation Act in 1978 and, some two and a half years later, a new Motor Carrier Act (the original law was from 1935). He also deregulated home brewing, making the pious teetotaler a founding father of the craft beer movement.

  It was not especially surprising that the Republican presidents who followed Carter—Reagan and the two Bushes—were avid deregulators. What was surprising, however, is how eagerly Bill Clinton, the first Democrat in the Oval Office since Carter, followed the lead of Reagan and the elder Bush. In 1996, as he prepared for reelection, Clinton famously declared at the State of the Union address that “the era of big government is over.” Just a few days later, Clinton signed the Telecommunications Act, which he said would help promote competition, including in the new World Wide Web, while offering a “roadmap for deregulation in the future.” It was under Clinton that Congress repealed the Glass-Steagall Act, a Depression-era law that placed constraints on the activities banks could conduct. With those limits effaced, the nation’s financial system hurtled toward the banking and foreclosure crisis of 2008.

  That crisis made the American public amenable to new regulation under Barack Obama, on the financial industry in particular. He created the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, a brainchild of Senator Elizabeth Warren, the progressive Democrat from Massachusetts, and instituted the Volcker Rule, which prevented banks from engaging in a potentially destructive kind of trading (both measures were part of the Dodd–Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, which passed in 2010).

  In the final year of the Obama presidency, the administrative state embarked on a growth spurt, with 3,853 new regulations issued. There were new regulations regarding disclosures on nutritional labels, of sugar content in particular. There was a regulation that would have financial advisers working with retirement accounts to place the customer’s interest before their own profit. There were new regulations on workplace exposure to silica, new rules for residential furnaces.

  Conservatives issued many dire reports on the effects of the Obama administration’s rules. James L. Gattuso of the Heritage Foundation found that the Obama administration enshrined a total of 20,642 regulations during his eight years in office, which, by his calculation, added $22 billion per year in federal outlays. The Competitive Enterprise Institute declared that “the total cost of the regulatory state” was $1.963 trillion by the time Obama left office. He hadn’t erected that state all on his own, but these critics charged that he grew it much too eagerly.

  Republicans running for president in 2016 were uniformly dismayed by all the new Obama rules, none more so than Donald Trump. Campaigning in New Hampshire during the Republican primary, Trump said that the gun industry was overregulated, even though the United States had the most lax gun laws in the industrialized world. “We have tremendous regulations already, a lot of people don’t even realize,” he said. During the general election campaign, Trump charged that Clinton would offer nothing but “more taxes, more regulations, more bureaucrats, more restrictions on American energy and American production.”

  A little more than a week after he took office—and two days after he signed his executive order on ethics—Trump signed Executive Order 13771, titled “Reducing Regulation and Controlling Regulatory Costs.” The directive instructed the future members of his cabinet that “for every one new regulation issued, at least two prior regulations be identified for elimination.”

  Never one for modesty, Trump declared that “the American dream is back.”

  Conservatives had been waiting—and planning—for this moment for years. During the 2012 presidential campaign, Mitt Romney had hired a young policy expert named Andrew P. Bremberg to compile a list of Obama regulations to be reversed once Romney took office. “When Romney lost, the project did not die,” said one veteran of the Trump administration familiar with those efforts. During the second Obama term, conservative lawyers around Washington fantasized about how they would go about undoing Obama’s regulatory legacy after 2016. “You can’t just get that shit out of your head,” said the White House alumnus.

  With Trump in power, Republicans saw three ways to “whack” regulations, as the former White House official put it. They could use executive orders. In some cases, they could have agencies delay the implementation of certain rules, a method that Scott Pruitt’s EPA would pioneer. They could also use an immensely effective but largely unknown instrument called the Congressional Review Act.

  The Congressional Review Act was the brainchild of Newt Gingrich, the spiky conservative from Georgia who led the 1994 Republican takeover of the House. Passed in 1996, the law gave Congress sixty legislative days to review any new rules. If it did not like a rule, Congress could vote to nullify it.

  Clinton himself did not use the CRA a single time. George W. Bush used it once, to cancel a Clinton workplace ergonomic program. Congress attempted to use the CRA against Obama on five separate occasions, but he leaned on his presidential veto powers to block each of these efforts.

  The Trump administration would not be reluctant about using the CRA, and it would not wait around for the cabinet to be confirmed before starting to dismantle Obama’s regulatory legacy. More than two weeks before his inauguration, Trump announced that the onetime Romney operative Andrew Bremberg would head his Domestic Policy Council. Bremberg worked with deputy chief of staff Rick Dearborn and Marc Short, the White House director of legislative affairs, to coordinate with Ryan and McConnell on how they would use the CRA. Trump was on board, remembered the White House official involved in the effort. “I love it,” the president said. “Show me which ones we’re talking about.” Here was the moment conservatives had been dreaming of and plotting for during the Obama years.

  The CRA proved a perfect tool for Trump, since it was effective and easy to wield. Both chambers of Congress were controlled by Republicans, effectively allowing Trump to nullify extant regulations with a few pen strokes. And that’s exactly what Trump did, with Bremberg working like “a machine,” according to colleagues, to cancel as many Obama rules as the sixty-day window would allow. In his first several months in office, he used the CRA more than a dozen times.

  The first Obama regulation Trump did away with stipulated that energy companies had “to disclose payments made to governments for the commercial development of oil, natural gas or minerals.” The rule, issued by the Securities and Exchange Commission in 2016, was supposed to align corporate interests with diplomatic ones. Trump got rid of it on February 14, 2017.

  Trump’s CRA tactics did not receive nearly as much attention as reports of bedlam in the Oval. Those reports, explained a former White House official, “were our greatest advantage,” the shitshow strategy at work. Here was Steve Bannon’s long-promised deconstruction of the administrative state, and it was largely ignored in favor of furious debate over the latest Trump tweet.

  Trump was happy to avoid having to answer potentially uncomfortable questions about his use of the CRA. Back in the spring of 2016, Trump the candidate had criticized Obama for using executive orders to govern, which he did, in Trump’s estimation, “because he couldn’t get anybody to agree with him.” The CRA wasn’t exac
tly the same as an executive order, since it required congressional approval, but that was little more than a fait accompli on a Capitol Hill controlled entirely by Republicans, who were either genuinely in thrall of Trump or far too frightened of his Twitter feed to say much of anything.

  The deregulatory push continued into the spring of 2017. That April, Trump repealed a rule that prevented Internet companies from selling individuals’ data without explicit consent. Given the newfound worries of many Americans about online security, this seemed like a thoroughly reasonable rule that both Republicans and Democrats could support. And many did. Not among them, however, was Ajit Pai, the new regulation-averse Federal Communications Commission chairman. So the seemingly sensible restriction went. The telecommunications lobby praised Trump for getting rid of “a confusing and conflicting consumer privacy framework.”

  When this author offered a former White House official who worked on the CRA that actions like these had the appearance of a corporate giveaway—especially when lobbying groups showed their hand by loudly cheering those rollbacks—the official grew vehement. “I could give a shit about the industry,” he said. “We took the political question out of it. We kept thinking of small town and exurban America.” For him, at least, there was a direct correlation between fewer rules and more jobs. And, yes, he added, of course he cared about workplace safety and the environment. But liberals had assumed “agendas that push the realm of crazy.” Republicans had no choice but to push back.

  In his conception, and in Trump’s, regulations were holding back American businesses. That was not accurate, though it was also not accurate to claim that regulations were somehow helpful to the economy. Regulation scholars Cary Coglianese and Christopher Carrigan found that “what we know about the relationship between regulation and employment contrasts strikingly with the grandiose claims found in contemporary political debate about either dramatic job-killing or job-creating effects of regulation. The empirical evidence actually provides little reason to expect that U.S. economic woes can be solved by reforming the regulatory process.” That meant that regulations were, in themselves, neither good nor evil. They were either celebrated or vilified by people in power, sometimes out of genuine conviction, more often to suit political ends.