The Best People

by Alexander Nazaryan

  Nobody at the Census Bureau was fooled by what Ross was doing and why. His citizenship question ploy dismayed career employees who feared that they had become the tools of the Republican Party. “We are a data agency, a factual agency,” said Johnny Zuagar, who headed the Census Bureau’s chapter of the American Federation of Government Employees. People came into his office and told him bluntly, “I don’t want to participate in this.” For the first time, they were working for a department chief who was not merely incompetent but malicious.

  “You have to talk people off the ledge a little bit,” Zuagar said.

  The Census Bureau had no permanent leadership after its head, John H. Thompson, left in May 2017. Many people worked from home. “They’re not in the building like they used to be,” Zuagar said. As across so much of the federal bureaucracy, there was silence at the Census Bureau.

  A number of organizations—including one tied to Obama attorney general Eric H. Holder Jr.—filed suit over the citizenship question in 2018. Congress started asking questions. In the face of these questions, Ross showed the courage of a field mouse. He tried to blame Gore, but emails were made public clearly showing that he, not anyone else, was pushing for the citizenship question. In January 2019, federal judge Jesse M. Furman of New York issued a ruling that shredded every reason Ross had proffered. Furman wrote that Ross “failed to consider several important aspects of the problem; alternately ignored, cherry-picked, or badly misconstrued the evidence in the record before him; acted irrationally both in light of that evidence and his own stated decisional criteria; and failed to justify significant departures from past policies and practices.” More than a mere loss, it was a humiliation.

  This served to make Ross even more irrelevant to the Trump administration than he had already become, though he had become mightily irrelevant in the preceding months. When the president went to the G20 in Buenos Aires in late November 2018, Ross was not with him. He was instead dispatched to Vandenberg Air Force Base, where he learned about the military’s space programs. It was as clear a sign as could be that Wilbur Ross’s short, unremarkable career as a public servant was coming to an end.

  To his credit, Steve Mnuchin was not nearly as pernicious as Ross or Carson. He had few allies in the White House, but also few genuine enemies. “Just an errand boy for Steve Schwarzman,” Bannon called him, referring to Stephen A. Schwarzman, a politically influential Manhattan billionaire who briefly served as a Trump economic adviser. Mnuchin was nobody’s first choice, but since nobody’s first choice was intent on joining the Trump administration, and Mnuchin had been a loyal (if not exactly effective) fund-raiser throughout the campaign, the job fell to him. “I thought Wall Street would go through fucking conniptions because he’s not a heavyweight,” Bannon acknowledged, “but he had been a good soldier.” A good soldier, Mnuchin would remain, even if he would never be more than that.

  He “played things well,” one West Winger put it, content with remaining inconsequential. He appeared to enjoy his own irrelevance, for he was not forced to cede any of the trappings that came with power, even as he relinquished what power he had. It mattered little. A summer 2018 cover story on Mnuchin in Bloomberg Businessweek showed him in an unflattering profile, in front of a background composed of a mantra repeated eight times in large white print: “Everything Is Fine.” And everything was fine, relatively speaking. In his rare public appearances, Mnuchin retained his wide, feline smile.

  He was only marginally involved in the tax-cut effort that consumed much of the end of 2017 for the Trump administration, after the failed attempts to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act. That effort was led by Gary Cohn, the former Goldman Sachs chief executive, as well as allies outside the White House. Mnuchin had no connections to Congress, nor much of an ability to relate to ordinary people, to explain to them how cutting taxes for corporations and the wealthy could help those who were not titans of industry or born into wealth.

  To explain the plan, Mnuchin had Treasury produce a single-page document. An expert with the right-leaning Tax Foundation dismissed it as a “thought experiment,” while an official with the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget called the analysis a “mockery.” And those were among the more kind reviews of Mnuchin’s plan.

  The economy, though, was not Mnuchin’s primary concern. He decided that he would act as Trump’s public crisis manager, somehow imagining that he was the one to soothe Americans’ inflamed feelings about the president. More likely, he just wanted to impress Trump with displays of loyalty. These led Lawrence H. Summers, the former Harvard president and economics professor—who regularly embarrassed Mnuchin by criticizing his expertise in public—to muse that “Steven Mnuchin may be the greatest sycophant in Cabinet history.” There was good reason to believe that Summers was correct. For even if there was an especially high number of bootlickers in the Trump administration, no one licked boots quite like Steve Mnuchin.

  In August 2017, many Americans were horrified by the shows of racism and anti-Semitism on display in Charlottesville, Virginia, during a white supremacist rally that left three dead. Their horror was compounded by Trump’s assertion that among the frothing hatemongers who descended on Charlottesville were “some very fine people.” Mnuchin was not among the dismayed. When his Yale classmates asked him to resign in protest over the sanctioned ugliness in Charlottesville, Mnuchin lectured them haughtily: “As someone who is Jewish, I believe I understand the long history of violence and hatred against the Jews (and other minorities) and circumstances that give rise to these sentiments and actions,” he wrote.

  The following month, Trump tweeted angrily about the kneeling protests in the National Football League. Some thought the president was trying to exacerbate racial divisions. Mnuchin rushed to his defense, while criticizing the protesting athletes. “They can do free speech on their own time,” he said.

  That same September, Hurricane Maria devastated Puerto Rico, a crisis made worse by a slow federal response. Most everyone took issue with Trump’s response, which vacillated from uninterested to annoyed. Mnuchin was right there to defend him. On television, the treasury secretary praised the federal government’s response as “terrific,” although much of the island lacked potable water and electricity, with the storm having come and gone many days before.

  Mnuchin also defended Trump himself, who had gone on Twitter to attack Carmen Yulín Cruz, the mayor of Puerto Rico’s capital city, San Juan. She had pleaded on CNN for more federal assistance and disputed Trump’s optimistic description of the relief efforts. Trump responded exactly as one might predict: via Twitter. “Such poor leadership ability by the Mayor of San Juan, and others in Puerto Rico, who are not able to get their workers to help,” the leader of the free world said in a two-part tweet sent from his golf club in New Jersey. “They want everything to be done for them when it should be a community effort.” Several other tweets followed before some adult wrested the phone away and ushered the president back out onto the links.

  Some were alarmed by Trump’s approach to North Korea (the productive summit with Kim Jong-un in Singapore was at the time many months away). Mnuchin was not. “This is not about personalities; this is not personal,” he said of Trump’s taunts of the North Korean leader, whom he had taken to calling “Rocket Man.”

  Mnuchin grasped that his boss demanded public praise, that he needed it the way a whale needed plankton. That allowed him to survive even as other cabinet members succumbed to their own worst impulses. As 2018 came to its end, Mnuchin, Ross, and Carson remained in the administration, too, but that was only because Trump had simply forgotten about them. And that was no great oversight, since they had done so little worth remembering.

  Chapter 14

  Advancing God’s Kingdom

  A week after his victory over Clinton, Trump met at Trump Tower with Eva Moskowitz, whose Success Academy charter school network achieved impressive results with children of color across New York City. The following weeken
d, he entertained Michelle A. Rhee, the former head of Washington, D.C.’s public schools, at his golf club in New Jersey. Despite her uneven results, Rhee had remained popular with those who thought incompetent teachers and the unions that protected them were holding back America’s children.

  The meetings suggested that Trump was serious about fixing American public education. If he could do that, and patch up the nation’s highways, he might make a decent president after all. So, at least, some hoped.

  Trump did not choose Moskowitz, or Rhee, or any of their accomplished peers in the school reform movement, to lead the Education Department, a federal agency with oversight over all of the nation’s educational institutions, from dual-language preschools to vocational programs in aeronautics. He settled instead on Betsy DeVos, a virtual unknown to anyone working on education at any level outside of her native Michigan, where DeVos was known but not necessarily liked.

  The choice mystified all those who had figured Trump was looking for a capable, forward-looking technocrat focused on student testing and teacher accountability. The choice horrified teachers unions, who knew DeVos only as a billionaire Republican who had labored to weaken the public schools in Michigan. Her nomination was, however, in keeping with Trump’s apparent conviction that nothing fueled government work better than antipathy to the workings of government.

  What nearly every holder of the office since the first education secretary—Shirley M. Hufstedler, appointed by Jimmy Carter to the new post in 1979—had in common was direct experience in teaching or educational administration (two were governors who’d enacted large reform measures). DeVos, by contrast, was a professional activist, one who had maintained a rigid set of simplistic views on schools and society for many years. It was a set of views shaped almost entirely by family and place, influenced little by her own experiences in adulthood. The most frightening thing about Betsy DeVos was not who she was, but what she had failed to become: a person whose views were enriched by observable reality.

  Grand Rapids, Michigan, largely defined the life of the woman born in 1958 as Elisabeth Dee Prince. She grew up in nearby Holland, on the shores of Lake Michigan, where her father, Edgar D. Prince, ran an auto parts empire that he would eventually sell for $1.35 billion. The family belonged to the Reformed Church in America, which had its roots in a type of Protestantism known as Calvinism, the predominant faith of the Dutch who settled western Michigan.

  Some fled their hometowns to attend college; Betsy Prince traveled just thirty miles to Grand Rapids, where in 1975 she enrolled in Calvin College, from which her mother, Elsa, had graduated. Any attempt to understand what DeVos would do as the nation’s education secretary had to begin here, at this college of four thousand that bid its students to act as “Christ’s agents of renewal in the world.” The college was affiliated with the Christian Reformed Church and took its religious mission seriously. As of 2019, professors were still required to be “members in good standing of a congregation in the Christian Reformed Church,” and to affirm their faith in the Belgic Confession, the Heidelberg Catechism, and the Canons of Dort, foundational aspects of the Reformed faith from the the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

  The school was named after John Calvin, the sixteenth-century French thinker from whom Calvinism got its name. A branch of Protestantism that took root in Northern Europe, Calvinism hewed to its founder’s doctrine of predestination, which held that God predestined all sinners to hell, and while he chose to save some as an act of grace, that salvation could not be earned. No amount of effort was sufficient to rescue the damned from damnation. It was also among the more intellectual of the various Protestant movements.

  At Calvin College, Prince studied business and served on the student senate; she volunteered on Gerald Ford’s losing presidential bid in 1976 and worked for other Republican campaigns. In 1980, she married Richard “Dick” DeVos Jr., a native of Grand Rapids and a student at nearby Northwood University. He stood to become the heir to the Amway fortune, the massive marketing company cofounded by his father that critics charged was a pyramid scheme. His family, like hers, was conservative, pious, and extremely rich.

  The DeVoses had four children, whom they raised in Ada, a wealthy suburb of Grand Rapids. The town had superb public schools, but the DeVos children did not attend them. Two daughters were at least partly homeschooled, a fact that was happily noted after DeVos’s nomination by homeschooling advocates, many of whom were religious conservatives elated to finally have a booster in Washington. Both sons attended the Grand Rapids Christian High School, which sported a DeVos Center for Arts and Worship.

  DeVos rarely spoke to the press once she came to Washington, but there was a time when she was not so shy about expressing her convictions. In 2013, she told Philanthropy magazine that her desire to improve education began with a visit to the Potter’s House Christian school in Grand Rapids, a private religious academy. “At the time, we had children who were school-age themselves. Well, that touched home,” she said. “Dick and I became increasingly committed to helping other parents—parents from low-income families in particular. If we could choose the right school for our kids, it only seemed fair that they could do the same for theirs.”

  School choice sounded like an innocuous policy that sometimes was genuinely concerned with giving children better options. But it could also indicate a desire to weaken public education, which to some conservatives was teaching the wrong values and to other critics—not all of them from the right—was not teaching anything at all. In 2001, DeVos told a Christian group that her work on school choice was intended “to confront the culture in which we all live today in ways that will continue to help advance God’s Kingdom, but not to stay in our own faith territory.”

  In 1990, Dick DeVos won election to Michigan’s school board. Three years later, the couple led a successful push for legislation that would welcome charter schools to Michigan (the first charter school in the nation had opened in 1992 in St. Paul, Minnesota). But while charter schools multiplied, they did not prosper. As early as 1997, the state auditor found the state has shown “limited effectiveness and efficiency in monitoring” charters. Two years later, the Michigan Department of Education worried there was “no defined system of quality control in regard to charter schools,” despite there being 138 institutions that enrolled 30,000 students across the state.

  The DeVoses persisted in advocating for more choice, disregarding calls for oversight. In 2000, they pushed Michigan to adopt a voucher system, which proposed to give students about $3,300 to attend a private school of their choice, including a religious one. She began to establish groups like the Great Lakes Education Project, or GLEP, founded in 2001. The group’s goal was “supporting quality choices in public education for all Michigan students,” in part by shaming public education. For example, one ad campaign, called Got Literacy?, featured misspelled school signs: “Welcome Back, Hope You Hade a Good Break”; “15 Best Things about Our Pubic Schools.” The campaign didn’t mention that the first sign was from Arizona, and a student joke besides, while the second was made for an Indiana school district by an ad agency.

  In 2011, GLEP and its conservative allies won a major victory when the Michigan legislature erased the charter school cap, creating what was close to an unrestrained market for charter school operators. DeVos scored another victory in the summer of 2016, when she and her husband spent $1.45 million to stymie a legislative effort to provide more oversight to Michigan’s charter schools. Choice, for DeVos, had come to mean something close to anarchy, with government’s role not just diminished but actually eliminated.

  The most effective argument against Betsy DeVos could be made with a single word: Detroit, where charter schools proliferated as a result of efforts by DeVos and other conservatives. On the National Assessment of Educational Progress, last administered in 2017, only 5 percent of Detroit children in the fourth grade were proficient in reading. The same percentage—5 percent—of eighth-graders were profici
ent in math. No big city in the United States performed worse on the exam.

  Not all the worries about DeVos had to do with education. Fears also stemmed from association—and insinuation. Some were concerned about her stance on gay rights. Her parents helped start the far-right Family Research Council and were committed supporters of other conservative activist groups, like Focus on the Family (DeVos herself had shown some support for gay rights). Betsy’s brother, Erik Prince, was the founder of private security firm Blackwater.

  DeVos was confirmed by the narrowest margin of any Trump nominee, 50 to 51, requiring the tie-breaking vote of Vice President Mike Pence, who presided over the Senate. Given the brouhaha over her “potential grizzlies” response to Senator Chris Murphy’s question about guns in schools, not to mention her general lack of knowledge about public education, it was somewhat astonishing that she was confirmed at all.

  Just three days after her eye-of-the-needle confirmation, DeVos decided to pay a visit to the Jefferson Middle School Academy in the traditionally black and impoverished southwest quadrant of Washington, D.C. She was met by protesters, who booed the new secretary and attempted to block her entrance. “Betsy DeVos: Does Not Play with Others—Should Be Held Back,” one of the placards they foisted said. Many educators, including liberal ones, condemned the protests as a show of incivility, but the point was made, however crudely.